Juxtaposition

On the life that was being built while it was falling apart

This morning I woke up with a word on my mind.

Juxtaposition.

I liked it immediately. Two things placed side by side so that each makes the other more visible. You can use it in design, in writing, in a life.

I opened my camera roll searching for images to go with this word. I thought of Morocco, though this trip was taken a while ago, I remembered the contrast everywhere.

We went in April 2017. Our daughter was a teenager. We traveled with our friend Ali, who was born in Morocco and now lives in Switzerland. Seeing a country through the eyes of someone who grew up there is an absolute treat. Ali took us to the Atlas Mountains, this destination was not on the tourist list. He wanted to show us the real Morocco.

On the road in Bin El Ouidane, I saw something I still cannot explain.

Two women in robes the color of fire, one yellow, one orange, walking along a modern road cut straight through ancient rock. They were carrying bags maybe with groceries. Going somewhere ordinary. The cliff face next to them, behind them and in front of them had been there since before memory.

I raised my camera to take a picture of this extraordinary and ordinary sight before me.

I felt pure gratitude in that moment. For Ali, for the road we were on, for being a girl from Queens, New York who somehow ended up here, witnessing this. I was grateful for my life. My beautiful family. Everything we had built.

The gratitude was real. It was just not standing on solid ground.

One year after Morocco, our life fell apart. Health crisis. Parents struggling. Financial fear. Challenges arriving one after another, for years. When we were on that road we believed our life was beautiful. We had no idea what lived underneath.

Our life was a beautiful facade. When you looked inside and poked around, you found cracks and broken pipes everywhere. That facade needed to be rebuilt one brick at a time. It took years.

I look at a photograph of myself from that trip. A pale green dress. Dark hair. Sunglasses. Moving through a lush Moroccan courtyard like she owns the morning. She looks happy. She looks held together.

She has no idea.

She is anxious, that woman. She has always done the work on herself, since she was a teenager. She is working hard to keep it all together. She does not know her life is about to fall apart. That she will lose so much weight from the fear and uncertainty. She does not know she will emerge far stronger. She does not know that even her marriage will fall apart, and that even that she will be able to course correct. She does not know that when she turns sixty she will feel something she has never felt before.

Free.

Now I look at a photograph from this spring. Les Baux-de-Provence. Silver hair. Standing on ancient rock, arm raised, laughing, the whole of Provence spread out behind me like I earned every inch of it.

Same woman. Completely different light.

That is juxtaposition. Not just what you see. What you cannot see yet. The contrast between the surface and what lives beneath it. The life you think you have and the life that is actually being built underneath the falling apart.

As it was falling apart, it was also being built. I just could not see it at the time.

We cannot see anything clearly except against its opposite. The ancient cliff makes the modern road visible. The dark years make the light ones luminous. The woman in the pale green dress makes the woman on the rock possible.

I am a girl from Queens, New York who stood on a road in Morocco and watched two women walk into the light and thought: I cannot believe this is my life.

All of it. The beauty and the breaking. The facade and the rebuilding. The gratitude that was real even when the ground beneath it was not.

I cannot believe this is my life.

And I am grateful for every single piece of it.