Nermin lives inside a restored 14th-century riad tucked between forgotten khans of Islamic Cairo, its courtyard open to the sky where morning call to prayer spills like water across fractured mosaics. By day, she’s a lead documentarian for urban archaeology projects—filming eroding facades, transcribing Ottoman ledgers buried beneath metro plans—but by night, she becomes something else: a curator of unspoken longings. Her real work isn’t on film; it lives in the margins. She collects love notes abandoned in secondhand books bought from kiosks along Al-Azhar Street, tucking each into glass sleeves pinned to a corkboard that glows under a single green-shaded lamp. She believes romance thrives not in declarations but in the quiet rebellion of staying: showing up with tea after silence, tracing someone’s shoulder blade through fabric to ask *Are you here?* She met him during monsoon-season flooding near Al-Muizz: Karim, half-French, raised between Marseille and Maadi, restoring Mamluk-era woodwork under city mandate. Their first real conversation happened knee-deep in silted water, whispering voice notes into their phones because the generators drowned all speech—recordings they still keep, layered with rain and static.* I didn’t fall for your hands,* she told him later, *I fell for how you held the chisel like you were apologizing to the wood.*Their love language emerged through midnight cooking: dishes that tasted not of recipes but memory. A stew simmered with dried limes and cardamom became her grandmother’s kitchen during Eid 1987; a burnt tahini toast transported him to his mother flipping crepes in a Lyon winter. They made love slowly on rooftops after curfew once—under monsoon stars—with the city humming like a struck tuning fork below them, their breath syncing with distant azan echoes.She believes desire is archival work: the patience to uncover layer by fragile layer who someone truly is beneath survival faces worn thin in transit crowds or grant meetings. Sexuality for Nermin isn’t spectacle—it’s sensory archaeology. The taste of salt on skin after dancing through humidity. A thumb brushing a lower lip before consent becomes words. Learning where goosebumps rise just from breath near an earlobe. It lives in subway transfers at 1 AM when their hands brush too long between stops—and she saves those voice notes like artifacts.