I really miss travelling. It’s been a year since I’ve been anywhere international and also since I stepped foot on an air plane. In a year of so many deaths, both big and small, I am keenly aware that this is a lesser suffering. But still. I’ve started going through journals, pulling out small jewels and polishing them we can enjoy them together and remember how compelling and expanding the outside world can be.

May 12, 2016  The Blue City/Chefchaouen

Chefchaouen – THIS is the reason I came to Morocco!

Marrakesh was a place I love and will return to, inshallah, to stock up in the bazaars for a lucrative import business.  But this place, Chefchaouen, FEEDS MY SOUL!

BLUE.

E-V-E-R-Y-WHERE.

It makes my eyes feel different. Makes my body feel different. Makes my soul feel different.  Makes my cells hum along until they catch the thread of the melody and begin to sing happy blues. Makes my deepest most innermost self sigh and relax, hitch up her skirts and spread her metaphorical legs wide, wide wide wide…wanting to make love to this soaring, open-throated glory and birth something luminous in exultant gratitude.

No. It’s not an overstatement. And yes. It’s really that deep

Every corner store, in addition rice, oil, soap, batteries, matches, and chewing gum, has a rainbow of large open sacks of bulk pigments squatting along walls or counters. These flour-fine powders are scooped into tissue-paper thin plastic bags, weighed on an ancient scale, and sold by the ounce. Small already-packaged souvenir sets are positioned conveniently near check-out for thoughtful last-minute gifts. Gallon-sized glass jars filled with higher-grade pigments glow from walls in speciality shops. Vendors tell me that these are made from dried blood of blue flowers that only grow in the nearby mountains, skins of pink radishes, sunshine-y mimosa flowers, tangerine peels, opium poppies, saffron, paprika, turmeric, ochre, violets, indigo stone and mint leaves. I am not sure if I believe them or not. I want to, though, so I do. I stare and stare and the colours dazzle my eyes. I feel like my soul has been starving my whole life and is finally sitting down to Sunday pot roast and mashed potatoes.

I just can’t seem to stop buying blue pigment. I bought a whole kilo in Marrakesh for $110 and it’s carefully tucked in corner of my backpack. Since coming here to Chefchaouen, I have also bought more (?!) of that same blue and an additional shade of blue that they call “magic blue” because it starts out as reddish grains and, once water is added, becomes a glorious, rich blue with a hint of green. I’m nervous to buy any of the other colours because it I’m not sure I’ll know when to stop. I have already extracted a promise from Tom that if/when we end up sharing a home together, I will always have a blue room. (We’re only on our fifth date right now, but I have my suspicions…) Five years later, as I edit this journal entry, I realise that I still don’t have a blue room. Tom and I are in the middle of turning our garage into a workshop. Perhaps this is my big chance.

Is this how alcoholics feel? Obsessive? Dying of thirst while standing in a stream? Unable and unwilling to extricate themselves? Transported?

In additional turning my pigments into paint, or stain or watercolors or mixing with cement for a gorgeous countertop, I’m imagining it being the centerpiece of a neo-pagan death rite when I am an old lady. Or perhaps a young one. I’m seeing powder-fine blue rubbed all over my naked, cold limbs and flaccid curves with scented oil. Massaged lovingly into creases and folds perhaps with a few surreptitious tears. Combed through my hair like the most expensive dry shampoo ever. A determined finger nudging my stiff lips apart and rubbing my gums and teeth with it as if I were a fussy, teething baby. Prying my jaw open and painting it on my tongue. I can see it darker in between my fingers and toes and armpits and groin, in the whorls of my ears and the corners of my eyes. I’m imagining anthropologists finding my blue-sprinkled bones 200 years from now when excavations for a new building are being made and scratching their heads, perplexed. I bet they’ll assume I’m a priestess. Perhaps I’ll even make it into an edition of whatever National Geographic becomes.

I told Tom that when I die, this is how I want my body to be prepared. He teared up and shook his head. Kind of a heavy conversation for a fifth date. I’m pretty sure he was secretly horrified and quite possibly is now having second thoughts about me. . He tried to negotiate NOT rubbing it on my body or gums or hair – only a small jar of blue in the casket. I will never make it into NatGeo at this rate. Perhaps he’s not The One after all.

Late this afternoon while we were meandering around town and contemplating dinner, I almost broke into the ugliest of ugly sobs while standing in the opening of a small alley.  EVERY single surface was some shade of blue.  Doors, doorways and the cover of an embedded utility box were glossy electric blue. The walls, a blue-sky color that softened to periwinkle once streetlamps came on. The street underfoot, rich cobalt.  I could feel intense energy coiling inside me at precisely the same moment that a family with small kids paused behind me, talking to each other in French.  I didn’t want to alarm, or be ogled in the middle of a spiritual orgasm, so I clenched that part of me that wanted to explode and waited for them to move on.

I will not do that again.

Once they were gone, the urge had also passed. I felt like Beauty had closed her robe and hidden her glory because I didn’t have the courage to reach out and touch her when she smiled at me. I turned to Tom and opened his arms. There may have been a few tears that slipped down my cheeks while he held me, but nothing like the flood that had been threatening moments before.

Has Beauty ever moved me to sob? I can’t remember, but I don’t think so. I hope she gives me another chance.

Some day I hope to love God as much as I love the color blue.