A World within Morocco

Being in Marrakesh was like walking through legs.

When you’re young and consequently short, the sidewalk moves even faster than the crowd; you have to scurry between other people’s strides and scuffle about their fast moving feet while keeping one arm raised so high that your armpit could split as the adult in charge grips your hand from above. Noises pour in from every angle and words you don’t understand get further muddled by smells you can’t identify. It’s a rush of pant fabrics and skirt hems (“you can’t see the trees when you’re in the forest” proves true), and the whole thing is jostling if not colorful, quick and claustrophobic.

Exactly like Marrakesh.

My grasp seemed to steady a bit when we left the city for Essaouira, a beach town right on the coast of Morocco. If you look at it on a flattened map and put a pin on its port, a very focused ant could walk straight on over to South Carolina.

It was calmer there. Everything seemed stretched out and lazy, a change from the foreign metropolis we’d left three hours away. Without all the surrounding noise, it was easier to understand that while Morocco was visually stunning, I’d been looking at it through small tunnels. Through crowds and seas of legs.

Here, out in the open, were crumbling walls that first through a romantic lens appeared lovely, and then through a more cynical one, old.

The town was filled with buildings that, from the outside-in, appeared as cold clay fortresses. From the road one couldn’t possibly imagine that what he or she was about to enter was lush and warm and at times, palatial, but the beach town’s quiet allowed me to absorb the whole picture. It felt more authentic this way, but in no way less remarkable.

The largeness of Morocco made me kind of mute. You know when you’re in a room with someone and their personality is so big that you feel like you can be completely quiet without being rude? That was Morocco. If it were a person, it would be a hand talker, the kind who whacks your knee to signal the punchline and touches your elbow and wears a lot of rings to make their fingers speak even louder. My mom and our guide frequently asked if everything was okay because I hardly said a thing, but everything was fine. It was amazing, and beautiful, and a little scary and confusing. For the first time in a long time, I felt tiny, acutely aware that there was so much to absorb I couldn’t handle forming the words.

It was like being five again when the world was still so much bigger than me.