“Marriage is like a besieged castle; those who are on the outside wish to get in; and those who are on the inside wish to get out.” — Arabic Proverb

“And there is a city in my heart where you are its only population.” — Arabic Quote

I fall in love with Cairo first: the dust dancing at dawn, minarets soaring above the pinkish brown horizon, my grandfather’s sheesha puffing out cloud after cloud of smoke. 

Trailing my grandmother on her Friday errands is when I first discover my home, amidst traffic jams and street harassment. At eight, maybe nine, I walk into a tree of jasmine, a cascade of ivory petals falling by my side. A man makes eye contact with me, shouts “Amara.” Beautiful. I assume he is referring to the jasmine, but when my grandmother tugs me closer to her, I realize he is talking to me. We are helpless, the quickening of her, our pace gives us away. 

I start thinking about love. 

I am at my grandmother’s, designing my wedding dress, when I witness one of my grandparent’s fights. My aunt, then around 25 years old, had come home at 3 AM the night before. My grandfather was sure she was with a guy. My grandmother begged him to leave her alone. She would take care of it, make sure there was no guy, and have the situation handled. 

“This isn’t the first time,” I hear my grandfather say sternly. I remember peering up from my piece of paper, my hands sore from gripping my white pencil so tight. 

He slaps her, and I hear my pencil drop, in shock. They must realize I am there only then, for my grandmother runs to her room sobbing, and my grandfather flees the house, the door slamming behind him. 

I pick up my pencil and scribble over the outline of my wedding dress. All I’m left with is a white piece of paper. My dream wedding is already being erased.

I don’t see my grandfather touch my grandmother like that ever again. Maybe he simply doesn't do it. Or maybe I become good at coloring in white, ignoring them, their problems, their love. I hide in the furthest corner of their house every time their voices rise, rummaging through pictures of my grandparent’s wedding day as I realize their love is the longest love I know.

I save my white piece of paper, slip it under my Dora the Explorer coloring books and math worksheets. It is a reminder of my confusion: if long-lasting love is broken, why does everyone so desperately seem to want it?

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We are searching through each other’s memory, busying ourselves at the annual family Eid gathering.

In my head, my cousin Salma’s  memory is as clear as sky blue, while Adam, my little brother’s, is a fuzzy brown. Salma knows a lot about our family. Adam knows very little. Kids, among them Salma and Adam, come and go, some excitedly sprinting into the room, others gleefully skipping out. Out is the crowd of adults we try to chart. My grandmother says there are fifty-five at her house. I am convinced there are more. They seem to hover everywhere, relatives greeting each other, picking at triangular cheese-stuffed sambousek, rearranging white plastic chairs in the salon. 

As hard as I try, I cannot tell who is married to whom. My mother tells me to look for visual cues; hand holding, shoulder clinging, small pecks on the cheek. I spend 20 minutes staring at the crowd of Egyptians before me. There are absolutely no visual cues. Egyptians are not public about love.

So, we rely on group knowledge instead. We add couple after couple to our family tree, each branch more surprising than the last. 

“Who are these people?” I first think. Then, “They are married?”

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My mother is spinning me around, my sequin-adorned dress keeping up with every turn, twist, twirl. We are giggling hopelessly in the dining room, waiting for my birthday guests to arrive. I don’t know it, but this birthday—my tenth birthday—is the last I will celebrate in Egypt. 

Travel-themed cupcakes stand in a straight line on the table, a pile of fake passports stacked beside them. Signs pointing to Japan, Germany, Argentina, Peru decorate every wall. 

I ask my mother if love looks different in those countries, and she smiles down at me, grabbing a fake passport and whirling me in circles until we reach the door, where my international school friends await. “Do you love any of them differently?” she asks. I never respond, just open the door, my birthday girl sash greeting everyone. My friends and I hum along to Amr Diab and Justin Bieber. I forget all about love while we sing along to declarations of it.

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Love seems different in the United States, where couples stroll down the streets of Milton hand-in-hand, kiss each other at the mall, embrace at the doorway of my 5th grade classroom. 

I am scandalized, or at least I know I should be. In a few years, my aunts will force me to leave the room for a sex scene, and I’ll pretend not to know some of my friends are having it. 

But for now, I’ll lie about Caroline and Ben slow-dancing together in the 6th grade, turn a blind eye to friends’ first kisses in the 7th, bend the truth about boyfriends and breakups in the 8th. 

I am at a sleepover with one of my best friends when I realize I’ve never seen members of my family romantically kiss, or hug, or even hold hands. The exception, I think to myself, are the stacks and stacks of photos from the weddings and honeymoons of my grandmothers, mother, aunts, and family friends. In my head, I can hear the cameras clicking, the couples moving closer together, the photographs memorializing a love I never got the chance to know.  

It is at that sleepover where I first hear the concept of date-night. We must be around 11, maybe 12, and her parents come into the living room where we lounge on their couch, exchanging secrets. They smile at me, then her, turn towards each other, explaining that it is time to go, date-night awaiting. They kiss in front of us. My friend rolls her eyes, unfazed. “They do this all the time,” she says to me, her apathetic tone one of teenage embarrassment. 

As we play Never-Have-I-Ever, I imagine them outside, on a bench, his arm wrapped around hers, their palms intertwined, both taking in the sticky Boston humidity.

We don’t hear them tiptoe into the house that night, put down the car keys, laugh their way to the bedroom, but when my best friend and I wake up that morning, there they are: in the kitchen, making us pumpkin bread and pancakes for breakfast, singing along to songs she and I have never heard. I feel I’ve fallen into one of the Hollywood rom-coms my mother turns on during the anniversary of my parents’ divorce. My best friends' parents have never felt more foreign, different, American. 

I am left wondering if that is what love is, but I refuse to give in to that definition. Maybe, I think, that is what American love looks like. Maybe I am simply not American enough to buy into it.

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A few years later, I convince myself that love isn’t what I should be worrying about, but men are. I am on a flight from Jordan to Egypt, recalling my Uber ride to the airport—the one where a stranger asked me to marry him, come back to Jordan to find him, planned out my life for me with him. 

I’d found it funny, or maybe amusing. I do a good job of convincing myself so. But I am quick to remind myself there are only three other women on this flight, so I withdraw the uncertain smile from my face, snuggle against the window, align my breathing to the newest Taylor Swift love song.

I can’t fall asleep. My mind is inundated with worries, worries passed on to me by generations of family members, worries that I realize are slowly becoming my own. 

It is on that flight that I become hyper-aware of the men around me, and soon, I am terrified of most of them. I am at the right age by then—14—and I start learning how to simultaneously appear passive and possess what I think is total control. 

On other flights, seated next to men like my Uber driver, I’ll force smiles with my eyes, use my broken Arabic to answer all their questions, think of an emergency plan in my head. I’ll appear outwardly submissive, agreeable, amicable. 

Between receiving gifts and declarations of fidelity, I’ll find myself comforted by the flight path projected in front of me. Soon I’ll be home, on land, in Cairo, protected by the chaos of hundreds of people packed into a street meant only for cars.

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I develop my first real crush on an Egyptian-American boy in the 6th grade, and it is then that my confusion around love, boundaries, and expectations begins. 

We vaguely understand what love is. And we both have an idea of what hob, or at least, the respectable version of hob, means. But will we mix the two definitions, choose one and not the other, fear both and do nothing?

We have a flirtationship—that’s what my friends call it. But I am sure he does not and cannot like me. Because he is not like the Egyptian boys asking for my hand in marriage at every corner of the street. He comes from a good family, prays at least twice a day, follows his parents’ guidance. I become sure any type of love is irreproachable. 

We cannot get married at 13, and love without marriage is haram, forbidden, so what are we doing? 

I turn to middle school match-making as a distraction for the next two years, letting go of my 6th grade crush in the process. Match-making feels like an investment in love,or the idea of it, even if that love could not be further from my own. 

I am content with my match-making career until the eighth grade, when my two best friends help me fall for Joseph, an American, one who wears a cross around his neck. They compel us to sit at the same table together at study halls, talk to each other at assembly, say hi to each other in the hallways. 

He and I text each other, his friends and mine mediating every “Hey” and “See you tomorrow!” 

One day, his friend steals his phone and asks if I’d kiss Joseph. I know it’s over then, and sure enough, two weeks later, I hear Joseph has finally gotten his first kiss from a girl outside of school. 

Part of me is hurt, but mostly I am relieved to have made it through another situation. My friends don’t understand, but I’m happy everything is resolved, excited to go back to my unassuming love life. The safe lack thereof.

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I hear my mother mention the words “Jana” and “dating” in one sentence at a seventh grade welcome party. She is talking to parents of kids in my grade, many of whom have additional children in high school. They are discussing when they’ll allow their kids to date. My mom delivers her classic line: “Boys are a distraction. There are more important things to focus on.” The parents murmur in agreement, and most agree high school is an acceptable time to date. But my mother looks concerned. “I don’t think I’ll let Jana date until after college,” she says, and I laugh when the other parents laugh, knowing that they think she’s joking, knowing that she could not be more serious. 

It doesn't take me long to come to terms with her expectations. And I tell my friends the truth, that I don’t feel the need to date before then, that I would rather not get married before then. 

I think they think I’m crazy, but luckily they’re crazy enough to nod their heads and rattle off the names of boys in our grade. “Marry them?” they ask, before we all devolve into hysterical laughs. “Never,” we say, and I am sure we are all on the same page.



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I’ve made it through a year and a half of my private half boarding half day high school unscathed when I suddenly find myself fixing the pink scrunchie on my head in anticipation of my math and history study sessions with Zach. The switch happens gradually at first, but when I realize I know his birthday and he knows mine, my friends say there is no going back. 

It is a Friday afternoon. Orange and pink hues criss-cross our wooden table, one half of the library already dark. Laughter tumbles out of us, bounces around the empty building, slides down the spiral staircase. 

I feel myself leaning in towards him, breathing in his blue sweatshirt, watching his eyes trace the sun’s imprint on my face. His dorm carries with it the subtext of a hookup, of blowjobs, of making out. That is not what I mean. 

“I can’t wait for tonight,” I confess distractedly, reaching for my phone, interrupting his trance. 

He does not move. As I straighten my skirt out, I refuse to look him in the eye, instead suggesting we go back to his dorm. 

“My dorm?” he asks. “Really?” I am quick to nod, maybe too quick, because he clearly does not believe me. 

“Jana,” he says firmly, and I look at him, my pencil case flip-flopping to my backpack’s side. 

“Are you sure?” His eyes are soft and hesitant. It is not the plan he’s expecting. My family would not approve of me in a boy’s bedroom—I’m not sure I even do. 

Doubt snips at my decision, but I roll my eyes wryly and point to the glass behind us. “You need a jacket,” I tell him.

I drape that coat, his coat, on the seat next to me at dance concert, tonight having finally arrived.  Intermittently fiddling with the jacket’s silver zipper, I blush each time I am asked if the seat is taken. We have not hooked up, nor even held hands, but I feel embarrassed, ashamed, scared nevertheless. When a family friend sits two seats over, I grimace, my eyes scanning the theater for two open seats elsewhere, my mind preoccupied with what the family friend will say or think or see. He is, after all, Egyptian, and we’ve known each other since before kindergarten. I worry he will think less of me when the night is over. 

With the dimmed lights of each lyrical dance, I nestle deeper and deeper into Zach’s shoulder. It’s the closest we’ve been yet. I feel my curls gently brush against his sweatshirt. I can do this, I think to myself. But then, the lights come on. I immediately push myself away from him, sit up straight again. 

We part ways at the end of the night, my fingertips resting on his shoulder for an extra second, reluctant to fully let him go. 

We are both wondering what my boundaries are, what my mum will allow me to do, how much longer we can last; I’m terrified of being seen, touched, even walked anywhere. He stays patient, waiting, careful not to cross any of the boundaries my friends have warned him about. 

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Shame, embarrassment, and fear come before any of my crushes. Grant, Omar, and I sit in a triangle, each one of us on a couch, memories of our day at Squash Camp filling up the living room, crawling under the cabinet by the window, seeping into the vase of flowers between us. 
I am struck by how platonic our gathering is. I do not have a crush on either of them. We’re recalling Grant’s five game match when the babysitter comes in. She is apologizing because she has to leave early. None of us blink. We are good friends, the conversation bouncing between us like the game of squash we witnessed earlier: fast-paced and energetic. 

When Omar’s mom picks us up, she is angry, shaken. She holds Omar and Grant by their wrists and speaks quietly but violently. I get it. She doesn't want me to hear.

Our goodbye is silent, as is the car ride with her and Omar to my house. I still do not understand what is wrong.

I eavesdrop on her conversation with my mother and slowly piece together what they see: a sixth grade girl left with two seventh grade boys, alone, in a house. 

I turn red as Omar tells me to ignore their conversation. I am ashamed of the entire ordeal. 

“I’m sorry,” he tells me, and I know he means it, that he and Grant would never have hurt me, raped me, or broken my trust. But it does not matter. It is not a question of trust. It is a matter of appearances, of ‘what ifs.’ An old, inherited fear. 

Grant, Omar, and I never have a conversation together again. 

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Years ago in Egypt, a BMW glides into the wedding ceremony, six hundred people with arms outstretched lining its path. Inside, I imagine he tells her he loves her, squeezes her hand, maybe asks if her halter-neck lace-trimmed gown needs fixing. They love each other—that, both mother-in-laws can agree on.  

When the car reaches the end of its red carpet, I see my dad look at my mom and nod, asking if she is ready, shutting the black door behind him. She is. My grandfather receives her, slowly and carefully. I imagine her wobbling, the layers and layers of tulle making it hard to stand, let alone walk, her hands gripping my grandfather’s arm out of necessity.

In the DVD of their wedding that my family watches together when I am eight years old, I see my to-be parents whisper to each other, and laugh, again and again, the wedding reception seemingly revolving around their love. I remember wondering if they still love each other like that, but something stops me from asking the question. I might already know the answer, or maybe what I know is that I don’t want to hear the answer. 

Either way, I choose to commit to memory the DVD recording of their wedding. I remember the details of their honeymoon pictures, forget whatever their relationship looks like beyond the first dance and kiss. 

As the wedding disperses before us, my parents narrate an off-screen version of their farah, their wedding. They explain it was a day of farah, and I’m confused until I realize the word for joyful pride in Arabic—farah—is the same word as “wedding.” 

I think about the pride and joy their wedding brought and I can’t help but wonder what the devolution of a marriage must look like. 

Is that a moment of farah too? I know the answer is no. 

When my parents do get divorced, farah is not an emotion I hear thrown around. My grandmother is upset, convinced she has failed her motherly duties, left with two unmarried daughters and one unhappy with her marriage. 

She knows my mother is better off without my dad, but she cannot—and does not—shake her disappointment for years. It becomes a source of many of our arguments, nights we spend shouting at each other. Me, asking her why a husband has anything to do with one’s quality of life; Her, wondering if I too will not get married, or worse, get a divorce. The prospect of two generations of “failed” women colludes any sort of understanding between us. 

Years later, we will sit, leaning on the cold granite counters as snow delicately falls outside. My grandmother will seem calm, more reserved, as if taken aback by the magnitude of the natural world, in awe of what power exists beyond my—and her own—reach. 
“SubhanAllah,” she’ll whisper. All Glory be to God. 

On her phone, she pulls out a picture of her wedding day and places it between us. I peer at it, smiling. It's one I’ve seen over a hundred times; my grandmother’s sweetheart neckline, my grandfather’s tall, skinny frame. She looks happy. Maybe in love.

“I made a mistake,” she says, and I lift my head. She is gazing straight into my pupils. “I married your grandfather.”

I’ve never heard her say those words aloud before. Out loud, she’s never acknowledged the woes of their 40-year relationship.

I clutch her hand tightly, almost apologetically, suddenly realizing there is a lot more to their relationship than I know. 

As my grandmother speaks, I imagine the scene: Cairo’s streets are cleaner then, but for the most part the city is unchanged. The apartment building I grew up visiting is her childhood home, and I see her, in my imagination, getting dropped off by a male classmate at 9 PM on a Friday. He is not her fiance. She’s wearing a mini skirt, a red one in my head, and a diamond necklace her uncle bought from a trip across east Africa on behalf of EgyptAir. 

She walks up to her bedroom, wishes her parents a goodnight, and wakes up to a call from her fiance. My future grandfather is breaking off the engagement. “I should have taken it as a sign,” she tells me. “He couldn’t handle me talking to another man. He clearly didn’t know what it meant to be a man.” 

I pause my imagination to think of all the memories I have of my grandfather. Like my grandmother who refused to divorce him, I appreciate his presence in our life, but years and years of arguments with my grandmother in the foyer, followed by excruciating silence, makes me wonder. What would our lives, all our lives, be like if she hadn’t married him?

“We’ve all learnt from your mistakes,” I hear myself say, but my grandmother shakes her head solemnly, silently, the tears in her eyes just a sentence away from spilling over. 

I know she’s thinking about my uncle, the way he speaks anger into the house, comes and goes with no explanations, blames my aunt for not having a son. 

“Another mistake,” I hear her telling me. 

Another generation, I think to myself. 

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The loveseat swing rocks back and forth, upsetting piles of jasmine in its wake. I am curled up to the right, watching white petals sway like ballet-dancers. I follow one to the ground. It rests at last, still as a discarded skirt. 

Inside my grandparents’ house—where prayers, tears, and condolences create a soft hum of sadness—my family remembers my great-grandmother, her death so recent that my father repeatedly refers to her in the present tense. 

I know very little about her: that she got married at fifteen, had thirteen children, spent evenings threading necklaces of jasmine.

It’s the way I’ll always remember her. I feel her presence on the jasmine-scented white granite counters in our home in Boston, wonder if she’s watching me blunder through more men than she’d ever had the opportunity to talk to. Does she hear me repeatedly ask myself if my life could be any different than hers?

We are three generations apart. This I know from my inability to make the necklaces she so loved, or grieve alongside the rest of our family, or silently wait on Egyptian men fully capable of helping themselves. 

I pick at the swing. My bitten nails send shards of old paint flying in all directions. I don’t know what I expect to find underneath decades of paint, but I suspect I want her to help restore my faith in love, in marriage, in relationships. 

She does not. Instead, the pool is glowing white, fallen petals lit up by LED lights, when I finally realize I’ve completely destroyed one half of the loveseat swing. It is time to go inside. 

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After he divorces my mother, my father remarries twice. The first, I learn, is a broken woman who my father tries desperately to fix. She does not, cannot, trust him, the ghosts of men in her past overshadowing every interaction. I see my dad ache for her, searching for an instruction manual to put her back together, like the computers he brings back from the dead every weekend. But there is no manual for love. Arguments every night make clear he does not love her, and she does not know how to love him.

I learn of their divorce on a weekday, sitting in Spanish class. But broken love no longer surprises me. I know of little else. 

Still I relish in learning about el amor, memorizing words like coquetar, prometida, and boda with a feverish insistence. I desperately want to need them some day. I do not want to be broken like her. I long to love. 

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My hob for Cairo is acceptable. Patriotic and commendable, even, so I cling onto it for as long as I can. I earn my family’s praise, nonchalantly using Arabic proverbs and cooking Egyptian dishes. It seems effortless. The way love ought to be. But I spend hours mourning my life in Cairo when I know I should be celebrating my new life in the U.S. 

My childish love for Cairo is what brings me closer to my short-lived crushes junior and senior year: all Egyptian boys. 

But it is this same Cairo—my girl friends in Cairo—that continues to confuse me. Amal, Lara, Aya, Karma, and I are sitting in a circle. Nicki Minaj punctuates every silence in our conversation. Ahmeds and Tareks hover around us. They are all boys I have not kept in touch with, but I get caught up on their lives anyway. 

Our circle is visualizing Maya and Fares on a date, apparently holding hands as they walk through Cairo Festival City together. They go back to her house, where she’s lined her bedroom with candles and fairy lights. My friends don’t explicitly say what happens next, but I understand from the way they look at each other. While Aya and Karma squeal as Amal continues the story, I am thinking of my family, of the myth we’d all created together. 

Somehow, I start to realize, I’d been made to believe boyfriends, dates, and bedrooms at 16 were for Americans, and Americans only. But Maya and Fares are both Egyptian. And the excitedly hushed tone of my friends retelling the story told me all I needed to know: this was not an isolated sample.

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Weeks later, I am sitting on my bed in Boston, my fingers separating golden brown curls from each other. Echoes of Super Bass sneak into my room, beckoning me to the window. My neighbors are having a party. Along one side of the pool, I vaguely make out the middle daughter, Sam. She is sprawled next to her boyfriend on a cream-colored reclining chair, and the sight of them together reminds me of Maya and Fares. 

Thousands of miles away from Egypt, I try to answer my own questions about love. A scene comes to mind: 

We walk, velvety hot chocolates in hand. I hold on to him, my block-heeled boots no match for Boston’s black ice.

I imagine I don’t tug at my skirt, wonder what time it is, fear being seen. I don’t know how far we go, if we cuddle on the bench, kiss by the Charles River, or sleep together in his dorm. 

But I know I don’t have to will generations of worries away, memories of my aunt’s love-induced suicide attempt and my grandfather’s fights with my grandmother finally frozen in the past. 

I never want to break his trances, and I don’t need darkness to let myself be engulfed by him. He cares for me, for our community, for Egypt, whether or not he is Egyptian.

I no longer fall in love with Alberto, Julio, or Carlos. There is no need for Spanish telenovela boyfriends from shows like Velvet, Gran Hotel, Alta Mar—not because I am living my own love story, but because I see enough love, whole love, intact love, strong love, around me. Off screen.

He helps me stitch together fragments of that love. We create a mosaic made out of hob and amor, plane rides and weddings, divorces and disagreements. 

We watch the seasons pass us by. I am not surprised when I realize we’ve been together for a year, or two, or five, or ten. 

Our love does break down sometimes, but I don’t go running to Cairo to fix it. The city may be my first love, but I know I can’t use it as an escape from all love. 

White petals of jasmine line the aisle on our wedding day. Tulle converts me into a wobbling bride like my mother in the DVD. Today, I am proud to be called “amar.” Beautiful. 

For a moment, I am back sitting with my grandmother by the window, watching the snow make its way to the ground.

But I am not afraid of having made a mistake. I let him clutch my hands and uncurl my ring finger. 

We waltz our way through the night. I am still thinking about love.