Alexandria, 31 December, 2007

It’s strange how an experience can change someone’s way of seeing things. And even influence their whole life.

I grew up in Cairo as a Muslim, and in Islam we speak a lot about destiny — that each of us has a written time to come into this world and a time to leave… and whatever happens in between is also written, written by God.

In a way, this has stayed in my mind forever. And I started observing my life as if I was in a cinema… watching and witnessing every minute of my own movie. The movie was set and written before I entered the theatre, and now it is time just to sit and watch.

Still, every now and then, I worry about things and start asking myself, why am I here? What am I experiencing? And what is the reason for life? Then, I quickly remind myself that I don’t need to try to figure things out… that it was all already written up there, way before the movie started. Now I just need to relax and wait, wait till the end of the movie, till the end of it all. When the lights come on and it is time to leave, time to leave this cinema.

I have grown up with this idea in my mind, that the end of my movie would mean I am dead, that I have completed my life. I have lived every day thinking that this might be my last or the last day of someone I love. I prayed to God that I will be the first one to leave so I don’t see anyone I love dying as my way of keeping everyone in my movie alive. I won’t let them die before me.

I don’t know how long this will last. Maybe my movie is a short one after all. Do we live for a purpose and die once we have finished what we are supposed to do? Why would I need to live longer if I knew that I had lived my life?

I remember the first time I understood the concept of people dying. I was watching an old Egyptian movie on TV when I was about four or five years old, and I asked my mother about the actors in the movie and where they were. Most of them are dead, my mother said. It was a shocking discovery for me at that age. I was in love with all these beautiful dead people! And this somehow influenced me because I wanted to meet all the actors I love, before they die or before I die.

On the train from Paris to London, 12 April, 2008 

I am aware that every moment is passing by and going away, that each moment is a different moment, and that everything is changing too, including us. I want to photograph everyone I love, I want to keep part of them with me, I want them to live forever through my work.

We all die one day, at one specific moment. I think about this every day. No one knows when their time will come; some people choose to die earlier, earlier than their time. Some people wish to live forever, never to die. But we will all die.

I left Egypt. I missed it, I missed my family, everything in it. Then I went back one year later and it was as if nothing had changed, as if I had never left. Everything was the same, I saw everyone. We felt the same as if I was there yesterday. Then I left again. After many times of going back then leaving again, I stopped missing people and things and they sort of lived with me. I carried them within my soul. I never really left Egypt, I never really left anyone.

I wake up at night wondering where I am, and if I am alive or dead. Every night, when I go to bed, I think of God for a moment. It’s like getting ready to go somewhere, somewhere more profound than the world we live in, our real life. Then in the morning when I wake up, I am often surprised to find that I am still living. But how do I know if I am dead or alive? I think that when we die, we won’t notice that we are dead. I think we will just enter the other world easily, without noticing any difference. It’s like what we do every night when we go to sleep, and live in our dreams.

Sometimes I feel that I am living my life backwards. That I died the day I was born, and that I will be born once I am dead. It is a strange feeling but somehow this has always helped me to remember that the moment I am living is not exactly the real moment I am living and that whatever I’m passing through will go away and new moments will come after, so I could live them too… and so on. Nothing is the way it seems, a new moment will come soon, just after.