Drinking in a bar looking out the window.

Soaked in the rain, too early to go home.

I've never drunk alone in a bar, but this today I needed it. A day like no other when everything changes.

5pm, looking out the window, people rushing home from work. Endless buses pull up and pull away.

In the bar a man is talking too loudly to his partner, trying to be overheard.

Music is playing in the background, The Doors Break On Through and The Stones. I pretend I'm sitting in a bar in the US somewhere.

Lone men check their phones or suck on vaporized nicotine.

Looking out the window. A woman I used to know walks by, on this day of all days. Once she said how funny it is that we always bump into each other, and she doesn't bump into anyone else as much as me. I offered up some rational reasoning excuse on that day. But I had thought that too, and often thought about why we kept seeing each other.

At the bus stop opposite, a girl is waiting for the bus, an old lady approaches with two dogs, I can see from the conversation that the old lady wants the girl to hold the dogs' leads' why she goes into the supermarket behind the bus stop. She also has a laundry basket, the wicker circular kind, white in colour, that she must have just bought, she leaves that with the girl at the bus stop as well.

I finish my beer and leave.

The girl at the bus stop is texting, probably telling a friend that an old lady has asked her to look after two dogs and a laundry basket.

I walk home. Clothes still damp from the rain. I think about the woman I used to know, and synchronicity and fate.. And I think about how your life can change in a moment, when you weren't expecting it.

It was a good beer.

Essaouira

Faded greens and flaking paint. It's autumn, and the high season is over.

A faded colonial out-post, past it's glory, clinging onto the coast. They speak French. Refreshing citron pressé in the beach front cafes.

Endless beach, with the waves coming in all the way from the Americas. Men try and sell you special cigarettes on the deserted beach. Someone says Jimi Hendrix once stayed here. It seems Jimi Hendrix stayed quite a few places in his short time. I was to hear the same story years later in Nepal.

In the boat yards, they build boats the traditional way, out of wood. A man spontaneously shows us around, telling us the history and how they build the craft.

The Atlas mountains seem a long way away now.

Later in a bar. There is a Japanese cartoon playing on the TV with Arabic subtitles. It's one of those old small portable box shape televisions on a wall bracket above the bar. In the background I can hear a familiar song, Neil Young Out on the Weekend is playing.

But that was 25 years ago. I was a kid then. I guess Essaouiria has changed too.