It's almost 4 pm. Wessam, as usual, has promised to be here early, so we can spend some real time together and just talk, like we always do, and for some reason, like we've forgotten how to do in the past couple weeks. He signed off of MSN at 12:30, saying he'd drive his brother to the conference, send me a text when he leaves the other side of cairo to get to me, and be here as soon as possible - most likely by 2.

And now, at 4, there's no wessam, and still no text. I've gotten used to this kind of thing - i stopped calling him as often and instead, would curl up and sleep, deciding that he'd get here when he wants to get here, or come back online when he wants to get back online, or call me when he wants to call me, and not when he says he will.

It's probably just PMS, or the pain from these damned stitches, but it bothers me more than it used to. He's had a lot less time for me than he used to during his vacations. And these days, he'd rush to leave a cafe so we could get to the studio, play music the whole time regardless of whether or not i'm able to sing at the time, and use the phone calls of the studio owner, asking us to come and jam, as an excuse for doing it. My voice is half as important as their music playing, even though, as the stuido owner's sister has said, the voice is perhaps the most beautiful instrument there is, and equally as important as everything else. The owner, sherif, is the one who stops his playing to adjust the volume, so at least i can be heard. Otherwise, i'm sort of in the background.

And that's when i miss the other side of the world. Here, having a uterus is an automatic demotion, in any situation that includes locals. Sometimes i wonder if i'll be able to handle this for the rest of my life. He's more sensitive and more attentive than any man i've ever known, old or young, friend or relative or aquaintance. But there's little things that sometimes get to me, and sometimes i wonder if those little things are just an overreaction that i'm to blame for, or something to genuinely worry about.

The other day, we had a 4 hour fight that lasted through eating, drinking, studying and kissing, only because he wouldn't shut up. The best-fitting pair of jeans i have fit like a second skin - they're not too tight and yet there's no extra space. It's as if the tailor used my exact shape as a mannequin for the stitching and cutting and shaping of the jeans. I like them, and most that have seen me wearing them like them too. But he has a big problem with them, because they make the difference between a small waist and gigantic hips very candid and revealed, instead of hiding it like most of my clothes do.

As soon as i approached, the look on his face told me we'd have a rough day. He immediately launched himself into a myraid of reasons to be mad that i chose this exact pair to wear, accusing me of wanting to attract attention even though i already have a man by my side. Can't get more egyptian than that.

It continued all day, and i argued back. "If you were wearing these jeans and you werent with me you'd get raped by now!" he continued, even though whenever i looked around, i saw the same kind of staring that i'd recieve wearing a long-sleeved shirt and normal, oddly cut jeans that fit my hips and don't exactly sit right at the waist. It was a hideous overreaction. He pointed out everything that was wrong with it and complained about the high heels and told me that i'm just gonna bring him more trouble, while i angrily pointed out that nobody was acting any differently than they always do when they see me on the street.

"You don't have a normal body! People don't see that kind of thing here! It makes their tongues hang! The sluttiest thing you can do is show off how different you are! Everyones gonna look at you and think you deserve to get raped!"

To me, i didn't give a fuck who was looking - we have eyes for a reason and in a place like this, they will stare no matter how loose the jeans are, as long as they can see me from the neck up.

The first time i wore tight jeans around him, he complained all night about how he liked tight jeans, but only on skinny girls. I rolled my eyes at his miseducation - where i'm from, along with the rest of the modern world, as long as the jeans don't squeeze anything, they're considered a perfect fit - not too tight. And i never wear a single piece of clothing until it has adequate space for every body part it covers.

I just got a call from him - speak of the devil. He had some excuse about the car and having to buy drugs for the old guy, john. He hasn't even left his part of cairo yet. Is it possible to be disappointed without being unpleasantly surprised? I expected it, even predicted it, but i still hoped for slightly better than that. I'm 100% sure that he won't be here until 5:30 at the earliest, and he'll want to go straight to the damn studio, and i'll spend the night bored and blank and grey while he plays guitar with sherif.

Either way, we argued all day about the stupid friggin jeans. I almost up and left to get changed cuase i wanted so badly for him to shut the hell up - but he wouldn't let me.

"And you're wearing high heels too, so they make a lot of noise, and they give people an excuse to look, and when they look, they're not gonna look back until you're way out of view! Your friggin jeans are just wayyyy too tight!"

Whenever he wasn't arguing with me, i had barely spoken. I wasnt in the mood to make small happy cheerful talk while he was so obnoxious.

We left to go and get burgers. I put on the jacket so he'd have nothing left to say - and then, surprise surprise, he found something else to say.

"The heels dont go well with those jeans at ALL!" he said obnoxiously.

I almost had a skander flashback. It made me shiver. Having someone constantly chastising you in public is never any fun, and i thought only skander would be one for that - even his reason was more legit than wessam's. Damnit.

When we sat down to eat the food that i paid for (as usual) he apologized. I rolled my eyes, came up with a few small words in reply, and basically ate in silence. When we walked along the road to find a cab, he gave me another one of his compliments - "you look so damn beautiful today."

"Shut the fuck up," i said, smirking wryly and rolling my eyes.

"I'm serious, i'm not just saying it to fix something i did wrong. I love the jeans and the heels and the top and the way you always use a little bit of make up and leave your hair big and wild - its just not good here. If we were anywhere else in the world i'd let you walk around like that, minus the t-shirt if you wanted to, and be proud of it."

But it wasn't about the place - it was about him. As an egyptian, he had problems with people staring at me, trying to get to know me, asking for my number, even though i told them to screw off every time. If he'd grown up in the UK, or the caribbean, he'd be like any of the guys i'm used to and regard me with pride - he wouldn't want to cover it up and prevent it from happening. We always had issues with a married woman's dress code - my dad was always proud of my mom and usually prevented her from covering up too often. She was happier that way anyway - she liked to show off her beauty in trinidad. He's a perfect exampe of a normal western man - proud. It's senseless to ask somebody to 'preserve' their beauty for their husbands with a veil or giant clothing. What are you preserving? Beauty doesn't rot when it's in full view of everybody, and it doesnt last longer when it's covered from all eyes but those of their husbands. It's a tool those damned men use to put their women under more control, out of jealously and possessiveness. Granted most of the women are ok with it because they've grown up with it, i'm thinking of all those who aren't ok with it.

He asked me why i have to look pretty.

"Because it's my right to look sexy and feel as though i look good - if  i look good, i feel good. That's something in any woman."

"Yeah, you say it's your right, but not when you're married or you have a man! If you love someone why would yo need to look sexy or look pretty? You already got him? You wanna attract attention? Huh? Huh?"

He brought his mother's quotations into it too. His friggin mother. She's got exactly the kind of attitude i'm against. A woman who believes it's our job to keep our men in line and if they fuck up, it's because of us (she blamed her brother-in-laws death on his wife. He was an alcoholic and she wasn't. According to wessam's mom, it was her fault because she went to parties with him and drank with him when they first got married, and didn't succeed in stopping him for his own good - instead he drank himself to death) and if we love someone we're disrespecting him by going out with our elbows showing. Fuck me. She'll have something negative to say about anything and anyone, whether it's a good or bad situation. Nobody is good enough in her eyes - only she is 'perfect.'

When wessam and i aren't arguing about how i dress, he's doing something else altogether that really bothers me. I'd be telling him about being followed home by a guy in a car AGAIN and being sick of it, and he'd immediately start looking at my face and pointing out every single thing that's wrong with it.

"You have a huge problem," he always said, "this nostril is smaller than this one."

Or, "This eyebrow is higher up than this one."

Or, "this side of your jaw isn't as sharp as the other one."

Or, "Your bottom lip sticks out sideways."

Or, "You have little hairs here on your upper lip - most girls take them out."

Or, "You have hair between your eyebrows, most girls take them out, why are you walking around with them there?"

Fuck. He had to look right at my face, two inches away, to see those tiny, insignificant hairs that i dont bother removing because i don't give a shit, and most people dont give a shit. He really exaggerates all the tiny asymmetrical details on my face and turns them into big issues. He's the first guy i've known that's ever made me feel like something's wrong with me, something's not normal, i'm a freak of nature.

Then, i observed his face, as well as all the faces in my family, and found that absolutely no face is perfectly symmetrical - there's tiny differences from the left side to the right.

Even so, i had to look extremely closely to notice it. I never look that closely at people because it doesn't matter to me - but somehow, he's so damn critical that it's of greatest importance to him.

I ask him why he has to point out all these tiny flaws and why they're so important sometimes, when i really dont want to hear them and he makes me hear them anyway.

"Because i care." That's his answer, every time, and he says it as if it makes him much more courteous and caring and merciful than everybody else - not just once, but repeatedly. BULL..... SHIT.

Oh, wait, the other day he added an end to that statement: "Because i care to know the face of the woman i'm gonna wake up to every morning - who knows if one small thing is gonna turn into one big thing someday?"

God. He's put on around 25 pounds that went straight to his waistline ever since i met him. And it never mattered to me, because i friggin love him anyway. These little details, i never noticed in him, because i never 'cared' enough to look for them. Wessam is wessam. I've been looking at his face practically every day for a year now, and if there's something wrong with it, i'd have to look pretty damn close, with intentions of finding a flaw, to see anything wrong.

He seems to enjoy drilling my confidence down to nothing, while simultaneously spilling out random bullshit about how beautiful i look today. I always wondered why i never believed him when he said it - and now, looking at the way he's always regarded me, i see why.

My mom laughs about it with  me on extremely rare occasions - she'd tell me about a woman that comes up to her saying "oh, one eyebrow is different from the other," or "oh, you have age spots on your cheeks."

"People like that are seeing perfection, and dissecting it until it becomes imperfection, usually for their own comfort. When people look at us, do you think they'd see the small differences between one eyebrow and the other, or the faint age spots, or the small blemishes? Of course not - they see the smile, and the eyes, and the color of our skin, and the lips, and how we speak and how we walk. The positives spring out, and that's all they see until they look for flaws and draw in closely enough to see them."

Usually, his doting and his sweet talking and his shower of attention is enough for me to take it all and forget about it, because it's darkened by the measure of the good side. At times like these, though, when his attention wanes and i have to make an effort to lessen the attention that i always give him, and impulsively want to give him, just so i dont feel like a doormat, these little things tend to spark up. When it first started, i took it as a joke and i was amused. Now, i can see that he seriously wants to chip away at my confidence.

Sigh...  I'm in pain, and i'm in a foul mood, and i've just discovered that to take out my tooth, the surgeon reduced my jaw bone to a razor-thin point, and it's been slicing through the gum that he's stitched up for the past few days. Now, it's sticking out, and it's scratching away at my tongue. Already i can taste the blood, god damnit.

There he goes, calling me again. I just found out he brought his friend with him, too. We're definitely going straight to the studio - i'm not buying food for everybody and going broke in one night like i always do. There'll be no talking. I'm definitely gona be bored.

Sometimes i wish i could sleep forever. This is one of those times.

Wassam is not good enough for you Lynn

well you could say that... but in the end there's no rose without thorns, and in the end, i'm not perfect either. Love is not synonymous with attraction, so whether he's good enough for me or not, i'm with him. Hopefully it's just a rough patch that'll go away soon.