I am walking through these alleys, music coming from shops, smells from spices mixed with perfumes reach my brain, invading and pervading it…
Colours from clothes hanging on the shops brightened with lights to call my attention… it is unnecessary! all of me is here…watching and smelling and hearing…I feel intoxicated of wonders and I wonder too: where am I?…is there another world in this one?…why I missed this sensation until now!
Finally, the café is here, and while sitting at that chair, with the round small table, and surrounded by mirrors, I feel that I could stay for a long time, just breathing, without moving, not to spoil the magic….
The bench is at one side of the alley…and between my place and the other row of tables, besides the café entrance, it is a corridor, and the world is walking along it…tourists, workers, people that left home to walk, to shop or to meet here…. beggars, sellers…
Oh, these small white flowers making a bracelet that this woman is offering to me …their smell is depicted at my heart now together with her eyes, black eyes watching me…if I could decipher what they want to say..
A girl with her little brother is coming, to ask me some coins… I will say her no, but when I see their feet, their thin arms, I doubt… she notices that, and stays here… she offers to sell me anything, and I say no, putting my hand at my chest, as I saw some people doing… I feel that I am touching my heart, it is paralysed, cold and miserable…
Why, why I am feeling alive…alive in the middle of many joyful but also many suffering people… Alive with people who feels like me, a strange mix of happiness and sadness…accepting life as it is, wonderful and terrible….
I am sitting…but not as a watcher…I am here, and I feel I am part of all this…I am a child now, and a seller and a beggar… I am that man watching at me and thinking: hey, she is a tourist, she doesn’t understand at all… I am the one reflected in that mirror…wishing to eternize this night, sitting at a bench, at Fishawi café, at Cairo’s Khan el Khalili market
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