I Want Too Much

Is this real life?

The Knicks win the NBA finals while I’m asleep on a twin bed in Marrakech, my second night there of two. I wake up at 6AM the next morning, thirty minutes before I’d set my alarm to brush my teeth, pack my pajamas on top of the pink agave silk rug I’d bought in the medina to be ready to meet my Uber on the highway just outside the front gate. I check Instagram first, compulsively, in search of the photo of Timothée Chalamet that will tell me whether or not it’s over. The waifish Punxsutawney Phil of New York basketball.

I find it within seconds of opening the app, one of hundreds of photos I’ll see just like it while I’m in between flights for the rest of the day. He’s bent at his waist, screaming so hard there’s a vein threatening to burst in his beautiful boyish neck, and I know then there’d been a historic win in my adopted hometown after I went to bed in Morocco. Know the streets of my neighborhood were flooding with everyone I know, everyone I don’t. Know that halfway across the world, Spike Lee is happy.

I pack plums and leftover kofta in a Ziploc bag with a pang of longing at the base of my stomach, the back of my neck. Pain in the phantom limb of what it might have felt like to be there. Something like the Wednesday before, when they’d won the fourth game in the series and I’d watched it at home with Stuart, folding clean underwear to bring on this trip. We hung onto each other when it was over, only letting go to press our ears to the window screen to listen to all the screams outside, rising up like steam between every building. We put flip flops on and ran towards Fort Greene, where Spike Lee lives. We knew he wouldn’t be home yet, he’d be on the court shaking hands by now, maybe dapping up Larry David. But it felt like the right place to be regardless.

Every face was flushed and beaming. A group of kids on electric Citi bikes rode down Classon singing The Theme from New York, New York. Stuart said “what a game” to everyone we passed and they all said it back. On our way home we walked by a man in a short-sleeve plaid button down sitting on the fourth step of his brownstone, sipping from a whole green coconut. We looked up at him and said hello, still smiling ear to ear, and he smiled back “Everyone’s so happy,” he said. “It’s amazing!”

I take a red eye flight from New York to Paris, Paris to Morocco the night after to arrive in Marrakech on Friday afternoon. I’m there to be with my friend Tenlie, who turns thirty on the Sunday I’ll leave.

I’d been counting down the days until this trip ever since Tenlie’d sent out a save the date by email more than a year ago. Tenlie is the kind of person who would send a save the date email. Highly intentional, thoughtful. Deft and earnest and humble and funny all at once. She does her own gel manicures at home and she has unflinchingly impeccable taste in marble and when she laughs she throws her head back, her mouth wide open. Her teeth are perfectly white. Not a moment I’ve spent with her’s been wasted.

Tenlie’s the only person I know in the group of twelve people who’ve come to stay with her at Palais Noryalis, a villa on the N7. I meet Emma first, by the cash exchange at the Morocco airport, wearing brown ballet flats and a pin-striped button down like she’d said she’d be. She’d failed to mention she has eyes in shades of green and blue like I’ve never seen before.

We both leave with wads of technicolor bills and talk about the rugs, the light fixtures, the spices we’ll bring home as we walk into the dry heat to find our driver, a sweet man about our age who shakes our hands between both of his. He’d like to visit America, he’s always wanted to go to Nevada. Emma lives in Paris. They speak French a little.

Everyone’s already in the pool by the time we get there, bouncing to a remix of the Velvet Underground all wearing the big straw sunhats they’d found resting on the yellow striped lounge chairs. They’re authors and architects and entrepreneurs, savants and Buddhists and critical thinkers who discuss the philosophies behind their artistic practice at breakfast. Everyone is nice and we all eat Pringles together. Everyone speaks French. Where the hell was I when everyone was learning French?

I ask them where the hell I was when they were learning French. And Arabic, and moving to Paris, getting graduate degrees and meeting their husbands on silent retreats. I want to get to know them in exacting detail, asking questions that start in earnest curiosity and that veer into the relentlessly interrogative the more I learn, using their answers to compose a “how to” guide in my head. “How’d you get your visa,” “How hard is it to get a French bank account” “Are you so happy you decided to get that MFA.” Slotting myself into the lives they’ve built. Grad programs in Ireland, an apartment in the 5th.

I sleep better than I have since the last time I was in my childhood bedroom and wake up at 9 to sit at the breakfast table in the garden. The palm tree closest to the porch is slightly charred from where the fire dancer Tenlie hired for our dinner entertainment had flung an errant spark the night before.

The house manager brings out a parade of platters of scrambled eggs and olives and cheese, flat breads and three different kinds of pancakes with honey and jam. Moroccan mint tea, a bundt cake. We’ll leave for the souks at 11. I’ll get in the pool first. I feed little pieces of egg to the cat that lives in the garden.

A man at the medina calls me ugly, says I dress like a man when I say no thank you to buying one of his leather bags, but the boy making fresh squeezed pomegranate juice is nice enough to help me forget it. I lose the group for a while and wander to the best part of the market I’d seen yet. Quiet and shaded. A boy, probably twenty-four, shows me both of his shops, one with glassware and one with hand-dyed scarves. He takes me back into a room to show me where they dye them in a big terracotta vat. I buy four ceramic cups and he makes a bracelet out of natural dyed wool for me, for good luck.

We get back in the pool as soon as we’re home, swimming up to plates of leftover chicken skewers and kofta and plums from the night before until it’s time to get dressed to drive into the desert for dinner. Shawn makes an Aperol Spritz in a water bottle to share on the road.

I sit next to Kaeli on the ride back to the villa after we’ve all had enough red wine and tagine. She’s an architect with big blue eyes and a cat named Baby. I tell her how my life’s been making me itch out of my skin lately. How I worry I haven’t done enough yet, haven’t taken enough chances. Haven’t lived abroad, haven’t learned French, haven’t fallen in love on a weekend in Amsterdam. Haven’t done enough wrong yet. Nothing wild, impractical, outside of the box.

I stop. I say isn’t it funny to lament how boring my life has been to a woman I’d just met the day before while both of us are in the back of a van in the middle of the Sahara desert.

It’s easy to think of my life as its elevator pitch. What I do for work, where I grew up, went to college, where I live. The bulleted list my mom would recite in the cereal aisle at the grocery store if she ran into my elementary school teacher or my old soccer coach. It is easy to forget that this list isn’t close to comprehensive. That all the best is between the lines. That if my life is a cake, and it is, that those simple facts are the flour and the eggs. That van in the back of the desert, the night the Knicks won game four are the frosting, piped on in thick swirls.

I say I’m going “back to real life” when I come home from vacation. But that does me a huge disservice. That is robbery. It is all my life. All my real life. My problem, the ache in my stomach, is not caused by wishing things were different and feeling powerless to make them so. It’s caused by having something good enough it’s hard to leave behind.

I don’t wish I’d been at home when the Knicks won. I would never have traded it for what I had, for two nights of sunsets and new people I hope to know forever, for seeing Tenlie well up every time we clinked our wine glasses. I just wish it had happened when I’d gotten back. My parents used to tell my little sister “that’s too much, Helen.” “I want too much,” she’d say back.

I want to live in New York and Paris while I’m through-hiking the Appalachian Trail at the same time. I don’t want to choose a door to walk through, I want to open every window and let it all stream in from the comfort of my impossibly cheap, palatial Brooklyn apartment.

I want too much. I have cake at home. I eat the frosting off the top.

Pony Recommends:

1. I have been a world traveler these last months. I have been to London and Paris and Marrakech and Boston, most of all. I have slept on many new pillows and sat sweating in many middle seats. I have grown bags under my eyes and new zits that bloom over the course of one red eye and when I get home, finally, finally. THIS IS MY ADDICTION. This is how I tell my face and body it’s safe. I put this mask all over my cheeks in a way that feels neanderthalic (good way) and I sink into the coach and watch West Wing. And I’m soft as a BABY by the time Josh Lyman’s looking hot as all get out (IMMEDIATELY).

2. Last night I saw Ragtime and I cried harder than I have since I read A Prayer for Owen Meany I think. I was having full body chills from start to finish and especially every time Joshua Henry sang. I had the firm sense I was seeing something I’d remember forever when he opened his mouth. A once in a lifetime talent with a voice that fills you up to the brim. Sarah come back to me.

3. Thanks to minds like Lindsay Sword’s “pull-on pants” have been the talk of the town all summer. These are my contribution into the pantheon. They’re comfortable and slouchy but still cool and structured and they have gigantic pockets. I am wearing them as I write this.

4. At a bookstore in London I picked “The Book of Guilt” from the table because I liked the cover. Sometimes that works. In this case, it really did. It’s about three identical British triplets living at a home for boys and the slow revelation of every single part of their seemingly idyll life being a complete and utter lie. There’s murder! There’s nuns (?)! There’s things English people say! And I love that we’ve all been reading all the same things, but I also love that I picked this up just because I liked the cover and not because I saw it on an Instagram story! Intuition wins!

5. Something I’m so excited about is coming on most perfect Bella Darden’s newsletters tomorrow. You should subscribe to that as a treat to me and you.

That’s all! Xx Pony