Their's was a nakedness (un)like my own

The desert dust hadn’t yet crept under my nails or darkened the inside of my nose, and I still smelt remotely of the home I had left. Cars buzzed around me, going backwards and forwards through the circles and lines of Cairo’s deafening streets, and I pinched my toes tightly within my shoes in an effort to save my bones from crunching under the tires of passing cabs. I hurried nervously through the lane-less mess of traffic to the other side of the street and kept walking in the direction of a bathhouse that I had heard of.

Leaving the winding streets’ filmy air of shish smoke, I descended stairs into a room heavy with moisture. Green paint that was faded and dull peeled off the wall with the weight of years of water, soap, and smoke-filled air. A tabby cat lay on a wooden crate in seeming exasperation. Other cats walked around half-broken furniture and empty crates. A veiled woman washed her hands in a rusted sink. Two women in burkas sat blankly on a wooden box. They pointed me in the direction of a hallway that was slippery with oils and dirty water. There the air hung around me and it grew harder to breathe through the odors and moisture.

As I crossed under the arch of a peeling blue door, I stepped from the hall and into what served as the bathing room, catching half a dozen naked Egyptian women unawares. A few let out small screams as I, clothed, stood there, more naked than naked. The forms under my clothes connected like a constellation, forming a vivid portrait of my naked, hiding, body. Under the greasy light, their nakedness seemed so unlike my own. I felt uneasy, nervous even. Here in this room, stripped away from everything, there was nowhere to run. Besides from the blue silk strips hanging from the ceiling rafters and the smell of roasting pigeon and corn cob seeping in from the outside streets, there was little else but our bodies, naked or clothed, foreign or known.

In the heat and the smell and the moisture, my clothes seemed to steam away. Our bodies, melting through their foreign forms, revealed nothing more than replications of one another. Mirror images augmented by little more that shape and size and color. What our eyes held remained the only things left to be uncovered. And that too, would only take time.