The Coptic Saint of Lost Objects

The police officer calls out, waving his arms in my direction.

Can you see that you have just crossed a red light?

It is late December. I am driving past the same square that I come across almost every day when I am in Cairo. It's the same one that I used to pass on my commute from home to school every morning growing up. I remember looking out from behind the glass window, suspended and held in time by the dreamy winter fog. There was an eeriness about the unusual quiet of a perpetually bustling city on those empty early-morning rides. Scanning the cityscape across the Nile River, I would spot the Cairo Opera House, the Cairo Tower, and the National Egyptian Museum. I mark these places in my mind's eye every time I pass by them like a tourist visiting for the first time. As though I still need to pin them on Google Maps and follow the blue line to know how to get to them.

I continue to ask: How do I belong to them and they to me? Can I access and transmit something of them and them of me? Moving within space inside my own internal reveries throughout childhood, I never retained street names and their corresponding visual markers. I didn't know the square I passed every morning was called El-Galaa Square until I was older. I came to notice the names of squares after the role and significance of Tahrir Square in the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Through the imagined possibilities produced by the symbol of the square, I began to question and search for meaning behind other meanings. Behind images, regressions, power dynamics, landmarks, ruminations, ruptures, separations, and associations.

Your ID? the officer immediately asks.

It's neither one nor many. It is constituted by deviation. It cannot be biologized, but it is not separate from it. It is somatic, but it doesn't have separate organs. It is an overlap between nature and culture.

You were driving between two lanes. Did you realize this?

I am neither here nor there. I am preserving myself while witnessing tha