I think we’ve been taught, collectively, that travel is sort of dangerous. There are warnings. Travel advisories. And I think it’s true that it can be dangerous, but not in the way the state department warns us. We go experience new places, have our minds expanded, horizons broadened. Come home with new perspectives and friendships. But this time. There should have been a warning. There was nothing the state department could have done. You can’t see it coming. Everything changing. I never did make it home. From a very safe, well organized group tour I wasn’t even that excited to go on. And now I’m irrevocably changed. This time I wasn’t even searching for that hit you can get from a new place, being a different person in that place. Feeling new words in your mouth and a different angle of the sun on your face. This time I got knocked off balance by the weight of familiarity. The Berber dresses in the museum I longed to put on. Like they belonged to me, and someone had stolen from my closet. The light in people’s eyes. The sand between my toes. Feeling like I’d been wretched from my home when I rode the bus away from the desert. Like it was physically wrong and incomprehensible that I was leaving. When I’d only just found it again. And it feels like again. Even though it was the first time. It was again. It was home. It was a returning.
On that bus crossing the High Atlas and out of the desert, I had so many questions.
Can something in the future unravel the past? Can it take out one stitch at the same rate they were made? So that something never was? Never existed? If we know what happens….does it change the past? Give it new weight or lightness? Give it warning?
And now a year later, I am stepping off the map for a while, but I’m feeling like I might be stepping off the edge of the world. Like it’s the end. And it makes me sad. And nervous. And it’s completely unavoidable. Unless I want to stay. Which is saying I want to be stagnant. I relinquish any magic or stardust. That I’m ok with that. And I’m not. Anymore. I need to step off the edge. I am going to leave as one person and come back as another. And I don’t know who she is yet. And I’m excited to meet her. And I don’t think she will fit into any piece of my life I know now. And that is a death and I’m nervous to mourn it, but I’m already feeling it creep around me like fog.
