Day 138: Quaranteening All Over Again
Day 138: August 11, 2020
Global Cases: 20, 511, 691; Deaths: 744, 916
Egypt Cases: 95, 834; Deaths: 5, 059
Amina Abdel-Halim
Political Science Alumna
In her childhood bedroom, my best friend drinks from a coffee mug labelled “world’s best poet”. The mug is her sister’s, but the label still suits its holder dearly. I could have known this without ever reading her poetry, from the way that she sometimes paints each nail a different color; sings along to the same CD stuck in her car stereo since the early 2000s; insists on calling each thing by its name; insists on calling me “writer”.
You write for a living, bro. You’re a writer, she’d say.
In high school, I wanted to be a writer, a whim I have long since traded for more practical alternatives: journalist, critic, scholar.
My best friend and I fill out applications for graduate school. By 9:30pm, worn by the grim reality of having graduated, we give up on planning our futures and choose to go out instead. In high school, 9:30pm was my curfew. To be out at this hour would have meant to sneak out, to sneak back in, to get caught and get grounded. So much of being a teen girl is about sneaking in and out.
The verb “to graduate” finds its roots in the latin gradus, meaning “degree” or “step”. To graduate is to take a step forward, but under quarantine, time moves backward.
Months ago, my parents’ long-obsolete curfew made way for a new one imposed by the state. This virus has kept me grounded for longer than they ever did. I spend most of my evenings sandwiched between my mother and sisters on the couch.
We watch sitcoms and argue about air conditioning. Under quarantine, I am neither a journalist, nor a critic, nor a scholar. I am a pretend-researcher; a teen girl with a fancy job title.
I slammed the door on my childhood bedroom four years ago, when we moved houses in my first year of college. Our childhood bedrooms are the bedrooms that house our oldest fears, secrets scribbled across the pages of our first diaries, first novels read under bed covers, first kohl pens stolen from our mothers, and first tears shed over brooding boys who never called back.
Across the bridge, in Mohandessin, my childhood bedroom has been rented out to some nameless strangers. No matter their names, I like to think that they have a daughter. I like to think that she, too, is hunched over her diary, scribbling the name of some brooding boy – a name she’ll have long forgotten by the time she begins to fill out college applications. Or to name her dream self a journalist, critic, or a scholar.
Every room I have ever slept in is a childhood bedroom, even this one with its stern blue walls, naked except for a packed bookshelf and despite all the posters gone and picture frames resting face-down on the dresser.
Even when I know everything there is to know/ about heartbreak or envy or the mortality/ of my parents, I think, even then I’ll want/ to be called girl, no matter the mouth/ it comes from or how they mean it.
– Olivia Gatwood, Life of the Party
In this room:
My best friend and I spend long nights in bed laying on our stomachs, legs curled up, on the phone with each other. My second best friend lives across the Red Sea and is newly engaged to a man whom I have never met. I like to picture him as wretchedly ugly, because she no longer has hours to spend on the phone with me.
My third best friend hasn’t returned my calls in two days. I find myself wondering if she has replaced me with someone new; someone cooler; prettier; with more piercings and more lenient parents. I forget that we are both employed, scholarly, and adult. I forget that we are both too old to be worried about being cool and pretty and pierced. I write diary entries where I number my friends instead of naming them.
My fourth best friend is celebrating his 23rd birthday. A birthday cake sits in my lap in the passenger seat, as we drive over to the Gezira Club. Through a slim opening in the green iron fence, we sneak into the golf course where it is forbidden to sit after dark. In high school, I knew I would never be bullied again when the popular girls and I jumped the fence and sat under the willow tree. I went home at 9:30pm and the popular girls stopped by for a snack on their way to a party I could not attend.
Tonight, there are no popular girls; no fence-jumping; no parties or curfews. Tonight, we eat fruit cake with plastic spoons; take selfies and self-timer pictures and nag about unflattering angles and that is the party. Tonight, I am a teen girl on summer break.
I eat too much sugar and stay up late. I spend my days watching sitcoms and listening to bad pop and laughing and running through sprinklers. Tonight, I waste time the way you can only waste time when you’re certain there will be more of it.
By midnight, we pack up all evidence of our illicit gathering: plastic spoons covered in grass and whipped cream, two paper napkins, a tacky blue candle engraved with the words eid milad sa’eed (Happy Birthday). We sneak out through the fence and back into the car. So much of being a teen girl is sneaking: in and out.
