I feel an uptick in anxiety over pretty much all the pararomantic connections I’m cultivating with various “men” “in” my “life” right now.

Certainly it’s because my chronic loneliness is now compounded by an understanding that to be in Morocco without a man is a different — at the least, more reputedly sinister, and perhaps empirically worse — proposition that to be here with one.

Walking around the Medina with Rasheed last night was so easy — even as the truth is he has no particular use for my body, we present as a man who belongs here and a woman who belongs to him — but what will it be like when I am alone and straying farther from the established path? Is my operating belief that I am enough to withstand whatever this will be?