Desert, prey animals, a sense of danger, I am squinting from the sun. People whom I don’t know are moving around. My tent is positioned a bit off from the others’, away from the horses and caravans and to make my way to safety I need to cross the empty space and I am afraid that as I do so, the cheetahs or jackals circling nearby will attack me. I try hard to work out the best way to cross, stressed and on the look-out, all alone by my tent. The ground is an extension of yellow in which I can’t make out the distance. In the midst of it, I wake.

My tent is not in the desert. A soft rain is falling. It sounds like a lot but I know it’s probably less than it sounds, only a light drizzle, enforced by hitting the plastic encompassing me. Creatures are already awake all around.

I am in a mood. The sleep was in patches and I am feeling like crap; tired, sad, unmotivated. Stiff, but at least not cold. I lay still and heavy in my sleeping bag. I don’t do anything. There is nothing in me that wants anything, nothing that reaches for anything, nothing that claims or explains anything. I don’t even wait for the feeling to pass.

In retrospect I can visualize it as the turbulent energy of up-rooting and moving turning itself from flow into fractions, direction-less, bouncing around and so scattered that they amount to apathy. I don’t know how to organize my energy; I don’t even know this is happening.

Slowly the mood changes and I decide that it’s been enough. When I start moving it is not as bad – packing is routine, anyway – and when I crawl out of the tent I see that yes indeed, the rain is not as bad as it sounded from the inside. Only the lightest of drizzles, already clearing up in a promising way.

In the daylight I can see the campsite for the first time; a little worn down, but all right. Some rubble lying around. A man walks back and forth between his caravan and the bathrooms, filling water bottles. He smiles at me and says good morning but his eyes flicker and I take it to mean he hopes not to linger in small talk.

Before leaving I sit down on the parking lot to charge my phone in one of the outlets meant for the caravans. It is still drizzling. All my stuff is packed and I sit on the backpack which has the raincover on. I still feel unmotivated and aimess, restless and bored.

I see the man working at the campsite, the one who offered me to sleep indoors when I arrived yesterday evening. He waves energetically to me from the window and we say our good morning:s and how are you:s. He invites me in by waving his hands, seemingly agitated by my sitting in the drizzle.

He invites me to have breakfast; I had a feeling he might already last night when I arrived by the way he received me. He looked genuinely disrupted by the thought of a lone woman sleeping in a tent in the rain. Now he gestures for me to follow him around the corner, in between some houses and in through a side door.
“Is it really OK?” I ask on the way. I don’t remember in which language, probably French.
“We are muslims,” came the reply with a soft smile as he glanced back at me. “Of course it’s OK.”

I step into a home, somehow an unexpected contrast in the abandoned-looking campsite. Hallway, salon and kitchen are combined into one big room with doors leading to adjacent rooms. Through one I glimpse a bunk bed. I leave my backpack and jacket by the door but keep my shoes on. His wife crosses over from the kitchen to say hello to me. She smiles and after the greetings in Darija she switches to French, slowing down and taking care to articulate for my sake. They place me on the sofa and serve me bread, amlou, olive oil and tea. Their son is too shy to answer directly to my tentative Darijais and is introduced to me as Suliman by his father instead. He plays around me in the sofa, jumps in a pile of laundry lying in the corner and glances at me from time to time. A short while later their older daughter, Marwa, joins us on her lunch break. I am told that the family has been up since 05 in the morning to have breakfast and prepare for school; my breakfast around ten overlaps with their preparing for lunch.

I eat slowly. My phone is left to charge and I watch the family: the mother working in the kitchen while Suliman sprawls on the floor by the couch, reading Arabic letters from a study book. She pronounces them along with him when he needs correction and from time to time she walks over to peer into the book. Marwa plays on a phone and participates from time to time in the conversations. The father pops in and out, seemingly busy with something on the outside, exchanges some words with his wife or sits down in the sofa only to have the little one climbing all over him in a matter of minutes, playfully annoying. He alternates between scolding and kissing him. There is no sense of hurry anywhere in the room.

From my place in the sofa, slowly breaking and dipping the bread in either the olive oil or amlou, I feel blessed to peek into this everyday life. Quietly warming on the inside. My stiff military pants and leather shoes mismatch their loose-fitting leisure clothes and flip-flops. I watch how the mother mixes some old bread that has been soaking in water with her hands. I ask her what it is for and she explains that it is to be repurposed for cooking chicken, but I can not really understand how. It’s recycling, she laughs. She tells me she bakes the fresh hobbs herself, every day. I ask her about the town of Safi and she tells me that it is a town known for pottery. Has been for centuries. With my restlessness soothing itself into a vague ache and unspecific sense longing I find my self wondering if time would slip by quickly for me here, too, if I were to live a life like her. Calmly preparing food, raising two beautiful children.

I am reminded of a beautiful passage describing the travels of Marco Polo, words following me well beyond having finished the book and given it away:

Marco enters a city: he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past; dead branches.
“Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated “Journeys to recover your future?”
And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”*

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*Cited from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, pg. 29.

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(This story told in pictures.)