On the wall of my dorm room a picture is hanging on the wall. It’s a photograph of an old man who happened to cross my path when I was roaming the old medina of my hometown, Marrakesh. Behind him are palm trees and the sun is reflecting on his wrinkled face. You can feel the warmth of this sun from this black and white picture where the bright light and the shadows are contrasting, you can sense the characteristic heath of the city I was born and raised in, a heath I long for during Ifran’s snowy seasons. The palm trees remind me of home, the old man whom I haven’t seen more than the time it took me to snapshot a picture of him looks familiar, I would never know his name, nor his childhood dreams, I would never know about his past nor his future, I would never know if he noticed my camera and if he did why he didn’t bother asking me for a reason. The man with has his eyes shut, certainly because the sun was blinding him, probably because the wisdom that accompanies his age guides him through roads he certainly walked for decades, that same wisdom which craved lines on this tanned skin, as if it wanted to mark all the years that went by and brought experiences and knowledge.
The photograph that is now hung on my bedside used to be laying on a pile of magazines in the middle of the painted white with huge windows living room at home, since I have brought it back from an exposition I participated in back in high school, it just sat there for years, being the silent witness of our daily life, of our laughs and tears, of our fights and reconciliations, of the sorrow that came with the loss of loved ones and of the joy of welcoming new members of that big and atypical family of mine, until I have decided that it should be my college companion.
The old man in this picture is probably dead by now, or maybe he is still wandering between Marrakesh’s ochre walls, through the medina’s tight and noisy streets, he surely ignores all of the events a part of him has been a witness for, that it traveled to a whole different city just to keep me company and to allow me to travel back home through the sight of him, to remind me of where I am from and where I truly belong.