There is a particular kind of affection reserved for people who move.

For those who live between places. We’re often met with curiosity, admiration, even. A sense of intrigue. Our lives look full, textured, in motion. We are asked where we’re from, where we’re going, what we’ve seen.

This attention can feel like affection. Sometimes it actually is.

But it isn’t the same thing as being held.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the difference between being interesting and being chosen, not only in love, but in the quieter, everyday ways we decide who belongs.

I’m opening In the Shadow of the Pyramids again. Reading my own words out loud. Listening for what remains. These pages were written inside a moment that asked everything. They carry the pace of the street, the weight of witnessing, the blur between thought and feeling.

I went out without my camera.

A few years earlier, this would have ignited my insecurities.
Am I still a photographer when I’m stripped of the camera?
What if something happens and I need to take a picture?

On this sunny afternoon, I abandoned my camera on purpose. I was in Cinque Terre with one of my oldest friends, a brilliantly talented photographer. We walked. We talked. We stopped. We ate. Then we walked again. We reached the bottom of the hill and stood facing the sea.

There is a particular kind of quiet that only exists on planes. Not silence… never silence, but a hush made of shared breath and the steady hum of jet engines holding us up. Everyone becomes briefly anonymous. We are suspended between places, time zones, beginnings and endings. Suspended between versions of ourselves.

Mama appears in my frame more than anyone else.

Sometimes she’s the subject. Other times she’s the anchor that settles me long enough to really see. Often she’s my decoy: the stand-in body that lets me focus on the world around her. Through my Mama, I’ve always been able to measure distance.

There is a window in Cairo that appears again and again in my photographs. It belongs to the small flat where I grew up. A strip of sky over a narrow street, opening into a modest living room with a panoramic window. When I look back through my archive, that window keeps resurfacing.