In our apartment’s final days everything was an omen.

Lost keys under the fridge found far too late,

loose change behind chairs slightly ashamed,

lonely notes under couches like landmines in wait,

left by people who tried hard to live here once

but still failed.

Words that crawled out of our mouths were signs.

Plans we made were prophecies turned curses.

What’s worse, you spent your last hours

in the home you dreamt of dying in eventually,

wafting from room to room like a ghost

evicted, clutching his own reliquary.

Whether you believed in ghosts or not,

they believed in you and stood by as

three hundred years of collective memory were sold,

what amounts to the history of a family

of four or so.

What’s certain is that the old has become new,

memories faded into hardwood floors are

polished clean. Corners where clothes

were thrown after we shed our skin at day’s end

stand as bare as the spaces under beds

where we hid our dreams in suitcases

and forgot all about them until

one of us was dead.

Soon sunlight searches for something

to shine on. Instead

it fills rooms shimmering

with stray strands of hair that glow as they fall.

Every dot of dust an ember,

everything

on the cusp of becoming alight

but nothing ever seems to,

leaving you only empty

dark dusty rooms filled with

old pieces of me.

What remains of us

floats and dances and pirouettes away

in the wind that somehow willed itself

through re-sealed windows, whistling

the same old tunes, the same old fears.

Later you wander back from the dead

right into fatherhood again and say:

this time

it will be ours to keep               this time

it will be hours to keep

this time

this     time

this        time

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Shrief Fadl is a 35-year-old Egyptian writer, a POC, currently living in Vancouver, BC. Before he came to live in Canada, Shrief was born and raised in Kuwait, studied in Lebanon and worked in Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Cairo.