Stop Being Mean to Yourself: A Story About Finding the True Meaning of Self-Love by Melody Beattie Page A

then parked the car in a small lot, way too small for the ten cars that were crammed in there. He walked to my door, opened it, took my hand, and guided me out.
    "Where are we going?" I asked again.
    "Coffee," he said brusquely.
    "I don't want coffee," I said. "It's too late . . ."
    He ignored me and kept walking, pulling me along by my hand.
    We walked up a flight of stairs, over a walking bridge, down the stairs, and across a street. I was dusty from the desert, confused, scared, and curious. By now, my thigh high stockings were bunched around my ankles, but we were walking too fast for me to pull them up. We rounded a corner and entered a section of the city that had no car traffic. Instead, people—hundreds, thousands of them—crowded the streets. They jammed so close together that there was no space between bodies.
    People touched those in
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    front of and behind them as they moved along the street. Yet I saw and felt the same erratic rhythm here with this mass of people that I had observed with the cars.
    The driver and I were swept up by the throngs of people and moved along by the pulsating tempo of this gigantic conga line.
    The sidewalks were crammed with old shops, piled one atop another. I saw silversmiths. Fruit stands flooded with dates and oranges. Clothing. Rugs. Every kind of Egyptian ware, product, and foodstuff imaginable. It had to be after midnight, yet all the shops were open. For the first time in all my travels through the Arab world, I saw women talking, walking, shopping. I was torn between gazing at the stores and their colorful displays, and vigorously trying to keep my place in line. Someone pinched my butt. I couldn't stop moving. I would have been trampled. I looked over my shoulder. A shrunken, grayhaired man about four feet tall and eighty years old grinned at me. He had no teeth. I glared, then turned around.
    Suddenly I got it. Oh, I thought. This is the souk .
    I remembered what the travel agent had said about the souks ,the mysterious marketplaces of the Arab world. "They run for miles. People live in there. They're born, live, and die in there. Be careful. People can go in, and never come out."
    "Is this the souk ?"I screamed at my driver, talking slowly enough so he could understand me and loudly Page 88
    enough to be heard above the noise of the crowd.
    He nodded. "The souk ,"he said.
    We walked block after block, going deeper and deeper into the souk ,pulled along by the massive moving crowd. Finally, my driver steered me out of the main stream of traffic and led me up a flight of stairs into a small store. He guided me through the store onto a secondfloor balcony. He pulled out a chair in front of a small table and said, "Sit."
    I wanted to pull up my stockings, but I didn't know how I could possibly do that. They were completely around my ankles.
    So I sat down. The driver sat down next to me. Minutes later, a waiter came to the table. He seemed to know my driver. They talked in Arabic for a few minutes.
    Moments later, the waiter returned lugging the largest, most ornate, floorstanding water pipe, or hookah, I had ever seen in my life.
    The driver lit the coals like an expert, took a big, deep puff, then passed the hookah tube to me.
    I looked around the balcony. There were four or five other small tables, occupied mostly by men. All of them were smoking water pipes. Oh, my God, I thought. I am being drugged and kidnapped. It's all coming down, right now. I am watching it happen. I have just been spirited to the Egyptian equivalent of an opium den.
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    I wanted to be invisible on this trip but I didn't want to disappear.
    For the second time that evening, I became paralyzed with fear. Again, I felt an ancient stirring within, this time a recollection of being powerless, unable to speak, helpless to defend myself.
    Just a minute, I thought. I'm a fortysevenyearold woman. What would they possibly want or do with me, even if they did get me?
    I relaxed for just a moment,