The House in Morocco by Rosalind Brackenbury

She would still, in years to come, be able take a walk around this town, that used to be called Mogador, as easily as she could go physically across the city she lived in. .ere are places in the world, as Yann said, that are centers, points of focus. You know them when you are in them. You know that something’s going on, that you’re there for a reason, even if you don’t know what it is. Something has drawn you to this place, and until you have let it change you, it won’t let you go.

During those months in Essaouira the place began to inhabit her. She walked around it following all the tracks and pathways that people had been following since the beginnings of life on that coast, and it came inside her, filled her dreams, pushed up like the ocean into all her empty crevices. She’d see this later. It wasn’t just Aziz. Each intimacy remains inside you. It’s not infidelity to the place which is now or the person who is now: it’s you growing bigger and more porous, with fewer boundaries. More on the inside, the more you live. Intimacy means letting people in; intimacy with a place means letting it change you, inhabit you, become your landscape too. Either way, it means being vulnerable.