charientism
“Do you know that hope sometimes consists only of a question without an answer?”
Dear Simone,
I keep pulling the firefly card: fleeting, inspired, a flash of brilliance. My crew in the Sahara were quick to understand how far my riddles went by reading the tarot I spread onto the deep red rug. Someone threw the carpets over the dunes and we sat in a circle, sucking on ice cubes. I stuck wands of incense into the sand at each of the four corners of the carpet. Markers of direction, my hips face the Dead Sea Scrolls of Jeruselum. Intuition thrust me into the desert and the girl from Isreal tells me I have taken aim in a sacred way. We roll hula hoops over our bodies and swing our arms until our faces are red. The heat licks our nipples and we recline like fish, bellies up at the sun. With lips pursed, death appears so quaint.
This is a short letter because I am hungry and cannot feel for a pattern to anchor my thoughts. We had eggs and moroccan bread with almond butter for breakfast. I have not eaten since noon and it is nearly midnight. The name for the coffee I drink here is neus-nues, which means half milk, half espresso. Tea and coffee are served with sugar and I turn it away but take the biscuits that taste of cardamom. We walked around the Jemaa el-Fna this afternoon and the motorbikes cut through the narrow paths so quickly that I jumped into a stand of dates. I gave my satchel to Abderrhmane and walked the cobblestone in my leather slippers. We are making tajine for dinner. I left the market before the boys, and they gave me a list of items to pick up from the Souk Semmarine.
Kilo btata potato / kilo bassla onion / 1 knor bagri / 1 toma / 1 hamda lemon / LiQama = spices for a tajine.
I have not done any cooking for weeks and am grateful for the meals prepared for me. I cannot remember or pronounce anything except scrambled eggs and macaroni salad. It's funny to think that I have a fridge of snacks from all the different countries I've been to—chocolates from Geneva, cashews from Berlin, and ginger tea from Manchester. Moroccan tea is preferable to the little packets I purchased in the UK last month. I opened my eyes and there was someone else in front of me, and my bags were full of trinkets.
Who are you without the objects, Simone? Who am I without the trinkets? People have their little tricks to inform their identity. I want to be outside the situation, though I am part of the play as much as anyone else. I have things that define who and what I am, yet I know that there is no such thing as the thing that I am. Do the items we choose to declare our identity do much more than pronounce our belonging to a specific group? I sought the yogis at the Taragalt festival by sourcing the hoops and mala. The Palo Santo drew me closer and I saw Ana with a crop top and fringe bangs doing dropbacks in the dunes.
I justify my belonging by saying we have the same ideas. Though I know this is impossible to tell. The clasp is never really that tight, and things are loosely interchanged no matter how we turn the seal.
Fireflies spend most of their short lives hiding in leaves, fully concealed during daylight hours. They break free of the underground at night when they can flash their brilliance for all to see.
Photo source.
