I grew up in Casablanca and I left it twice. The first time I was twenty-two and I went to Lyon, for a job that I had been told would change my life and that mostly changed my insomnia. The second time was after I came back at twenty-eight, lasted nine months in a marketing firm in Maarif, and went to spend a winter alone in a small house in Essaouira, where the wind would not let me sleep either.
I am back now, for the third time, and I think I will not leave again.
What the body remembers
I had not understood, until I came back this time, that my body had been keeping a record of the city all along. The smell of msemen on the street at seven in the morning. The way the sea breeze hits the corniche around six p.m. and turns the air briefly cold. The cracked tiles in the bathroom of the school I went to as a girl. The blue gate of my grandmother's house in Hay Mohammadi. The voice of the man who used to sell maakouda outside the train station, who has not been there for ten years and whose voice I can still hear if I close my eyes near that door.
When I left Casablanca, I thought I was leaving a place. I have come to understand that I was leaving a body's worth of small remembered things, and that no other city, however much I loved it, could replace them.
A city becomes a part of the body. The body cannot be transplanted twice and survive intact.
Coming home as a practice
The yoga of returning to the city of my childhood is not a metaphor. It is a practice, and it has cost me things.
I had to forgive the city for what it had not given me. The streets are not friendlier than they were. The men on the bus still look. The traffic on Boulevard Zerktouni still kills my back. The apartment I rent has a stove I cannot trust and a neighbour whose television is always too loud.
And I had to forgive myself for the years I spent trying to leave it. I was running from things that were not the city, and the city had to absorb the cost of my running. It received the postcards I sent and never visited. It received the visits when I came back too thin and pretended to be fine. It received the silences when I would not call my mother for months.
The yoga is to put a hand on the wall of a building I used to walk past as a girl, and to thank it for waiting.
A small ritual for cities you have loved
If you have a city in your body — and I think most of us do, though we do not always name it — I would offer this practice. It does not require travel.
Sit on the floor. Close your eyes. Place both hands on the lower belly. Bring to mind one street, in one city, at one time of day. Breathe slowly while you walk that street in your imagination. Do not narrate. Do not perform. Just walk.
After ten minutes, open your eyes. Drink water. Notice if anything has shifted.
The city you have loved is in your body. It will answer, when you ask.
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I am thirty-eight now and Casablanca is teaching me what I refused to learn when I was younger. The teaching is slow. The city is patient. We have time.
— Ghizlan