derebikh

= Derekh + Arabic

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Epilogue: 1 month later

(Derebrooklyn???(EH!?)/Derebikh: Me, today, back in Fort Greene Brooklyn & me in Egypt on June 17th.)

It’s been one month since I returned to New York from my trip to Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, and Denmark—one-third of the total time I was traveling. I’ve started a new, temporary advertising job, I’ve moved back into my studio with my brother as my roommate (that’s right, 2 grown-ass Froudes sharing a studio), and sometimes the trip feels like a dream, which devastates me.

As a goodbye to the blog here’s one of my favorite memories.

Woken-up by a kick to the ass, I bounce. My knees fold into my face. I’m human luggage. Joel and I are crammed into a van that’s bounding across the void of the Sinai desert in the middle of night, the kind of the middle of the night you experience when you’re a child, when you wake up and it feels like you shouldn’t be awake, like the people who are responsible for making the day happen are all taking their cigarette breaks and the world isn’t ready for you. It’s not done up. Go back to bed. We’ll be ready in a few hours.

Bleery-eyed, bleery-minded I look to Joel beside me who’s also bouncing up and down, like a flapping flag.  He’s my brother. It’s a joke to think we could sleep through such a bumpy ride, and yet we do. The van is packed with other passengers and their luggage, hence the close-quarters. When every square inch of free space is a place to weave an arm or leg knowing how to contort is important. And Joel and I have a secret. If you take off your shoes it changes everything. You go ” from no room, to all room.” Don’t laugh. Try it. It works better than it should.

I look out at the desert. Stars are tossed across the navy fabric of the sky, and the moon creates weird shadow triangles on the boulders and dunes. We could be at the bottom of the sea. The desert’s crumpled white surface stretches out of sight when you look right, when you look left, forward and back. It feels like we’re in the dead center of the desert for the entire drive. I feel swallowed by this place. 

And there’s music. “By far the best Arabic music I’ve ever heard,” Joel later says of it. The driver is playing CDs. I have road hum clogged ears, but I can make out female choruses, guitars, other stringed instruments I don’t know the names of, and looping sing-songy melodies that sound familiar, but I know I’ve never heard before. I feel like that’s how you know a song is catchy.

At a rest stop I ask our driver what the music was he was playing. “Eh?” He doesn’t speak English at all. I point to my ear. I point to him. I point to the stereo. “Mewoo-zik ew whir play-een?” “Ah!” He seems to understand, and tells me a name that I write into my iPhone.

I’ve searched through forking trails of Google searches and haven’t found the band. “De ma de a,” I think is what he told me? Damn, I don’t know. I’ll probably never hear that music again, but the hooks were so good that If I heard it again, I’d know it.

I hold memories like this close to my chest. I want to make more. Life is a waste otherwise.

Thanks everyone for reading. I love you. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

- Derebikh