Darkness

The desert road at night is just how you would imagine it. More than anything, it is dark. No streetlamps or headlights or ambient urban glow. After a long winter of sandstorms and disrepair, dunes have started to creep into the outside lanes. It winds, and it is fast. 

I found myself in the middle seat of the back row of a charter bus that we flagged down on the side of the road outside of Ain Sokhna, a sleepy Red Sea beach town. Lobster-y and out of it, I stretched my legs down the center aisle, put on my best running music and watched the bus pound the pavement and the kilometers peel off by the dozen in the flicking headlights. 

I needed to be at work at 8 am on Sunday, and as exhausted as I was at midnight on Saturday as we approached Cairo, I was overcome with a washing sense of content and calm joy. While the hot sun had sucked it out of me, the cool desert darkness had reinvigorated my mind, and as I dozed in the cab home from the bus station, I happily and wearily dreamed.