Mango'd

Today I shared 2 mangoes with a housemate.

After unsuccessfully cutting most of the the fruit away, I tried the soft yellow around the seed with my teeth.

And I found myself again in Cairo. I felt it before I recognized it. I felt it before my mind filled in the nighttime, people, traffic, and dust.

There are not juice stands here, on every other corner, the way they are in Cairo. The sense Mango filling my mouth and the memories that filled my brain took me back to buying glasses of fresh mango juice from the juice stands - a tall glass filled with liquid fruit - we competed with each other to find the best and cheapest stands.

I maintain that Tiff and I won.
I don't remember the exact price, but I remember it was less than anything else we knew of, and the juice was first rate - eating mangoes that you didn't even have to chew. The place is in Arbaa-Wa-Noos - I think it's in the Northeast. Hop in a mini bus that goes to Seleb! Seleb! Seleb! and get off when you see the sign for the textile factory: 'ال سلاب,' if I remember right. There was construction here, a few years ago, so it probably looks different now. But find the school - ask someone to take you to Central, school for displaced Sudanese. Stop at the school and play jumprope with the kids and drink tea with the teachers. Ask them if they ever got the pictures we took with them. Ask them whose gone back to Sudan and if there are new teachers. Ask them if Bafi is still there, or if he and his family have made it out. Then keep going down the direction you were headed in. I think you'll come to a fork in the path between sand and abandoned buildings. They're not abandoned - most buildings are not falling apart but rather are unfinished, so as to avoid the tax that applies to completed buildings. Take the right fork. In that direction, I think, and not too much farther, is the best mango juice stand I know of.

It's past Gheda's house and near the restaurant where we took her out to dinner. Gheda, who spoke a little more of our language than we knew of hers, who was engaged to be married, who invited us into her home, and whose friendship with us consisted mostly of smiles, nods, and laughter to replace the words, but none of it ingenuine.

I am going against Pascal's musings.
I am trying to be everything
Is this why I unravel?

Is anything correlated?

I think I cast the thread of these stories in the partial hope that someone will recognize the spool that spins them or the fabric they might be trying to weave.


I hardly dare ask for causes,
but is anything correlated?