GRATING SPACE

This is a question I asked myself on the night-train ride from Cairo to Alexandria, two hours north from where the Egyptian capital sits at the beginning of the Nile Delta up through the impoverished urban sprawl that stretches all the way to the Mediterranean, to the historic port city that was once home to the greatest lighthouse of the ancient world, as well as one of the grandest libraries ever constructed and burned, and its duly impressive modern counterpart.

It was my third night in Egypt. I was riding along with two friends I knew from Lawrence, Kan., and another American with whom they taught at a private English-language grade school in Cairo. We passed around magazines and portions of the day’s International Herald Tribune, which we had sought and discovered at a newsstand downtown earlier that day. I scoff at any nostalgic longing for the preservation of print media, since the Internet does what newspapers — and I’ll admit despite my current occupation, most magazines — do, but I must say that, because I had little access to the Web where I was staying, the newspaper felt like a treasure when I found it in Cairo. Information was not constantly readily at my fingertips, as it is in the States. Even if I found a newsstand in Cairo that sold English-language newspapers, they were almost always the ones that were, at least in part, owned by the State, as nearly all media are in Egypt, and therefore did not qualify as anything I would support with a purchase. For a news enthusiast such as myself, coming across the Herald Tribune in Cairo was like stumbling upon a delicious meal in a land of bad food — which, arguably, Egypt might be considered — as it was something I could cherish, consume and digest until it was expended, and then I could look forward to searching for and devouring another the next day.

I could not manage to focus my attention on the paper during the ride, though. For one, each glance out the window revealed some glimpse of surreal mystery — a poorly lit dirt alley that ran long and straight enough to crest with the horizon, an unmarked bus stop at which dozens of men huddled smoking together, the five spires of a neon green mosque towering up out of the shanties. Egypt, to me, was a place where the sheer sensory overload of my surroundings was enough to keep my brain stimulated during my short stay there, but a corner of my mind kept nagging at me: “Okay, you’ve gotten yourself to Egypt and can see all these things you’d never before imagined, but is that really the point?”

I always say that when I travel to a place the only thing I really want to do is act like I live there. I almost never take a trip to somewhere I don’t have friends to stay with, and when I arrive, I do as they do, go where they go, and socialize with whom they socialize. I would go to work with them if they let me. One might mistake this for a bit of imaginary role playing on my part — an escape from my life into someone else’s, far away from my own — but it’s actually the opposite. My life when I travel is just as much my life as it is when I am wherever I happen to be living. I consider travel in any other manner pretty much pointless.

The idea of vacation is absurd. People cobble together some semblance of a life out of jobs and relations and hobbies and interests and try as hard as possible to make something decently worthwhile of it, then throw it all away for weeks at a time while they sit somewhere sunny or scuttle from one point of interest to another, fondling tour books and gawking at monuments, essentially putting on hold everything life-wise they have worked to accomplish. Vacation, in this sense, is a break from life, or non-life — or, even the opposite of life: death. I plan on using as much time as I have undertaking the singular task of living, thank you very much.

So, what to do in Cairo? At a glance, it’s a batshit-crazy fantasyland of overwhelmingly exotic sights and sounds produced by a culture that is, in any “authentic” way, about as accessible to an average Westerner as an experimental French film is to a three-year-old cave baby. Sure, Egypt is deeply infused with Western tendencies, thanks to nearly a century of British colonialism and its latter-day counterpart, tourism, but the chances of grappling a hold onto any sort of meaningful connection with “real” Egyptian culture during a 10-day stay is slight. You’re not going to make it to your third cup of tea with anyone besides upper-class English-speaking Egyptians like the ones I met through my American friends.

With this in mind, I took a mental step backwards during my train ride to Alexandria and tried to get a better vantage of exactly what it is about acting like I live in the places I visit that is rewarding. I realized that it goes something like this:

Superimposing my life onto another place, another culture, is exhilarating because it gives me a sense of possibility. During the 18 years I spent growing up in a small town in Wyoming I dreamt constantly of the possibilities of living elsewhere, especially of the opportunities that living in a more populated area would afford me. I built up such a frenzied desire to live somewhere else that even now, living in the fifth city since I left the one I was born in — one in which I have secured a stupendous lifestyle that affords me nearly everything I could have wished for during my desolate adolescence — I still have that urge to live “somewhere else.” Where? Who knows? Who cares? Anywhere and everywhere.

I have conflicting feelings toward this fancy-to-roam inclination of mine. I have never been a true vagabond, hopping rides from state to state, sleeping where I may and getting by on my wits. My geographic repositioning has run essentially parallel to what any upstanding citizen would consider a series of responsible decisions: I left my hometown to move to another in which I went to college, then I moved to another town to go to grad school, then I moved to another in order to fulfill that increasingly popular middle-class rite of passage of a short jaunt abroad before entering the “real world,” and finally to another back in my country of nationality where I secured a steady job in the field of my preference. There’s nothing too crazy about my moving around — but still, I get around.

I never thought much about this until I reached what “adulthood.” I initially imagined that my stay in Chicago would provide me with satisfactions that my other temporary residences could not: a social circle that did not resemble a crowd through a revolving door, an occupation of which I could acquire a true sense of ownership, an investment in a community that I would interact with symbiotically, and an apartment where I could finally aggregate some stuff. However, seven months into my life here, I still have that urge to go somewhere else.

Am I packing up my bags and scouring Craigslist for job openings in Odessa? Of course not. As I said, my wanderlust abides by criteria of reasonableness. But there is a part of me that wonders if it will ever go away — if I do force myself to stay in one place for an extended period of time, will I be repressing the desires I ingrained in myself during childhood to venture out and see what opportunities arise, thus depriving myself of something? Will I simply be unable to create a life extended across a significant span of time in a single place? Am I doomed to keep collecting friends I’ll move away from and never regularly see again outside Facebook? What kind of life would that be?

On the other hand, I fear losing the part of me that always wants to leave. Because all humans are susceptible to the lures of comfort and the safety of routine, it’s possible, if not likely, that one day I will be perfectly happy settling into a spot for the long haul to destiny. This thought makes me sad. I feel like I hardly know myself at all as it is, and one of the only parts of myself that I am familiar with is the one that comes and goes. I know Nate: He shows up, and then he’s out of here, onto something else. Who is that guy who’s just sitting there, stationary, in the same stupid chair on the same dumb porch, watching spiders crawl down the wall?

Travel, I decided, helps me cope with this dilemma. It’s not that it quenches my thirst for new surroundings with a brief respite in some unfamiliar terrain, but, by finding entry points into the flow of wherever I go — by acting like I live there — I remind myself that there is nothing forcing me to not go and live wherever I please. In Cairo, I did not immerse myself in the local customs in order to feel the strange sensation of interacting with the Other — I hung out with expats and Westernized Egyptians who assured me that I could get a job easily there and live with little problem. In a sense, the actual time I spent in Egypt was not as gratifying as what it revealed to me about my future: the possibility of, once again, living abroad.

When I returned to the States from staying six months in Buenos Aires, I had the inkling of returning South, but that notion was quickly subsumed by the day-to-day worries of acclimating myself to whatever present condition I found myself in, and figuring out what the hell I was going to do with my life. The sense of connection I feel with that city has been somewhat revived by a series of Argentine visitors to my home in Chicago over the last few months, but it wasn’t until I returned abroad that I really felt with certainty that I would, and should, figure out a way to live once again in a country other than the one I have citizenship. I already have a social base in Buenos Aires and a pleasant remembrance for the life I lead there, so it’s currently number one on my list of places to move to, but being in Cairo made me realize I could go anywhere.

I’m in Chicago until further notice. Summer has just begun and I’m excited to be here. But I am not in immobile object, though, in any sense. Cairo made me remember how broad my options stretch. Keep an eye out, foreign lands. I’m not through with you just yet.