homesickness

i’ve avoided writing about morocco because to write about it would mean i was just remembering it instead of living in the memory. i feel as if the friend who invited me gave me a gift in a small box, and when i opened it a huge spill of golden light came pouring out, like the sun. it seemed very light for him when he handed it to me, but when i realized the weight of what was inside i was left speechless.

when people ask me where i went and what i did, i don’t have an answer that makes a good story. we stayed at home, went to the market, slept, ate. his mother made three meals every day, which we ate with our hands. there was one cup for water on the table, which we all shared. meals were sometimes silent, sometimes noisy, filled with talk in three languages. when they made fun of me too much i would talk back in japanese, or imitate his mother talking; “kat kat kat.”

we sat on the roof of his house, which looks out over the old maze city of fes, talking of light things or heavy ones, politics or family, cooking, love. when the time was right the sky would be filled with calls and cries, laid over each other like the reverberations in a concert hall, not so much beautiful as they were primal and a little frightening. they filled me with a wild joy, like i could spread out my borrowed robe and leap off the roof to join them in the air.

my friend’s sister told me her secrets and listened to mine. his brothers dusted off their old languages, forgotten since school, and teased me like real siblings. his mother went to the police station to get a notarized form saying that she was responsible for everything i did and anything that might happen to me, a requirement to staying with a family in a country with strict controls on ‘guides’. she gave me the paper and told me i was her daughter now. she walked behind me on the street, pulling my shirts down, holding my hand in the crowded squares.

in the old streets, grown up out of the earth a thousand years before i was born, my sense of direction was useless. i could remember each street, but not how one place turned into another. the streets were a deck of cards, reshuffled every night. ten days was not enough time to learn to count the cards. every street was like an image from the tarot, like a dream remembered since childhood, like a face – full of concealed layers and symbols, regarding me with its own thoughts. i was lost in that crowd of faces but safe with a family not my own.

only ten days, it’s not a long time. but when i came home, beside the usual strange perceptions that travel gives you, i was filled with such loneliness. i miss those street faces that make up the crowded city, i miss the mother and brothers and sister around the table.

the second day home i was sending instant messages to the youngest brother, trying to tell him how much the welcome his family gave me meant to me, trying to explain the strange closeness i felt with them. i said to him “you know i don’t have any brothers and sisters…” but he interrupted me. “no. you are my sister.”

and ignoring the office moving around me, the televisions chattering and the ringing phones, i put my head in my hands and cried.