Written on tired nights like this one.

10/18

I have packaged dates sitting next to me and I lied about them. I said they were a gift and I bought them for myself. I bought them for myself from the Superette des Martyrs around the corner and across the street, along with an ice cream bar. I bought gum there a few days ago and I knew the shop owner to be North African, maybe even Moroccan, because I heard him speaking my kind of Arabic on the phone last time and it comforted me so much that this time I walked up and around and back down the aisles just to be near it. I walked around for a while, scanning the shelves, trying to decide what I wanted—I don’t like having so many options all of the time—until I settled on the dates and the ice cream so he wouldn’t get suspicious of my loitering and so I could leave and go back home to Lola’s. I think I got the dates as a stupid sort of silent communication. I wished he would hang up the phone so I could talk to him. I needed to be spoken to by him. He rang up my shit and as he did I asked him if he told tobacco but I can’t remember if I asked him in Arabic or French. It happens reflexively, like when I answer in French class in a French that’s littered with Arabic, the way I’m used to. He said no, in French, but that he had Marlboros. I didn’t get any. I thanked him in Arabic, aware of it by then, and left. I don’t know if he registered it. I don’t know what it’s like on the other end. (I know what it’s like on the other end.)
The dates are covered in a thin layer of plastic wrap and laid on a Styrofoam tray, which I despise for reasons beyond the pure and environmental. I cannot stand the way it feels. I’m a proud New Yorker when I encounter it somewhere else, like Ohio, and remember we have it banned.
My favorite ice cream in Tangier comes in these awful big Styrofoam rectangle containers, deep and tilted inward with frost seeping into the space between lid and box, and I can’t bear to touch it for fear of the terrible sound it makes. Sometimes I have to but other times life gives me lovely gifts like an ex-boyfriend—from seventh grade, so I really only call him that because it’s a sweet memory—now wonderful friend who was willing to do the dirty work of serving the ice cream this summer.
I should specify it’s not really ice cream. It’s a tart frozen yogurt, like the one you’re imagining right now but better, with dark, cold, sweet little berries mixed in. Fruits des bois, it’s called. By the way. Berries from the woods, god bless them.
The dates themselves don’t taste like home. I didn’t expect them to, but I have a bad (good?) habit of holding out hope.
They have more give than they should.

10/17

Had a joint before dinner at the Persian restaurant and just ordered two salads (Middle Eastern salads, not some sad American mess) and am reading Eve Babitz be so beautifully Eve Babitz (“Current styles are beneath the timeless flames of love into which they disappear in the end.”) Waiting for my wonderful new friends. I could live here, really live here. Again.

10/15

The sky here is actually dark blue.

10/15

My first word was bateau. Boat.
We’d stand on a bridge over the Seine, my mother and father and me, watching the ferries packed with tourists under us trail by, and one or both of them would sing:
Vivi waves to the people on the boat
and the people on the boat wave back.
I’d wave my soft little hand, and the people would wave back, and then they’d disappear, hidden by the stone under my feet, and then—miracle of miracles—they’d emerge again on the other side.
Whether I hold these memories as real memories or if they’re fabrications scrounged up as a visual aid to the stories I’ve been told is unclear. They certainly feel real. I consider them my earliest memories of self-awareness, of interacting with the massive, open world and feeling it respond. Feeling the ripple. I’d wave, and they’d clock me, and wave back. And that was just delightful, to feel myself be seen and acknowledged, happily.
I've never been good at falling back asleep.
Jet lag
My body knows the rhythms of this part of the world

10/13

I know many people feel no connection to the place they were born.