New Year in the North

I was hiking Akchour, winding around the mountain, looking ahead at my friend Wade when I realized that it was 2016. New Years’ had come and gone and the thought of resolutions hadn’t even occurred to me.

In recent years few things have occupied more of my time and thoughts. I took a writing class once where the teacher asked us two questions for every story we read: first, what’s happening? And second, what’s really happening? The past few New Years have found me in bed with a mug of coffee and my journal trying to answer those two questions. What happened and what did it mean? 

But this year, I was in a place so physically beautiful I had forgotten to mull. I had forgotten to be resolute! 

We hadn’t looked at a map. We had prepared in no way for what lay ahead and so the hike felt endless. But each turn brought something new. Weave this way and you were in Morocco, that way and it was Japan, here Virginia, there Costa Rica. We looked up to our right and saw monkeys. And down to our left, finally, we saw it: Le Pont de Dieu. The Bridge of God. A stunning natural bridge made from water passing under it. 

So much has happened this year. So much (literal) water under the (literal) bridge. I think of the past year in three parts. The first third, I felt very alone, very aware of it. The second third, I was very social. Nashville in the summertime. The summertime in general. The last third was leaving all I knew, coming to Morocco. 

Last January, when I was working at Trader Joe’s, a woman came through my checkout line who oozed warmth and affirmation. Every now and then I’d get someone who came through my line like her, someone who reminded me what I wanted to be like. We fell into an easy conversation, about Januarys, resolutions, the types of ads you’re pummeled with this time of year. She said something so simple but that pierced me. “Things don’t happen like that,” she said. “Change is incremental.” 

I repeated it to myself in the coming days and months, when it felt like nothing was changing, when it felt like there was no curve in the tracks up ahead for me. Like the little engine that could, I thought of the woman with the warm, shining face. Change is incremental. In the long expanse before spring truly comes, you have to remind yourself again and again. It doesn’t look like things are happening. But they are. Change is coming. It is. 

The early twenties can feel so blind. Every turn feels like it’s the end of the world. You don’t have the rhythm down yet. You want life to happen all-at-once, with a very clear cause and effect. But things don’t happen that way. Instead, you keep going. You refuse to give up. Like the slow relentless course of water, you refuse to look for an easier way around. You follow Mary Oliver's "Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."

Christmas in Morocco

The holidays weren’t nearly as somber as one might expect being 4,000 miles from home. It’s not very hard to ignore when you live in a country that – apart from a few commercial displays aimed at foreigners – doesn’t celebrate Christmas. If a tree falls in the forest, and all that.

The morning of the 25th, I had Christmas brunch with some other Fulbrighters where I made French toast and nursed a cold. Afterwards – it being Friday – I went to my old host family’s in the medina for couscous. I walked in and Mama Majda told me to close my eyes. When I opened them, 13-year-old Aya was dressed as Santa.

After we ate, three of my host sisters and I crawled into the same bed to take the traditional, post-couscous nap. We kept dissolving into giggles though, reminding each other of times we had mixed up words in the others’ language. There was the time I had been teaching Kawtar an old folk song, "Sweet Betsy from Pike" and she accidentally sang "Have you ever heard tell of sweet Bartus from Pike?" Once Kawtar asked me in Darija when my birthday was. I forgot the word for June – yewnu –and instead said, newnew. And the best, the time when I asked what was for lunch. But instead of lunch, I said the word for poop.

There’s something so funny about mixing up words. This surface-level communication. We couldn't really explain to each other why it was so funny. Except that it just was. It reminded me of laughing with my sisters at home, of laughing so hard that it physically hurts.  

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When I got back to my apartment, I put on Christmas music. I wanted to try to get in the mood. And besides, I normally love the stuff. The jubilant doowaps of the Drifter’s White Christmas. Bing’s whiny oval-mouthed vibrado.

But my attention wasn’t holding, so I put on Erin Rae’s album, Soon Enough, and played her song “Monticello” through my tiny, tinny speakers. I pressed play while I started doing dishes. Then I pressed it again. And again. And again. The rest of the night.

In it, she talks about the strain of doing what you love, of being where you want to be and yet this homesickness that still seems to permeate everything. Homesickness – not for a place – but for a time. 

"I wish it were Monticello," she sings, "And I could come to see you. And you might talk me down and put my mind at ease. Cause if it were Monticello then I’d be at your table. It might be a while now." And then simply, achingly: "Don’t wait for me."

It was a bright, palmtreesy day in Rabat. I was living the life my eleven-year-old-self described on a bucket list. I wasn’t what you'd call sad, and still, I felt those words in every morsel of my being. It was like I was holding two contradicting things in my lap at the same time.

Taken by Wade Angeli at Rabat Beach on Christmas Eve, 2015

It wasn’t just a Christmas thing either. Even now, sitting alone in the Moroccan equivalent of a Waffle House, I can’t listen to her voice without big, sloppy, toddler tears rolling down my cheeks.

I think that’s the point. 

The holidays typically represent time spent with the ones you love. But it's kinda like speaking different languages with my host family; it's almost irrelevant. It's just a surface measurement of understanding.

Lucky me to have family and friends who I miss every day of the year: Mondays and Thursdays and mornings and afternoons, for concrete reasons like Christmas and not-so-concrete reasons like just because. It’s what makes this whole experience a gift. There’s no escapism here. 

Recently I’ve been struggling a lot. I’ve felt very alone. But behind that is the deeper knowledge that I have these people on my side. And the fact that I’m related to a lot of those people – that I enjoy being around them, that they’re the ones I call to “talk me down and put my mind at ease.” Well, to me that’s the definition of fortunate. That’s all I could ask from this life.