I’m interrupted by stillness, a striking silence that is not customary for a Sunday in Isla Vista. It is a perfect time to play pretend. The steel balcony bars are now vibrating with the voices of Cairo. I follow their rhythm, dancing around the room, my hands gliding like whirls of soft wind. The richness of Abdel Halim’s voice finds me, the words surging from my speaker as if to carry me. I think I am looking for myself. I stretch the tips of my fingers towards the corners of the walls, though I know I won’t find her here. Still, I uncover bits and pieces in the Tarab. With my eyes closed, the blackness of my eyelids create a blank canvas. I begin to paint. Mixing different shades, I search for the colors of our motherland. I can almost see her portrait. My imagination only takes me so far before I begin to lose feeling. 

My mother is a child waking up to Oum Kulthoum as she eagerly waits for her mother to come back from the market in Cairo. The warmth of the sun beams through her home, a feeling I’ve only imagined, yet try to replicate on my skin. The sounds of sixties Masr make their own melodies in my head, but my ears have never heard their song. I feel a bleeding in my chest. A hole that has ruptured all over again. A memory I’ve never experienced but somehow miss so deeply. 

My mother tells me her story in pieces, like a book that fills us both with a childlike comfort. From her words, our dinner table transforms into the one in her childhood home, though the white cotton tablecloth is almost identical. I listen as she grudgingly recites “un, deux, trois…” her voice dragging through each breath. The smell of her mother’s kaak (cookies) distracts the both of us. “Yalla oliha tani,” her father says. He sits on the other end, a determination in his thick furrowed brows that I like to believe remind me of my own. “He was a French teacher,” her voice brings me back. I’m almost there, completely entranced in the images of her evocation. It’s my favorite book, though I will never know it the same as her. 

I remember walking into my mother’s room one day shortly after I started wearing my hair natural. “How do I look?” I asked, as usual. Her eyes lit up, “You look so much like my mom.” I smiled of course for such a sincere compliment. Yet shortly after, I crept into my room, meeting myself in the mirror as I silently wept. First, for this newfound appreciation of my features. Yet I longed to know what my grandmother looked like, how she spoke, if she also loved something she never knew. I searched for her in the memory of my mothers voice, from the portal in her eyes. I missed her somehow, though I could only even begin to imagine what she was like.

Masr, Umm Al-Dunya. Egypt, the Mother of the world. Her roots spread throughout the earth, as if to carry us and hold us though we are nowhere near her. How I long to hold her, stretching my hands to every corner and laying my feet onto her soil. Then will I be able to declare that I know her, that I too am a part of her? For now, I listen closely to my mothers’ morning hums of each classical rhythm, as we yearn for the feeling of our mother’s tone.