Write Yourself a Promise

writing with Leslie Jamison in the Atlas Mountains, I found my way back to myself

In October of 2023, I spent a week writing with Leslie Jamison and other female authors in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.

The retreat was hosted by Trust & Travel, and I was there grieving the end of a relationship. I let my grief stain everything I did, shape every form I took. I began to feel Grief as my Domme and I her willing submissive. In moving with grief this way, I let myself be retrieved, transformed, softened.

Every morning, the leads would set out writing prompts and Moroccan tea, nuts and dates, for one silent writing hour. This hour was a portal that brought me home to my identity as a writer. What I wrote for the final open-mic night was a borrowed-form essay in writing prompts.

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Write about the way she touched your back gently at dinner, and how at first you thought it was a pillow falling forward, and when you swiveled to catch it you found instead a hand, a smile, an invitation to somewhere you had forgotten.

Write about how you keep losing your shoes and walking around barefoot, only to find them on a table the next morning, where you come to write on your knees, beneath the encounter of sun and moon.

Remember to include sensory details, like when the man squeezed your shoulder when he walked by, the way he delighted in your specificity of requests from the food bar—salmon, the piece that falls apart at the fat—and how it makes you want to ask him for more, more, more.

Make a list of these small invitations back to your body, bits of magma flying at sunset, back toward the molten center of you.

Describe the hammam, the Moroccan purification ritual of sloughing off the skin, and the woman who only said, “Ça va?” and somehow each time you knew what it meant: turn, lie down, let me, let go.

Write a poem about how she gave you the sloughing mitt upon parting, your dead skin a gift for you to decide how to bury.

Write about the therapy cat at the Kasbah, how all of our longings are revealed through her: She came to sleep with me. She chose me. I will be the one to feed her.

Write about the women who remind you of yourself at different life passages: the youngest, most of all, whose revealing about her mother cracked open the moment, reminding us of our identities of daughters, and the parts of our mothers we had to gather, later, for ourselves.

Write about the identities you have returned to here—the one who brings the incense at sunset, the one who bought herself break-up Jimmy Choos, the one who asks questions that glimmer in the dark.

Write a verse for his real name: Love, and Earth, and Longing, and Let Me, and Go.

Write yourself a promise: that you will never make your love smaller, not ever, again.

All photos (except last, which is mine) by Roza Kadi for Trust & Travel