The girl who landed here...

She was quite something that lady. She had been badly wounded recently enough to still let her mind wander into it's memories. She had been operated on just three weeks before. They pulled FOUR of her teeth. As the anesthesia set in and she felt all of the muscles in her body relaxing her into oblivion, the surgeon came in the room and looked her in the eyes and said, "so you are moving to morocco?" she grinned and relaxed back into the darkness. When she had awaken her mother was staring at her and crying. She was somehow already weeping. It is so strange to wake up already crying, unaware of what has been done to you. She started to remember short little memories like little flash backs from a film. She remembered asking the nurse that walked her to recovery if she could see the teeth.

As she convalesced in her mother's bed, eating chicken soup and chocolate pudding cups, she would ask her mother repeatedly what she thought about him. Her ex husband. What she would think if they got back together, what she would think if they had a family, did she think she was in love with him. She was...but she needed her mother to tell her it was OK. She needed her mother's blessing to move forward.

Her mother told her this, "When you see him, you will know. You will either be attracted, or you won't be and you will know right away".
Her mother has a way of being right about most things that concern the love a woman is capable of feeling.


So the weeks passed and the swelling in her jaw rescinded and eventually the morning came that she had to tear her tear soaked face off of her father's shoulder. She had to walk what felt like an eternity to get in the red pick-up truck he had given her where her two sisters awaited her, watching, probably bemoaning her drama.


At the airport, she sat in the same bar she had bid farewell to her older sister in, six years earlier. When that one packed up and moved away for love and to meet her destiny. She ordered a vodka martini, devoured the olive, hating herself for never being able to wait until after  the drink to eat it so that it will have soaked up the vodka. As the hazy buzz f the vodka started to set in she and her younger sister exchanged words and promises and it somehow felt hollow. Her younger sister was trying so hard not to feel it, fighting it so hard. She only knew that when she received the desperate text from her declaring her love and admiration before boarding the plane.


She landed in Paris without incident and found her way to her hotel room on the right bank where her dear childhood friend was waiting in the cafe attached to the hotel.


They set out on two days of drinking and dining and reminiscing and catching up. Those two days came swirling to an end over a leisurely Vietnamese lunch when the girl checked her ticket and realized she had miscalculated and that her plane to Casablanca was leaving in exactly two hours. She threw the napkin down, bid farewell to her friend, grabbed her suitcase, and RAN RAN RAN to the metro, managed to catch an arriving RER to the airport and run to the gate just before check-in closed.


She had a nice seat on that flight, in the front row, first off the plane.


When she arrived in Casablanca, she knew he would be waiting. She took her time to exit into the general population because her heart was beating soo fast and she was soo scared to see him. Scared she wouldn't love him, scared she would. Either way it was nerve wracking. They had been eight years separated, five years since she had seen him.


As the crowd parted and she recognized his smiling face, her mother's words RANG IN HER HEAD and her whole body became a buzz with excitement. She was too embarrassed to really look at him before they left the airport, but once the exited through the sliding doors and they were shrouded by darkness, she gave him a once over as he fumbled for his lighter and she knew she loved him so so much. She knew it could work and that was it and they were done. She knew he loved her too, she knew she was foolish for the fear she felt before exiting to meet him. She knew she knew she knew.