We never grieved losing the beach in Alexandria. I wonder if the Mediterranean Sea itself grieved the loss. 

Alexandria, Egypt, where my family is from, is the great city that was founded by Alexander the Great himself. When you think of Egypt, it’s likely you don’t think of a beach culture. But for centuries, Alexandria was a beach city—in Arabic we call it Aarosat Al Bahr al Abyad Al-Mutwasat, which means the bride of the Mediterranean Sea. Everyone in Egypt knows that Alexandria is special, especially Alexandrians. It will always be my home.

I am sure I am not the only one that recalls summers in Alex growing up, Alexandria’s sweet nickname. In fact, having only had two summers I remember there before the age of 18, I am sure many other people can tell you about it with much more profound depth than me. 

And yet, those two summers abroad, when my mom would pack six suitcases of 70 pounds each filled with clothes for my extended family, and lug my brother and I to Egypt—they were some of the most profound summers of my life, and indeed the most memorable. I remember little of the summers in California, even though my brother and I would beg not to go to Masr (the Arabic name for Egypt). My most base memories of summer stem from there—the Mediterranean Sea, that very much defines us all as Alexandrians. 

Speaking of profound depth, that is how I like the water—maybe it’s an Alexandrian thing. While my family never really took us to the beach in Alexandria itself, those three months were filled with trips to the beach in nearby Agami and Miraya. Twice we went to Mars Al Matrouh which characterized possibly the best two beach trips of my life. As I got older, I visited beaches with friends on the Red Sea like Ain Sokina and Dahab. 

You may be surprised to know that there are places in Egypt where the water is completely placid—like a giant swimming pool, it has basically no waves. It also can be surprisingly shallow for extremely long stretches, so you and your cousins will need to go a good distance out to get any depth. Bouncing around like astronauts, gravity feels optional in the water. Perhaps because it is so clear and placid, we are not afraid for the water to get deep and we long for it. I feel comfortable swimming with fish. I think that’s why until this day, being unable to touch the ground does not scare me but is a feeling I long for. 

Mars Al Matrouh is where my primary memories of masyaf reside. Masyaf is a concept I think we share with other Mediterranean people like Italians, the concept that the world is different in the summer, and that the summer unfolds in different words from the ones we live in in Egypt. Masyaf is a place. It’s what we call beach towns, only they are not beach towns—they are towns where summering occurs. It is also a verb. Masyef makes summer into a verb—this word in Arabic literally means “summering,” because summer is a huge part of our culture, we needed a verb for it. 

There is such a thing as masyaf homes, which are beach homes that are used only in the summer, for summering, usually pretty bare of furniture and what’s present is intended for beach use, perhaps some plastic chairs. There’s always a full kitchen because your mom and aunts will cook. There are often no men, just women and children. There is masyaf clothing, the idea that people can wear completely different clothing in these maysaf places than you would wear wherever you’re from. 

You could be whoever you want in the summer, in the masyaf. In the masyaf, magic occurs. The masyaf was magic. 

“It was like coming home after you’d been gone a long, long time,” said Belly Conklin in The Summer I Turned Pretty. “It held a million promises of summer and of what it just might be…”¹ We did not have a big house to go to every summer in the masyaf. Having your own summer home, for one, was something only the wealthy had. Many families, like ours, simply rented a home for a few weeks, or a month, or a few months. This meant usually summering in a new place. And this did not matter at all.

Masyaf can’t be done properly unless it is at least a few weeks long in my opinion. You need enough time to do nothing, wake up after sleeping in some sort of sleeping situation that was way too uncomfortable, eat something, corral all the kids, and head to the beach. There was this seemingly endless nature to the days, when each day is roughly the same—eat, beach, sleep, repeat. Oh how I long for those summers in the masyaf.

Matrouh is the affection nickname we give to Mars Al Matrouh, the masyaf I best remember summers in Egypt. I think we went both times we came to Egypt in the summer as kids, when I was 10 and 12, and for some reason, I think we did stay in the same place, a beige colored, relatively large, bare villa to fit at least 15 people. My cousins’ aunt from their mom’s side had some sort of set up at work that allowed us to be here. 

I remember the sleeping situation was so tight that me, my mom, and my cousin Nermine shared a twin side bed by sleeping with our heads and torsos on it, with our feet propped up on chairs. It was so awful that until this day I remember it vividly, not improving until Nermine went home early. Sleep was so uncomfortable, some of my cousins and their cousins opted to stay awake as long as possible in hopes someone would wake up and they could take the beds. Sleeping like this was indeed also an integral part of the masyaf experience. 

Matrouh will forever be etched into my memory as the place where this integral part of my childhood unfolded. We could be kids there, and we were effortlessly childish on those turquoise beaches. At the time it was nearly a virgin masyaf. The waters were tranquil and a clear blue—you could just look down at it and see fish. There were no cars so my family transported itself using donkey carts, which were the taxis of the era in that area of Egypt. We’d take two or three, each group shuffling into a wooden cart being tugged by the donkey, and hanging off the back—many antics occurred on those donkey carts, the adults on one and the kids on the rest.

One of my favorite memories is the paddle boat we took out to the sea with the slide. Remember, we are not afraid of deep water. The water is so calm and clear that there is clearly nothing to be afraid of. We took that paddle boat out far beyond where anyone was, out to sea—it was uncanny how deep it was, and that this was safe and okay by our moms. We slid into the Mediterranean all day long. 

I can’t even begin to describe the feeling of sliding off a paddle boat deep in the Mediterranean with your cousins on a hot summer day, being dunked into the water, and climbing up the ladder on the paddle boat, only to do it again and again. The Mediterranean welcomed us, each slide off the paddle boat launching us deep into the water, each of us gushing out like a geyser and back to the metal ladder on the side. In retrospect, I see how this is our DNA—not all people like water or are comfortable with deep water, but this felt entirely natural. These were some of the best days of my life.

The same day, my mischievous cousins’ cousin Amah tried to climb up the slide, slid, and chipped his front tooth on it. Until this day, his tooth is chipped, a physical memory of those days that will never leave his face. He is a quiet, mature father and husband now, but I will always know the truth about him from those days at the masyaf, when he urinated on the neighbors doorknob and doormat because he didn’t like them. He was likely 10 too.

Once, we made a human totem pole, my cousins’ older cousin on the bottom, each of us got on each other’s shoulders as high as we could go until someone fell, usually once we got as high as three people. My cousins’ cousin, Amr, was the oldest and the largest, as I think he was already in high school. He was unequivocally the bottom of the totem pole, every time, and in retrospect, it fills me with affection that he didn’t balk at this role, or hanging out with his much younger extended family. 

Another day, not at the beach for some reason, we decided to try and kill as many flies as possible—while sitting outside on the porch. Ask my husband if you don’t believe me, but until this day, I have an uncanny ability when it comes to killing flies, as I learned perfectly well how to do it that day.

My cousins’ other cousin, Yasser, must’ve been about 12 at the time. He gave me a seashell he found. It was a small conch shell, about two inches long. I had a painfully cute 10-year-old crush on him, and never told anyone until now. I still have the seashell to this day. I found out much later, when we were adults and he asked to marry me, that he had a crush on me then too. Masyaf allowed for miracles—this was the first crush anyone’s ever had on me to my knowledge.

Things change. That’s probably one of the only constants of life. My mom never knew how to swim and that is why she insisted my brother and I learn. I’m not a strong swimmer, I am an Alexandrian swimmer, learning between lessons in the pool in Richmond, California, and summers in Egypt. My mom almost drowned once, and my Khalo (maternal uncle) Bahaa saved her, grabbing her by the hair.

Khalo Bahaa could swim, but Khalo Awad, my mom’s other brother with the dashing good looks and strong, big build, was the one who would swim Beir Masoud. That was a wishing well, a deep hole on the sidewalk in Alex, that young men would dive into, looking for coins, or holding their breath long enough to make it out the other side in the Mediterranean to show off. Some young men died down there. But my Khalo Awad could easily make it.

He died of a heart attack a few years after my last masyaf in Egypt, on a cold December day in 2001. He was the one with a villa in Al Agami, many of our summering days there starting at his home. His family lost it over time due to Bedouin squatters, as his widow and young kids were not able to maintain it enough to keep them out. Al Agami, which I have many fond memories of too, is now a fully fledged city, not just a masyaf.

We never went to Matrouh again, and would not return to Egypt again until I was 18, when everything had changed. I never had another masyaf with my cousins. To avoid the heat, which in Egypt is nearly unbearable in the summer, we started coming in the winter.

I am not sure if my mom grieved the loss of the beach. Oh yes, it is gone in Alex. I was only 10 when, playing in the sand with my cousins one night in Alex, I brought my mom something I found in the sand that I thought we could play with—an open syringe. She was horrified. 

Eco-grief. That’s the word my friend Jac taught me today. The term means “the sense of loss that arises from experiencing or learning about environmental destruction.” While my family never summered at the beaches within Alexandria itself, I know my mom and her siblings did growing up. My aunt had a cabina (cabin) on the beach, and the whole family would use it in the summer. My mom and her siblings’ memories of Alex’s beaches must be much more intimate and pleasant than mine. 

But I think we all neglected to mourn when the Egyptian government decided to take much of Alexandria’s beaches and turn them into a street—the corniche, Alexandria’s main street that borders the water, is a behemoth now. While data shows that adding size to a street never really alleviates traffic, what’s done is done. The bride of the Mediterranean Sea, the ancient beach city in which Alexander the Great is buried and no one knows where, no longer has a beach. And I don’t know that anyone ever took a moment to say that this made us sad.

We are beach people, water people. Parts of Alexandria still smell like fish. But change is one of the only things we can be sure of in life. In Arabic, we would call Alexandria now khana, which means a choke. It is insufferable being in a beach city with no beach, believe me. Come over and feel it with us. In the summer, when the humidity and heat reach their max and the city is suffocated from pollution and the poor who come from other places to summer in Alex, it can only be described as a choke. 

Even energetically, Alexandrians lost something when they lost their beach. We lost a bit of what made us ourselves. Like a whale in captivity. We still feel like beach people, that will always be in our DNA. But without the beach there—there is no place to take in a gasp of air. In Alex, we are choking.

It is hard to grieve when things change, when they change so rapidly. The taking of the beaches to extend the road just happened one day, and I am not sure anyone really considered what that meant for us as Alexandrians. I wonder what Cleopatra, who lived in Alexandria while making love to Mark Antony within it, would think of it now.

Egypt’s economic situation is not one many people would envy right now. As much as I love my country, I know I couldn’t live there. Of the friends I made in Egypt when I came to live there after college, some of them have also immigrated to Europe and the United States. I live in Mexico City. 

I am not the only one who longs for an Alexandrian summer. Two friends, Eileen and Marwa, come every summer, with their kids, and rent a house on the North Coast, the trendy place to summer in Egypt these days, with my dear friend Yasmine and her kids. Though I hate to have to bear the heat, I messaged Yasmine in my best Arabic saying, soon, in the summer, I want to come to the masyaf. “I hope you can come with us,” she told me, and she talked about how we could plan this out. “This part of the year is my favorite, that’s why the winter is so depressing to me. I just love that mood of masyaf, I stay on the North Coast, go to the beach, sit in the apartment, and we smoke hookah at night once the kids are asleep. It’s the best mood. I wish you could join me as soon as possible.” I wish I could too.

In the meantime though, I just came back from the coast of Oaxaca, here in Mexico, where my husband and I own a plot of land but also just love to be. The room we stayed in belonged to the brother of a friend and booked super last minute over Christmas, was barren and uncomfortable in some ways that I did not like, but overtime, filled me with a nostalgia that I cherished in a strange way, because it reminded me of masyaf. There was a bed, a small kitchen, a few plastic chairs, and that’s it. In fact, I think I love that part of Mexico because even though Alexandria has changed, it is the closest I have ever come to feeling like I am there—in Alex. in the summer, in the 90s.

I will make this town my home, for many reasons but perhaps especially this one. “There is nothing quite like your country,” I tell Mexicans who can’t fathom an Egyptian living in Mexico, and ask me about it. 

Masyaf as it existed is gone, not because the places are gone, but because that beachside simplicity of our youth, the one where the Mediterranean kissed the beach in Alexandria daily, no longer exists. But I have been wondering lately if perhaps all of adulthood—especially the second part, the part after maturity—is all just a journey to find where you came from. For me, for now, I will say I found it here, in Mazunte, Oaxaca, where I can shed a tear for the Mediterranean beach that is no longer, while maybe making new memories in the Pacific every morning, even though it will never quite be the same.

1.  The Summer I Turned Pretty. (2022). Amazon Prime Video.