(the following passage is an excerpt from my journal. it's dated May 9, 2003)

Drunk and sentimental. I don't want to go home and forget about these changes, this place, this sky, the way I feel alone and free.
I still have a paper for my women and economic development class and a french final, but I really feel finished. Finished? Can you grasp that? How is it possible to understand that these people, who have helped create pieces of ourself, might slip out of your life completely, that you may never see them again?
How do you say such goodbyes?
How do lives merge, never to even run parallel again? but to be thankful for that one merge, for me to see that I have been happier than I ever have been before. How can I ever thank Morocco for allowing me to learn to fly?

Now this is the present day me:
I am going back to the place that has consumed so many of my thoughts for five years. Five years? Is that possible? I re-read my journal from Morocco, and I can remember everything in such vivid detail. I have physically ached to go back there, and now I am. It's just for a couple days, and I know it will make me want to move there. Places have such a tug on my heart strings.

sometimes, i will get a whiff of cumin and i will become disoriented, close my eyes, and believe, momentarily, that when i open them the rows of orange juice stands in Marrakech (a city of rose colored walls) will stand before me.
Alexandra Fuller has been in the news lately, and along with her Pinedale and Sublette County and i miss the harshness of Wyoming so much. i open my New York Times and am confronted with the dirt and the isolation and that sought after loneliness i lust after here in the land of SUV drivers doing lines of espresso off steering wheels. i miss the bone crunching cold and not having silence be something to conquer. i make so many promises, so many insha'Allahs that i will return - to wyoming, where a garage still holds a pair of long forgotten sandals and Morocco, where a country holds my heart.

je ne veux qu'elle

My desk: Trader Joe's pad thai; papers claiming truths about oil, cancer, governments; excavation.
My desktop: Marc Lavoine for the sake of memory in lieu of taste, Guggenheims, Anne Lamott, revolution, YouTube's Moroccan accounts.
My thoughts: The library is open until nine, my throat hurts, minutiae kills me, are revolutions possible in the U.S.?, I can feel burnt out, I can't wait to live in Brooklyn, I'm excited to write an article about super tuesday, I'm going to check out No Logo by Naomi Klein at the library even though I have a million books I need to read at home, I fall in love too hard, too easily with the world and it breaks my heart every day.

this is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper

friday, my leg tingles. it freezes up and i hit it because i believe it's grown numb, but the sparks shock me and make their way to my heart. my heart, it's supposed to pump something like 6800 litres of blood a day, but mine disappears to climb trees and watches the day end in somebody else's body. like everyone else, i'm too late when i discover it's gone.
(...would you change...?)
i think in parentheses and ellipses; i always have. i once labored over letters and spent an average of seven hours per mixed tape.
i'm beginning to believe fluidity, in all its enigma and beauty and sadness, is one of life's few constants. when do you discover the others?

i am hoping in one or two years, i will need to pass a few minutes in an internet cafe somewhere i've not yet seen, and i'll re-read this. and i'll smile, as i often did in morocco - unless, of course, when i realized Dubyah was effing destroying the world.
asdlkrjaewiojulkzjdaoieruailerkjaklwerjelakwjraes.
i cannot CANNOT wait for that man to be tried as a war criminal.

stars, stars

I woke up early that day, years ago, when I believed a place that named itself "the city of drama" would prove to be my alternative salvation. The kind that comes not from steeples or spilled holy water, but from feet on gravel and mint tea. It was already hot before the sun rose, and my South African traveling partner was still cradling her pillow, a glass of rosewater and a book about an ideological continent on her hostel bedside table.
I slipped on the too-large orange slippers, bought in the 4 p.m. medina where the children beggers asked for coca and the store-owners drowned you in tea and "Insha'Allah" was a way of accepting life instead of religion.We had drank too many bottles of red wine and smoked too much hashish the night before, and I remembered to grab my last-ink-filled pen to write my own impromptu ode to the place where I would feel more lost and more at home than I ever would again.
After I climbed the stairs to the roof, where the man from the coast was dozing in the corner, I watched the world begin in shades of snapped-open blue shutters and old men in white robes selling mangoes. My face pressed to the rose-colored concrete, I took off my mask and promised the Everyday I would never forget this.