I. The Calling
March, twenty twenty six, did not begin with a plan. It began with a summons I did not invite. Crows covered my dog Manga. Not one bird. A black argument on the back of the only creature in the house that had not learned how to lie. Nearby a fox came out of the ground’s own pocket and dragged Manga toward a hide the beach does not put on a menu. In the garden afterwards I found a cat’s skull. I threw it where I first understood the dog was no longer walking beside me. For a few hours the air had teeth. Then something pulled through the ribs — not a metaphor, a vibration with intent — the kind of force people call a witch because they are afraid to say the land still keeps servants. I was tearing at my own hair when Manga walked back into the garden three hours later as if death had been a rumour with poor timing. I ran to her and held her close. That sweet animal. The living thing that still answers when I say her name.
II. The Closed door
Layla’s mother does not. For a stretch of time, while her house (she made it clear to me that it’s her house after my data breach in 2024) waited to become orderly and never quite did, she kept me from my only child for weeks, then months, then years. Two years to be exact and then brought her for a week despite agreeing for bringing her for a whole summer but then she called it a busy work schedule because she lost her job, and then another, and then another… and named the silence a busy work schedule. The schedule collapsed. She also doesn’t believe in political circumstances of my Egyptian passport in a Qatari terrain. Layla and Nesla stay over there with my dear sister, same house, same problems. I’ve been requesting permission from them to invite me over to be with Layla at least. All don’t have a clue what I’m becoming. What I’m capable of. Everything we agreed upon before I leave Qatar was shredded because they mistake the real me with my creations online. So does my father and mother. Nesla (Layla’s mom) lost a job. She lost the next. Six months, two endings. She lives on what she borrows from the person she claims to “appreciate” most. That person is me. The child is left, day after day, with a nanny and class acts I paid for in advance, and in full. Worry does not seem to enter the room. Absence does. A mother can call that arrangement life. A father, locked out of the voice of his own kid, calls it what it is: a door shut on a small throat, and a grown woman spending her pennies in bars and on drugs while she spends the child’s hours elsewhere. She cheated. She tried to throw me into the street to the wolves and she ultimately did by calling the Amir’s happy family of intelligence officers. Condescending much? yup. how did she though? She still wants dollars, to run from Doha on someone else’s spine. I only give her enough out of goodwill. She still tries to depress. I filed a police report over the taking of the child. She travels with her without my consent to places where General Sisi’s fierce enemies reside and where my voice is heard well. I told her. Not once but more like a thousand. She smiles with her mouth and says I am only joking around and to seek therapy (in public) and then hangs up or blocks on WhatsApp. Unblocks when she needs something urgent for her family back in Greek territories. Then blocks again. What do you call that? Let her keep the joke. A child is not a drop. A dog came home. A household chose the exit and called it an oopsie daisy the Amir of Qatar is here and I’m too scawed of that bitch. The peninsula does not negotiate that kind of music. It takes the body instead, and it charges in full. Let it be clear.
III. The Spine
So I pointed the bars at the mountains and let them judge. Seven days. A little over five hundred kilometres. Ras Sudr to Taba, then the bicycles thrown into a vehicle because the legs had paid big and the road was done taking. Ahead, a spine of rock that was kneeling toward God before helmets were invented. A mountain in Sinai is not a view. It is an elder with no manners. It does not console. It speaks in ridge, in shadow, in the sudden proof that your noise is a guest and the guest can be evicted. You climb into that proof, or you stay on the asphalt and baptise the asphalt as courage. I refused the baptism. A rider joined me on Taba’s wandering roads. He teaches men to breathe under water. On this coast the lesson was drier: breathe when the ridge steepens and there is no second door. I kept him in sight when the trail became rubble. That was not romance. That was refusing to let another body disappear on my watch after too many bodies had already learned the trick. I slept at a camp in Nuweiba. Reed. Palm. A door that shut on the Gulf like a lid. Hospitality here is older than every resort that tried to buy it. It belongs to the people who read these hills without an application whispering in their ear. Bedouin ground is not décor for a bicycle. It is a claim with blood in it. You take tea if it is offered. You do not turn the camp into content. You leave the place unspoiled, or you have understood nothing and the ridge will not correct you kindly.
IV. The two sacraments
Above Fjord Bay the land opens a bowl of water and dares you to call it pretty. Stand long enough and beauty shows the knife. The inlet holds still. The sky presses down. The body, beaten into listening by stone, finally shuts its market. Prayer here is not imported from a book you packed. It is height, hush, and the mountain permitting your weight on its shoulder without applause.
Wadi El Weshwash is the sacrament that bites. The clean line dies. The bike becomes a corpse you are still required to carry. I walked it at times. The diving coach ran. Ghosts, he said, and he fled as if the wadi had opened a throat behind him. I did not flee. I came after him like a mother whose child has decided the dark is populated. Perhaps it was. Some places keep a watchman that is not a man. You feel it in the calves and in the coward wish to be anywhere else. The wish is worthless. The only exit is through: frame in the hands, breath rationed, one of you still moving so the other is not left alone with whatever the stone is feeding. Then the road again — pylons, a yellow stripe, the thin charity of a truck’s shade, cloth over the face because dust here does not ask. Church on one side, mosque on the other. South Sinai holds both and does not request a referee. Through the spokes the sun is a nail driven into the day. On the bars the Gulf unrolls, gorgeous and unearned.
V. What remains
More than five hundred kilometres in total is bookkeeping. The week was ridges straightening a bent mind. Bedouin guides reminding a guest that he is a guest. Another rider who can vanish when ghosts appear, faster than a cold bottle lives in this noon — faster still when the trail stops flattering the wheel. A camp that kept the dark from eating the nights. A fjord that took me in and offered no certificate. A dog who walked back through a garden after the fox had done its piece. A woman who kept a child out of reach and called the gap a calendar. A calling that did not leave a name. The film is twenty-three minutes (without the baby mama) ((or with IDGAFF)) The platform kept twenty and stole the bay. Let it steal. Fjord Bay is not a clip. It is
Ahmed K.
CYCLOPATH
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Cycling film: instagram.com/p/DXMz4cOjDMM
Private story highlights: https://www.instagram.com/s/aGlnaGxpZ2h0OjE3OTA3MjExMjIxNTE0ODM1?igsi=MWswbTN2dzlyMm1vNA==
Ahmed K. 