Merzouga Nights

After a lengthy hiatus, I’d like to report that the pieces of my puzzle have come together. That my feet have finally found their way, gradually picking up momentum, and lifting off the runway. That I am every morning elevated by a giant balloon which transports and transcends me into an alternate space where the mundaneness and pains of our Earth have been left behind and that my heart explodes at the enchantment I’ve found once again. That when my head hits the pillow every night, my purpose is as clear as those starry nights I spent in Merzouga nearly a decade ago. 

Truth be told, there have been no magical balloons or metaphoric runways. My feet still stumble. Nights have been cloudy, with a fading memory of the clarity felt in Merzouga.  The silver lining I’ve been told to watch for appears as but a glimmer, visible only from the right angle and is persistently hazy, holding no illuminating contours.

Ultimately this hiatus has been filled with many enigmatic undercurrents, still working their way into my consciousness.  I can but feel them, too small myself to understand their magnitude. Yet that they are there, crashing into each other, causing commotion in the form of discomfort and sustaining my intrepid heart is all I have to hold onto. It is all what many of us have to hold onto in periods of breaking. 

As I run this maze, I promise there’s a point to all the verbosity. All I mean to say is that I’m coming to find a certain beauty to this destruction. We are necessarily required to accept and embrace this beauty and purpose if we are to rise from the ashes. There is indeed a beauty in learning what you fear the most, a beauty in facing the fallacy of your perceived certainties of the world and your place in it, a beauty in the precariousness of the present moment and those of tomorrow. And I begrudgingly suggest that there is a beauty in abandonment and the solitude that results. 

Diving head first from a life filled with enchantment at every breath, often painful its own right, into the dark abyss I call ‘coming home’, weighs heavy on my head in the mornings and heavier at the end of each day, making my argument a tough one to buy into. Yet, I can’t let go of the idea that it is all for something. From a life filled with soul mates, daily epiphanies sourcing from a simple mud mask and a Nescafe, a furry feline friend who inspired the storyteller within me and a dance studio—a dance studio, bright and beaming with potential for creation. Leaving behind a life filled with dance, which seemed to make everything come full circle, I’ve found myself in a place void of perhaps the most romanticized elements of my recent past.  Yet, I can’t let go of the idea that it is all for something. Might there be an adventure hidden in what feels like a backtrack motion into a world I left running eleven years ago? 

Perhaps the clarity in Merzouga was a byproduct of a bliss that only a mind unfucked gets the privilege of feeling. An ignorance, if you will. A gap in my understanding that I will never really understand. And that that’s okay. Maybe when our feet walk in a certain direction, our only task is to follow along and trust that there’s a dash of wisdom in each of those funny little toes. That maybe our vestigial pinky is actually a source of great power, paving ways for journeys we never anticipated and crippling us to points where our knees surrender and we face the shit that we have been avoiding, all the while swimming in its depths. That maybe it’s time to face the unknowns of a life we thought we had so squared away. To give way for a new set of uncertainties even if they take the shape of something that shakes us to our bones and challenges the very fibers of our being. 

If that’s not an adventure, I don’t know what is.