The Sand That Didn't Care Who I Was

The Sand That Didn't Care Who I Was

I said Egypt out loud the night before I left, like testing a key in a lock that had been stuck for years—soft at first, then harder, then with a kind of stubborn belief that felt almost like prayer. My suitcase lay open on the bed like a mouth waiting to be fed, and I kept packing and unpacking the same three things: a scarf, a long-sleeved shirt, and my fear. I told myself I was going for history, for wonder, for the Nile, for the pyramids—easy words, clean words. The truth was uglier: I needed a place that wouldn't flatter me. I needed a country that wouldn't care about my productivity, my "growth," my carefully curated healing. I needed something older than my excuses.

I learned quickly that Egypt doesn't want you to arrive loud. It wants you to arrive proper—covered where you should be covered, respectful where you should be respectful, careful with the way you look at people like they're scenery. Modest dress matters here, especially in religious spaces; shoulders and knees covered is the baseline respect, not a costume. And asking permission before photographing people—especially women—isn't politeness, it's dignity. I folded a scarf into my bag and felt how small a piece of fabric can be when it's carrying the responsibility of how you move through other people's lives.

Cairo hit me like heat and sound. Not cinematic sound—real sound: horns, footsteps, vendors calling, the city breathing through millions of throats at once. Traffic moved like an argument no one intended to win, and I understood in my bones why people say crossing the road here is its own sport. There aren't many pedestrian crossings, and even when they exist they're often ignored, which means you learn by watching locals, waiting for gaps, crossing one lane at a time, staying calm and decisive. The first time I stepped off the curb my heart hammered so hard I could taste metal, and then—somehow—I made it across, alive, almost laughing, like my body couldn't believe it had survived something so ordinary.

The hotel room had curtains that didn't quite close and a window that looked down onto a street that never fully slept. I washed the travel off my hands and stared at my face in the mirror, trying to see the version of me who could handle this. I didn't find her. I found someone tired and a little too fragile. And for the first time in a long time, that didn't feel like a failure—it felt like honesty.

I went to Giza early, before the sun got arrogant. The pyramids were there the way a verdict is there—immovable, uninterested in your feelings, refusing to shrink to fit your camera frame. Everyone tells you they're bigger than expected, but that's not the part that breaks you. The part that breaks you is the insistence: that human hands did this, that someone lifted stone after stone under a sky just as bright as this one, and kept going long after their bodies begged them to stop. Standing there, I felt my own timelines—my impatience, my panic, my need for immediate proof—get embarrassed into silence.

Later, farther south, I met the Nile the way you meet someone you've heard about your whole life. Not grand at first glance—just water, moving. But the longer I watched, the more I understood: this river doesn't rush, and yet it changes everything. I sat on a low wall and let the day pass without trying to turn it into content, without trying to extract meaning like it owed me something. My chest loosened in increments so small I almost missed them.

And then—Sinai, the Red Sea, the kind of blue that makes your brain go quiet. Underwater, the reef looked like a city that didn't need humans at all. I kept my hands close to my body, not because I'm naturally disciplined, but because I'd read the rule and it felt like a moral line: don't touch, don't stand, don't kick. Corals aren't rocks; they're alive, and even "light" contact can damage them, so you keep distance, you control your fins, you stop acting like your curiosity is more important than the ecosystem that's been surviving without your approval. It wasn't just about conservation. It was about learning how to be a guest in a world that doesn't belong to you.

Back in Cairo, I bought tea and bread from a stall and watched the vendor's hands move with the steady confidence of someone who knows exactly what their work is worth. I practiced greeting people before asking for anything, because respect travels faster than English does. I learned that the city can be kind and exhausting in the same breath, that you can be approached by scammers and also saved by strangers, sometimes within the same block. I learned to hold my head up, to walk like I had somewhere to be, to stop broadcasting uncertainty like perfume.

One night, I stood at the window again—this time in Egypt—and listened to a call to prayer drift through neon. The sound didn't ask me to convert. It asked me to stop performing. It asked me to remember that life can be devotion even when it's messy, even when your heart is loud, even when you don't know what you're doing.

I came to Egypt thinking awe would be a spectacle. What I found was a quieter kind of truth: that endurance can be gentle, that reverence can be practical, that the world doesn't need me to be impressive. It only asks that I pay attention—and that I don't touch what I haven't earned the right to touch.