tiles.
By: Joy Cohen
Tags: Thoughts, Short Story, Travel

tiles.

A reminder to look up.

It is only as of recent that I’ve realized it’s been a while since I looked around and took everything in that this country puts forth. A while since I didn’t stare at the reddish-brown suede of my birkenstocks as I walk through the markets and to class. It’s been a while since I looked up to the sky to take note of how the sun still shines smilingly in early December. It’s been a while since I let myself grin at unsuspecting strangers. Why is it that only today, I noticed that the man who sells books from a literal hole in the wall, which is the brightest light on my walk home in the early evening, is not at his perch?

I remember my freshman year of college, sitting in Professor Mackey’s sociology class, as he droned on about the concept of the “metropolitan consciousness.” The idea that living in cities and other busy, bustling places causes its inhabitants to develop a sense of indifference. It is a quality of the metro consciousness because people in cities are surrounded by so much stimulation they could never give their full attention to everything which surrounds them. George Simmel’s article, “The Metropolis & Mental Life” entails the stimulation of the city lights, the constant flow of people, and continuous sales making simply walking home an arduous process.

Yet, even in the ever-busy, incredibly loud, and inevitably disorienting streets of the Medina, on the off chance that I catch someone’s eye from the very corner of my periphery, they smile.

At me, a stranger.

At me, the perpetually lost-looking being.

At me, the pale-faced anti-hero, who looks at the ground and stares aimlessly at the cracks in the tiles. Why is looking up so hard?

Is it due to the discomfort and anger which consumes my whole being when the men on the street enter my space with a drawn out “Bonjour” and the licking of their lips and blowing of kisses? Can I not bare to make eye contact with the woman breastfeeding her child on the Medina floor, for she has no home to return to? Is it that I have run out of change to give to the man with his feet twisted spineward and cannot handle the sadness in his eyes? How is it that this city’s people can look one another in the eye and grin from ear to ear as they sing praise with an “al-hamdu li-Allah,” that they are blessed to meet another day, when some mornings I curse at my alarm for shaking me awake?

With less than two weeks until I return home, I am doing my best to lift my chin from my chest and allow the life of this city to breathe into me the same wonder and awe in which I first arrived with.

Outright glee in our second week in Rabat.

I will allow myself to smile at the children who dance and run, carelessly around me. I will not decline conversation with the petite older man from whom I purchase the most delicious clementines I’ve ever tasted. I will not deny myself the joy that is letting my own laughter resound from the insides of my ribcage to the very walls of the Medina. I will take these lessons and run with them. I will hold onto the happiness that these people have brought into my life over the course of the past four months. I will keep them as a reminder.

A reminder; this world is not out to get you.

All the love,

JGC