Even If I Lost Sanity…

Car eats road. Road sign after another flash then disappear as I drive almost obliviously on the dimly lit Da’ery. I have no reason to rush home, but I can’t think of a good enough reason to slow down either. It’s my drug. Cliché Fantasy-driven me thinks “What fun will driving be if I cannot race Wind while singing and pretending to have company in the car?” It’s a clean high. Speeding is dangerous you say. Well, not to get too philosophical, but what in life isn’t? At least I don’t do drugs. A clean high, I tell you.

I raise the volume to 30 when Nina starts her piano solo. While my left hand naturally hangs on the steering wheel, my right hand moves across imaginary piano keys as if I actually know how to play. I get so carried away, my eyes only half-open as the music runs through my body reaching my finger tips. That’s when a heap of thoughts lose gravity inside my head and start floating. I try to focus on one thought, one image, but it gets tricky. They float in a full circle without stopping, and I start thinking that this is my head’s way of teasing me, that it’s all intentional. I thought my head and I are on the same team!

Right blinker on, I smoothly go for my exit. I see a girl – looking about my age – crossing the road in the dark. For a second there I think that maybe I can stop the car. That maybe I can give her a lift if she’s heading to Maadi or at least drop her off somewhere safer. I dwell in my thoughts but I don’t slow down. I see her in my rear view mirror standing on the side of the road. I think maybe I should hit the breaks, gear on reverse, and drive back. But I just keep on driving as her reflection shrinks and finally disappears.

**

I get off the bus on Da’ery just before the Maadi/Nasr-City Exit, hoping to find a taxi to take me home. Some car starts pulling back to where I’m standing. Ah great, just what I need to wrap up my evening, some jerk thinking he can pick me up off the road. What was I thinking getting off the bus HERE in this hour? Oh wait, it’s a girl!

“Hey, do you need a ride? Where’re you headed?”
“Umm… actually.. I’m going to Maadi?”
“So am I, I can drop you off wherever when we get there. Yulla?”
“Ummm… thanks..”

She unlocks and I timidly open the door. I’m grateful and relieved but I don’t know if this is a smart thing to do at all. Yes she looks harmless, but I still don’t know. It won’t be worse than standing here anyway.

She asks where I live and I tell her she can drop me off anywhere in Maadi and I’ll take it from there. She insists to drive me to exactly where I want to go, and so I tell her. It’s not much trouble anyway; I’m on the main street, practically on any Maadi resident’s way back home. She seems friendly enough, but she doesn’t ask for my name. She doesn’t talk. She raises the volume slightly to the music playing and hums along. I feel a little awkward so I start making conversation. I ask her where she lives, she says a street number, she smiles, and she looks back ahead. Silence. Not much of a talker. She raises the volume again. Is she trying to shut me up? It’s as if I’m interrupting something. Why the hell did she stop to pick me up if she can’t stand talking to anybody? Oh alright, it’ll only be 5 minutes.

“So.. Where exactly?”
“Yes right here, to your right..”
“Oookay..” she stops the car
“Thank you very much. Seriously.”
“You’re welcome. Take care.” She smiles.

**

I would watch her step out of the car and walk toward the building where I decide she lives. I’d drive off and head home. It would’ve been that simple. But like most things I do, I do it all in my head.

The sight of the girl on the road has put the floating thoughts to rest, to give way to one tiny possibility of what I could have done, or have in fact done albeit inside my head. But with the girl leaving the car, thoughts of a similar nature start stirring up. One single act of goodwill, which I hesitantly withheld in reality despite going through with it imaginatively, created a downpour of memory flashes resembling this seemingly insignificant incident. Another low-gravity point. Another floating stream forming a loop. I stand before it, but I also stand in the center. I stand containing it, yet wrapped by it. But I’m not really there, am I?

After well intending “to be independently blue”, Nina starts singing to her Sinnerman. I shake my head once, twice, then regularly to the rhythm, and the chaos hiding in my skull quiets down. It vanishes. Just like that.
Hail to the rhythm.