I arrive in the dark, before sunrise. Twenty hours of sitting on the bus have warped reality. I barely sense when, where or even who I am when the bus stops and people start filing out. The streets give an eerie feeling, silent but for a few engines and the wind dragging old plastic bottles or cardboard along the ground. It’s cold. Few of the lights äre working and I cross big stretches of darkness. A few dogs and men make their ways on the streets, silhouettes in the dark but I see their heads turn my way as they pass. I feel too distinct with my backpack. My phone has no connection and when I manage to find a cafe to ask to use the wifi it turns out that my couch host is sleeping, waking only to give me directions and unlock the door to the apartment building but sound asleep as I knock on his door fifteen minutes later, leaving me unintentionally locked out.

I am met by a cat at the bottom of the stairs. She brings me up to the top floor where my knocks will receive no answer, checking that I follow her every few steps. When I’ve given up knocking she leads me right across to a small terrace filled with junk and introduces me to her three babies. They climb out slowly from behind the sheet of plastic, bottles and junk. I sit on my backpack as the sun rises and the wind blows around us, roosters crowing from around the block. The small ones are playing, climbing on the discarded items, trying their tiny claws on the raincover of my bag, chasing and ambushing each other with those looks that babies always have on their faces, as if they’re constantly newly awake, and I watch them with my own head tilting to the sides, heavy with sleep.

Finally somehow I get a hold of my host again, manage to wake him, am let in and given a low couch where I gratefully and without delay roll out my sleeping bag and instantly fall asleep.

…

This place is curious. A peninsula, a little tail of land growing into the harsh-harsh ocean, the big Atlantic. I find myself wondering if this place will be under water as the tides will rise with the climate change. Will this little peninsula-town remain?

Dakhla is so flat and I am struck by all the trash; broken glass, pieces of shoes and plastic and tiles and brushes for applying shaving cream and more plastic and cables, pictures from newspapers and cans from well-known beverages. All stomped down, filling up corners and blowing along streets, merged, part of the landscape. The smell is really bad by the lagoon. Most of the trash is colorless grey-brown but some colors still pop; the pink plastic, something purple that catches my eye and lets it go a moment later.

I can’t really get a grasp of the size of Dakhla. It’s wide but feels empty. The street lights are lovely, all black and gold metal, turning beautifully onto themselves. I wander around in a daze, sleep deprived, still aching from the bus ride, still sick and tired. Around me people are slow too, the streets almost empty, not much traffic, not much of anything. No bustling street life here like in Tangier, Casablanca or Essaouira. No tajins or skewers cooking by the sides of the roads.

My host has told me there are no seasons here, that the weather is always the same but I am surprised by the chill. Maybe I just can’t imagine a place with colors like these not having a constant heat wave, my only reference being pictures on paper and screens creating a fantasy that the colors of sand also always accompany at least 35 degrees Celsius. Little do I know.

It’s refreshing to see trees. There aren’t so many trees on the streets. Of course there are palm trees. But these other trees, these real trees with leaves and branches, they make me feel like I’m on land. Otherwise it all feels like a moon landscape, but the few trees breathing make it seem terraformed.

…

The further south I get, the more I see women wrapped in these fabrics. (I forgot the name of them and I don’t want to google; I want someone to tell me.) I would also like to try that; to wear these fabrics. Yes. I imagine that I will do so in Mauritania.

I want to insert the experiences of people elsewhere into my self. I can never truly, fully understand someone else, I know that. I can never have anyone else’s upbringing or be shaped by their values or cultures or beliefs the way they have been. I can maybe get a vague impression but words are clumsy and I want more.

I want to crawl into the shapes and places they occupy, soak in the experience of mimicking them, playing them. What is it like to wear a hijabi or cover my body as female? To move this way, against cloth, how would I see the world? How would I be seen? I know I am seen differently because of my eyes and my skin, the rules are different for me. Still I want to try out new shapes, be-come in a different way, change my perspective. I know a saying about curiosity and cats. I just can’t help wanting to poke my nose into things. It’s harmless, I’m just playing. Right?

My collectives are few. I don’t belong to many groups, or maybe I belong badly to many different groups and am unfaithful and disloyal to them, move between them and don’t manage to completely fit in anywhere, gossip about the formers to the latters and then back again, build temporary loyalities and change shape. I am saved by goodwill or people’s lack of frames of reference to call me out. They imagine me as many different things and I let them, just to get away with many more truths remaining hidden in my heart.

I believe that I am also saved because I truly love each and every collective and person that I betray, and I think they can feel that. That is what matters.

…

I think I like this town, though I’m not sure why. There doesn’t seem like much to do. It is inexplicably calm.

Opportunities arise and re-enforce my faith in traveling without a plan; my host wants to start a hostel in his apartment and invites me to stay and help him with that. And I want to, I would love to. I want to paint the walls, set up beds and decorate the terrace, build something, start something. We envision it together, sharing drinks and tajin. The energy is good, I feel welcome; I imagine building a life here.

But I have already made plans on the other side of the border. People are waiting for me. Even though I like the company of my hosts, even though I can imagine my self staying longer than the two days I have planned.

I hold the idea in my hands, commit, grow to like it. Then, reluctant and determined, I let it fall through my fingers.

Every one of my loyalities comes with a a little heartbreak at my inevitable betrayal. I have committed to the road and to the movement but here, for the first time maybe, I truly see how I could plan even less and place even more trust into the strange flows of life that will bring to me what wants to come.

…

(This story told in pictures here and here.)