Scattered Parts

Lara Gibson

I lay awake, shivering, heartbroken and lost. It’s 3.30 am on a February Tuesday night in Dokki, a densely populated district in Cairo. The moon outside is almost full and the pearl-white light trickles through the sheet-thin windows. In the wide, square bed, I pull the light pink sheets pulled tightly over my head. Under them, my phone’s intrusive blue light reveals the stream of letters I have been sleeping with for the past few weeks. Outside, street dogs are barking vigorously and winds carrying bursts of cold air clash against stray shutters. 

I don’t want to be in Cairo, five thousand, six hundred and sixty kilometers away from him. I want to be back in London. In a little room, under a thick blanket with central heating. Instead I’m rereading the five letters he wrote to me several months ago. They are far shorter and messier than the ones I crafted for him. Less descriptive, but more assertive and confident. Using the intrusive phone light I pull out one of the sheets of paper. I squint and try to read the final paragraph. Even though I know it almost by heart, it disappoints me every single time. I will always remember our time together, however brief. But like all good things it must come to an end. I sigh. I can’t sleep yet again, although I’d barely done anything at all today or the day before.  I know I will feel tired and restless again all day tomorrow. 

Just a couple of months ago, I moved to Cairo following an intense love affair. When I left London we were still deeply in love and there was no natural close to our relationship. If I hadn’t departed suddenly, it would not have ended and most likely continued to burn until one of us felt an irreversible icy sensation trickle down our spine before we gradually stopped replying to messages. The day after I landed I walked the noisy streets of downtown Cairo, retracing routes I’d strolled as an exchange student five years earlier. I knew the area well enough not to rely on Google Maps. Though I tried to observe the mindless familiarity of the dusty buildings, all I could think of was him. The smell of his slightly too long stubble, his deep throaty voice and how nervous I felt when I glanced at him editing my stories across the newsroom.

When we bid each other goodbye the afternoon before my flight, we mutually agreed our love hadn’t peaked. We had only been lovers for three months. I had never met his friends, nor him mine. Everything had been secretive, furtive, experienced by just the two of us. Hardly anyone knew of it. We kept it from our colleagues and almost all of our friends. We knew it would never work. He had a family and I didn’t want to be tied down. Although we never said it out loud, there was an unwritten understanding that it would be fleeting. For him, a brief flurry of excitement before a return to mundane family duties, for me, a slim chapter before a bright new start. 

I only decided to submit to him once I knew I would be leaving for Egypt. When I could be certain of escape from his authority. But now I had flown away, I did not want to cut ties. I wanted to message him constantly. Tell him about the friendly Yemeni man who I’d started to buy bread from, my anxieties about speaking Arabic badly, how much I wanted his hands to retrace the marks he made on my flesh. Six weeks or so later, I still feel compelled to tell him absolutely everything.

In the hours, days and weeks that followed my arrival in Cairo, I found myself questioning how to close the perpetual wound. We had carved open a channel of intense passion, desire and longing and I did not want to close it, even if I were able to. I continue to ask myself what happens to the leftover love? Where does it go? How can I give it a home? I couldn’t conjure up any answers and every time I turned to Google I became more lost than ever, diving down a rabbit hole of helplessness. I decided to open my own private investigation into the elusive second half of our half-lived love affair.

Looking back to the origins of our entanglement, it began on an unseasonably cold September afternoon in London. We sneaked out of the newsroom where we both worked to share a cigarette and stroll along the canal. The wind blew ripples across the water and the path was almost entirely empty. Just a few ducks, cyclists and bored mothers pushing prams. I was due to fly to Beirut and he told me he couldn’t wait any longer to declare his feelings for me. I was terrified and overwhelmed in his presence. He was older and professionally far senior. I would lean closer every time he spoke. Now I’m far away, I realise that perhaps I couldn’t say no. I was hypnotized by his powerful presence. When he finally kissed me, I felt a mix of fear, longing and panic.

Within two weeks of my return from Beirut we became inseparable. We spent every morning together in my attic bedroom before skulking into the office. After taking the tube together we would walk separately into our work building so no one would see us. His married-ish status forced us into hiding. Inside the office we kept up the charade. I remember one time he was reading through my latest article. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him shaking his head and sighing slightly. Strands of nervousness scrambled through my body. We had spent all morning lying naked, our bodies intertwined. Now he sat two desks from me, cutting up my work. It hurt every time he shed my words. I felt as though I'd let him down. Less worthy of his love. The sting cut deeper the more I fell for him.

It seems incredulous no one sitting around us had any idea of the pleasure we had just inflicted on each other. When he looked at me two seats across with the overwhelming glow of desire, I sank further into my seat trying to hide from our world. I was infatuated. I longed for him when he was away and even when he was near, I longed for him again and again. On workdays, we spent so much time together we quickly became each other. On weekends, we messaged incessantly. He shared every mundane update of his child’s swimming lesson and he begged me to tell him every little detail of the parties I went to and people I met. There was almost no feeling or thought we didn’t share with each other. There was no one else to turn to.

He was available to me exclusively during working hours, but never evenings or weekends, spending those in the comfortable, steady arms of his family. During those times I flitted between other, less significant boyfriends. One weekend I went to Berlin with a French man I met in Mexico, another time a friendly German I met in Jordan visited me in London. I tried hard to distract myself but I had no interest in anyone else. I only wanted his flesh on mine. Sometimes I hated him. His cynicism and dark moods drove me crazy. He was critical and knew much more than me. Yet, when I listened to him entirely he was immeasurably grateful. I loved him deeply. His toughness melted away.

We loved to write to each other on pen and paper, to share sections of what we happened to be reading. It was the only way we knew to express deep feelings. We were both too intellectually proud and emotionally shy to tell each other how we really felt. It was far simpler on the neutral space of a white page. Later, writing letters helped me to organise my thoughts. It allowed me to read the absurd story I was living and realise what was happening. After all, the affair was too overwhelming to be spoken aloud at the time. Putting it on paper made it real. It gave me evidence that something secret was happening. I kept the letters in the back pocket of my thick-papered diary, which I carry everywhere. 

During the last few weeks of our relationship in London, our clandestine meetings became more and more important. Christmas lights filled the streets and every time I looked up at a holly wreath it reminded me it would soon be over. A few days before Christmas I would leave my job and have no reason to see him. He would no longer edit my articles and occupy all of my working hours. A week after I would be leaving for a new continent. In the end, we had our own Christmas celebrations underneath the heavily-decorated tree at his house. We exchanged presents- he gave me Arabian Sands, a travelogue accounting the lives of nomadic Bedouins. I handed him a rolled-up picture- then we drank one final coffee together in his cold kitchen and I took the train to my parents’ house in the countryside.

One of the letters I was reading on that cold February night was the final letter I wrote to him. “I’m not sure what to do with my love for you. I want to give lots of it to myself. But I don’t need it anymore. I am brimming with self-love after only recently having fallen in love.” I believed I would be fine without him. Love would continue in another form. I would cherish the memory and swiftly move on. It would be easier for him, he had so many distractions. When we lived in such close proximity our love hadn’t had a chance to fully form and I assumed geographical distance would cut the invisible ties.

On the long February night, I found myself turning to Wikipedia to justify my sadness. It was too late to go for a walk and I didn’t know where else to look. According to a series of articles I read, on a biological level, falling in love corresponds to an increased production of the chemical dopamine. Symptoms of dopamine withdrawal- here being the separation from him- include panic attacks, depression, sweating, nausea, fatigue and cravings for more dopamine. I had underestimated the destabilising effects of dopamine withdrawal. In a separate letter I wrote “we have devoured our bodies and souls to the extent it may be difficult to unravel. The process may take longer than the time we have left together.” Perhaps that was the most difficult part of recovering from the half-lived love affair; forcibly disentangling myself from my beloved before we naturally untwined.

During my waking hours in the first few weeks in Cairo, I would spend days in coffee shops staring frantically at a book. I would consume novels new and familiar. I was commissioned to write an article about Cairo’s International Book Fair and every single aisle I walked down in the giant arena was full of fiction addressing love. I couldn’t escape, nor did I choose to. Most books I read celebrated eternal, fleshed out love. There were several works of Arabic literature that helped me piece everything together and get my mind back into reading half-forgotten Arabic words. 12th Century Andalusian poet Ibn Hazm wrote that “physical forms have a wonderful faculty of drawing together the scattered parts of men’s souls”. My soul felt scattered, as did my mind. 

There was a line in one of my first letters to him, when I realized that I was too deep in love to extract myself cleanly and I would have to leave him soon, that jumped out at me.  “Perhaps this is the most defining part of our relationship. The fantastical space of unfulfilled desire. Unblemished by reality.” In a later letter I repeated this sentiment, “Our love won’t end on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, as reality won’t have time to tear apart the memory”, and in one his letters he wrote to me “You’ve taught me that the very ending we knew would come allowed our short time to burn more brightly, that one should tear down defenses and be open to love.” 

Maybe because we always knew that we would never live the second half of our love affair, we lived the first half at double intensity. We crammed two lifetimes into one. We joked that by virtue of me moving away, our love wouldn’t end on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in a HR disciplinary meeting. Instead it cut into ourselves for months, gnawing at every minute of the day before it finally drifted away over several months

After so much anxious messaging, late night longing and snatched Facetime calls, I began to text him less and less. Winter faded into Spring and I crafted a new life here, with new friends, new exciting work, new places to explore and eventually a new lover who spent all weekend with me. I began to sleep soundly through the noisy Cairo nights and moved the letters from under my pillow to the bottom of a drawer in a side table. I no longer beamed with excitement every time his name flashed up on my iPhone, but traces of his memory remain under my flesh.

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About the Author

Lara Gibson is a Cairo-based journalist and writer. Her work has taken her along the deadliest road in Egypt, all over the country in search of rare, dying recipes and, last month, she reported on the Arab world’s largest and most secret camel race.

Lara can be found on Instagram @laras_adventures_