Kismet at the Bus Station
Where the sky meets the walls in Chefchaouen, Morocco.
I tend to find myself elsewhere. Anywhere. Nowhere. Usually in solitude or lost in thought, and when I'm lucky, in the midst of culture shock. A couple years back, I found myself in Morocco—Chefchaouen, to be precise—waiting for a bus bound for Fez. At the small bus station, we shared a bench with a family: a rugged father, a beautiful wife, and two darling kids who kept busy with balloons and dolls. Nothing about them caught my attention, except that they seemed to be trying to catch mine. Funny how that works.
Turns out, they recognized me and my husband—from a photo we occupied on their phone. We were in the same blue town on the same days, and they captured us in a million tiny pixels, along with a plethora of other vacation photos from their time spent in this traveler's mecca. Papa swiped through their gallery like a proud curator, letting me peek: mouth-watering dinners, peaceful hotel rooms, souvenir scores, unintentional baby selfies, and family portraits. And there it was—the photo that brought our two families together in curiosity and coincidence. *Camera click*—the open, modestly sized Plaza Uta el Hamman, souvenir shops lining one side, the Grand Mosque standing watch on the other. Centered in the photo, Chefchaouen’s somewhat out of place, and towering pine tree - our weird little lighthouse in this tangled maze of a mountain town. The kasbah’s cobblestones gleamed in the morning sun, and there we stood—two backpack-clad tourists dwarfed by the Atlas mountains, drunk on the Marjorelle blue that stains every wall like a mirror to the sky.
We weren’t the point of the photo. Why would we be? Just a couple of blips in a family album. But perfect it was—this tiny bridge between strangers. Their English was broken but kind; they called it kismet, this chance collision at the bus station, sharing a moment with a photo snapped less than an hour before. I tried to match their warmth in my own broken French and Arabic—something like ‘Kismet. Bon. Inshallah.’ Not elegant, but the meaning made it through as we shared our mint tea and Coca-Cola while waiting for our bus to Fez and theirs to Casablanca.
That friendship? Thirty minutes tops. Yet the tether remains—stronger now that it’s here, written and remembered. And that word—‘kismet’—it stuck with me, like a seed planted in what was a dusty corner of my mind, but now a verdant garden of thought and connection. I’ve thought about what it means, why he said it then,the happenstance of it all - how that little word kicked open a door I didn’t know was there. A door to memories, to chance meetings, to coincidences I might’ve otherwise ignored.
There’s more to this story, and you’ll find it weaving through this site like a thread through fabric—like the time in Mexico City when a song, one I’d only ever heard in memory, spilled from the café speakers just as I woke humming its tune. Or in Amsterdam, when an old friend crossed our path by accident, and suddenly the city felt different, reshaped by that moment. Kismet is the theme here, the quiet narrator in the background.
