James, you've got me feeling poetical.

A month ago, right about *now* I was dancing. Dancing and waiting for rosy-fingered Dawn, which is something I see every morning here. The entire city turns pink, since it's already hues of orange and white and sand and pink and plaster and cement. Twice a day, it glows rosy and beautiful and then in what seems like seconds it's dark. And cold, in a way that makes the sand feel like cool water on my feet instead of dry and soft like I know it is.

I saw clouds a few nights ago, for the first time since I got here. But they weren't clouds like I know them. They were pressed flat like hand-made paper, the kind you make in art class by putting construction paper in a blender and sifting it through screens, and the sky had that same texture of pieces-held-together and dried that way. They're dry clouds, bumping up against each other but not overlapping, the pattern's like the cobblestones here, irregular and the moon is getting full.

I brush my teeth outside in the jardin because that's where the sink is, and I stare at the moon. (and the moon sees me, and the moon sees the one that I long to see). And I hear the singing from the mosque and the occasional goat. I've started to recognize the cats.

If my name were Bekkah or Alanna or any other slightly-individually-spelled name-made-medieval by now I'd have made friends with one or all of these cats and they'd be bringing me luck or news or something. I resist the urge to name the dog with the chewed ear that I walk by every morning. I *did* name the huge cafard cockroach that lives in the crack in my ceiling though, because if I didn't name it Henrietta then it'd just be a huge cafard cockroach and I'm not okay with that. I'm slightly more okay with a huge cafard cockroach named Henrietta living in the crack in my ceiling because then it/she/it is not a stranger which means that it/she/it is not strange and therefore not a surprise but a neighbor, which is still not what I'd call comfortable but more okay than not.