Tangier light doesn’t just hit the retina, it rewires the goddamn thing. That silhouette against the Mediterranean haze, the way the architecture dissolves into something between memory and hallucination, it’s the exact visual frequency of not knowing what comes next and being perfectly fine with that fact.
I have no idea of what is going to happen
or in which parts the pain will be.
We are only in spring, and spring has a twisting light.
Spring’s images are made of crystal and cannot be recalled.
There will be suffering, but you know how to coax it.
There will be memories, but they can be deflected.
There will be your heart still moving
in the wind that has not stopped flying westward,
and you will give a signal. Will someone see it?
Paul Bowles, Next to Nothing
Bowles knew. Spring’s twisting light, images made of crystal that can’t be recalled: that’s not poetry, that’s documentary evidence. This is a photograph about the impossibility of holding onto moments even as I’m standing inside them. The figure there could be anyone, could be you, probably is you if you’ve ever stood at the edge of a continent feeling the weight of every choice that led you there and every choice still unmade.
There’s something ferociously honest about pairing that particular shaft of light with Bowles’ warning about pain and deflected memories. No bullshit orientalism here, no exotic postcard garbage. Just the raw deal: you came here because something was broken or breaking, because the familiar had become unbearable, because spring has this way of making everything feel both urgent and impossible.
That knook framing the unknown, the anticipation of what comes next, does so with an almost violent precision. The shadows aren’t romantic: they’re surgical. And the buidling wall absorbing the light? That’s where all my American certainties go to die, slowly, beautifully, without apology.
This is what happens when wanderlust stops being a hashtag and becomes a condition. When I finally understand that the “no idea of what is going to happen” isn’t the problem: it’s the entire point. This photograph catches that exact moment of surrender, that threshold between who I am and whatever the hell comes next.