On the 17:36 to London Paddington. We keep passing those ubiquitous self-storage units. I associate them with trains now. Or perhaps it’s the other way round – I associate trains not with rolling countryside but with sprawling industrial amenities.

How can there possibly be so much stuff in the world that needs storing? Who rents these units, and for what purpose? It seems to me that once people become disengaged from their things, they cease to need them. For awhile I toyed with the idea of having some things in Oxford and some in California, but it really was pointless, and after a season I’d re-acquired everything I wanted but had left behind. The rest was duly carted off to the Salvation Army. What we own means nothing without us, not the other way around.

There’s a man who stores his furniture with us. No one really knows where he is anymore (Canada? Australia?) and it seems he has no thoughts for the things which gather dust in our house, though money continues to appear monthly in our account, like magic. Recompense for nothing at all.

So whenever I see those self-storage places I feel like I’m looking at these vast empty spaces. Even if they are full, even if people do use them – what’s the point? What’s inside is just abandoned stuff in its own abandoned world.

But back to trains. Air conditioned trains on a hot day, which always remind me of the summer I spent commuting from Goleta to Santa Ana. I was interning at the Orange County Transportation Authority (is there irony in the amount of time I spent transporting myself for those three months? Oh, yes!), spending three days down there before returning home for a long weekend. And on Wednesday evenings I’d buy a sandwich for dinner and change out of my suit and I’d catch the last train back.

Between Santa Ana and Los Angeles I’d watch the hot, pale sunlight turn into a Southern California twilight, and in that twilight we’d rush past the other side of things. People’s backyards – plastic toys, dirty pools, beer bottles. The tired backs of buildings, the places where cars go to die, the places where trucks go to stock up on goods. Warehouses and factories. A Spearmint Rhino with a neon sign and a mournful countenance.

But mostly self-storage places. They were everywhere – a part of the landscape, like rolling golden hills and stunning sea views.

You never really saw any people on that journey. A few stops out of L.A. it would suddenly be dark and you’d have to turn your eyes to the seat in front of you again, and outside there would be nothing but flashing lights.

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This time Fez is much less about us and much more about the place itself, the people here. Now I think it extraordinary that we came here when we did – only six weeks into our relationship, the future (our future, that is, he being English, me being American) only a cloud through which we could not even imagine passing. But we trusted each other completely here, and lay on our hotel bed taking photos of our sweaty, hairy, unclean selves.

Now we are staying with friends. But it is also different because three years of living together has made it so. It is lovely but also, weirdly, lonely. If you are no longer getting to know each other in such an active way (now I can make jokes about his past and he knows the geography of my history and there is much less exclaiming over a tajine: ‘oh, I didn’t know you’d done that!‘). It is sometimes almost like travelling with oneself. If he knows, now, that I like to wash my hands more than strictly necessary, and I know without thinking about it that he will smoke almost twice as much here, then there is little (nothing!) to try to hide, and even less to be grateful for the revelation of.

And this is such a sweet thing, but also scary – suddenly here we, this one thing that is a “we” but also an “I”, are, in a foreign country. Perhaps in a way this is why I slept badly last night – for, in spite of him being beside me, loving, handsome even in sleep, smelling and feeling more familiar than anything, than even myself, I felt a sense of being also alone. And perhaps also this is why people (eventually) have children – I had this thought yesterday, as we were discussing the merits of trans-national relationships: that at a certain point you become so close that you almost need someone else – who will be like him and like you but different and constantly, forever, surprising – again. Is that a strange thing to think? But then, everything is strange here.

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25.06.10 Fez, Morocco (Café rooftop, near Bab Boujaloud)

I.
Morning clouds are burning off. Or perhaps they aren’t, perhaps they’ll stay all day. But at any rate something’s burning – plumes of white smoke coming from a small chimney, a smell which reminds me of London. I have to reach for the memory, but slowly, through the Moroccan morning, it comes: I’m 12, it’s my first time in England, we’re at the Imperial War Museum, moving through artificial First World War trenches. They have replicated (and softened) the moans of wounded men and the boom of guns; it’s dark, there are flickering lights that illuminate plastic statues of officers bent over their plans, casualties lying still on stretchers, rats at the feet of a nervous recruit. But mostly the have put a smell into the room – a smell of soft, warm burning. A smell like this smell here, now, in the medina.

Three years ago we came to this same café and sat just as we are today, on the rooftop, with our tea. He made a sketch of an elaborate iron lampshade, which took him nearly two hours to complete, and I mostly watched him, occasionally making notes of my own. It was hot, I wore a veil of sweat over my face, large black sunglasses obscured my eyes.

Now the mint tea is finally cool enough to sip. Sunglasses? I can’t decide. On, off, on, off, oh, well. Maybe it’s better to squint anyway – to meet the haze with half-closed eyes. Alice says it gets cold here in winter. Today I’m willing to believe that; it’s so cool, with the overcast sky and the breeze and the soft air. I see it’s not all dry dusty heat. Nowhere, not even England or Africa, can be defined by weather alone.

II.
There are cats on the rooftop (a cool tin roof!). Mean, skinny strays – a whole pack of them, moving towards us as a hungry phalanx.

III.
Bab Boujloud was only built in 1913. And the cherry festival, at Sefrou, is the oldest festival in Morocco after only 90 years. So you see, it’s strange that what seemed so old can be so new and yet things here – or at least the outline of things, the basis for them – are ancient. Medieval and often seemingly frozen in time.

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24.06.10. Fez, Morocco (Ali & Alice’s house, rooftop)

I.
True it is not the Africa of my dreams; but then, that place does not exist. It is not elsewhere, it is simply absent.

II.
The pigeons are making their guttural sounds; the wind is both strong and soothing, the sunlight casts a golden spell. Soon the sun will drop below the hillside – even now the sky at the horizon has turned pink. Behind me a minaret stands proud. Minarets and satellite dishes characterize the landscape here. I’m always so fascinated by these uncanny juxtapositions, but really they mean very little. This is simply how things are nowadays. There’s wifi in the medina; what of it?

This is a place that is both not-familiar and also very familiar; it moves quickly and slowly at the same time. From here it all looks so simple – I can see the Merinides hotel, the ruins on the ridge, and it hardly looks very far. A crow could be there and back long before the sun disappears. But below is a bowl of complexity; by foot it would take you an hour to find your way through the tangle of streets and shops and dead-end alleyways (”derbs”, I’ve learned they’re called, these exotic culs-de-sac). You would not be there in time for sunset. See? Simple but not simple.

III.
Oh, but it’s as Africa as any other bit of Africa. Its Arab influences do not preclude it from belonging to its own continent.

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26.06.10

Ali tells us of the jinns, the spirits. He does not like the dark because it is infused with them (and we arrive again at light and dark). Alice says he tells her not to go into dark alleyways.

Then she tells us a strange tale of going to see a purging of jinn-infested women. (We are on the rooftop, eating Moroccan style out of a tagine, sipping red wine, the empty bottles of which must be carefully brought out and disposed of one by one, so as not to offend the neighbours in this dry-but-not-dry part of the city). They wore black, Alice tells us. They brought offerings to the river – bread, milk, chickens, a hedgehog.

(A hedgehog? )

Yes, a hedgehog, she says. But the hedgehog was simply flung to the riverbank, while the chickens were beheaded. A man gave the bread to the river and scattered the milk. The women, or some of them, began to convulse and make strange guttural sounds, an indication that they could see the devil.

***

27.06.10

Islam is everywhere and nowhere here. You breathe it in at night; it seeps into your ears with each adhan, and yet it feels such an organic substance, as if were part of the molecules of the air, that it is sometimes easy to forget the foreignness of things.

One of Alice’s friends, a teacher at the school where Alice is studying Arabic, sips mint tea with us one afternoon. She is 25, a student of Tajwīd, recitation of the Qur’an. It is a specific and shockingly intricate art; it takes years to master the correct emphasis and pronunciation. Her love for her religion – not as a religion in the way that we conventionally understand it, but as a topic of study, a thing which lives and breathes itself, a story – is infectious.Really, we decide, our thoughts hazy from the heat (perhaps this is the ideal atmosphere in which to learn – your mind malleable, melting like wax, reforming around each new idea) everything is the same (philosophies, religions); everything is about how we live our lives.

She speaks to us in perfect, almost un-accented English about her own students, some of whom are ambivalent still about having a female tutor.

Strange this balance, I think. How sometimes you find yourself thinking, here: ‘there’s so much!’. And at other times, ‘there’s so little!’ It’s so cramped, so open. So hostile and yet so friendly.

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28.06.10

Later, at the local hammam, topless, filthy, I sit on the hot tiled floor while another woman, topless too, her hair wrapped in a white scarf to keep it from her face, scrubs me vigorously. We do not speak the same language, but when she wrenches me round so she can scrub my front, and holds my arm up with a smile and a tsk to indicate how much dirt she has brought to the surface, how much dead skin will be washed away with the next bucket of water, we are in the same moment, inhabiting the same world. Maybe later I pass her on the street, and do not know it – she shrouded by a hijab, me pale-skinned and wide-eyed like every other Western tourist, each of us indistinguishable in spite of that moment of intimacy.

But in that moment: how unselfconscious I feel! Usually so aware of things – unsightly folds of skin, the size of my breasts. But the folds are like everyone else’s folds, and my breasts are certainly no larger than most of the other women’s, and the water, the steam, the scrubbing all act as a drug, and an hour and a half slips by unnoticed.

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