I moved to the US from Cairo in 2000 and, like many immigrants, my feet walked first to Seattle and then to New York City where I relocated in 2002, while my heart and mind were still in Cairo. And then at a protest I'd flown to Cairo to join near Tahrir Square in November 2011, on the day that the US was marking Thanksgiving, Egyptian riot police broke my left arm and fractured my right hand in two places and sexually assaulted me, and shattered my heart into more of a mess than a dropped 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.
Is that what home is? Where you know there will always be a place at the table for you? ... Naguib Mahfouz said: Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease. And that New Year's Eve at Chez Lucienne, I stopped running.
I did not have to be alone for the 2011 holiday season. I needed solitude to gather myself, the pieces I am, to misquote Toni Morrison.
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