Canada: Finally Freedom

When I first was considering coming here to Canada, I wasn’t thinking about how this immigration could improve the quality of life as most people kept repeating. I actually didn’t know what it means to have a better quality of life or even imagine what it looks like. That is simply because I thought I was just fine in Morocco; I had a nice job in a nice company, we didn’t have a fancy car or a house but we surely knew how to enjoy all the little beauties of life and what my home country had to offer. I worked hard on myself and freed my mind and spirit from those suffocating chains, but still there was that part of me lingering inside, aching for an extra more. That extra more that I wasn’t sure how it looks and how it feels.

Canada: Houses, Public Transit... and trash

 

Houses.

When I was in Morocco, I didn’t care about owning a house. Why would I? Why spend twenty years of my life paying for a perfectly shaped box with no innovative exterior or interior design in dull neighborhoods? Appartements are boring, not to mention the risk of defective water or electricity installation, noisy surrounding, and having the feeling of being trapped behind the small windows’ fences. Houses are pretty much the same; cement walls and cold floors. For the most fortunate, they go with “economical villa”, with tall walls tightly framing small back and front yards, which only emphasizes the feeling of suffocation and imprisonment.

Canada: Weather & People

Cold

I loved how cold it can get here, it felt lively, sometimes deadly. I was never exposed to such extreme weather where you could feel you fingers and toes freeze inside your pockets, not just metaphorically, but literarily, they can become hard as a rock and you can’t move them. The lower of my butt cheeks, as though dipped in water filled with ice cubes, felt funny and weird as I walked. The temperature falling below 30°C, totally dismissing the presence of the sun, makes your cheeks red and nose runny. One night we stood too long in -20°C waiting for a bus, and by too long I mean over 15 min. I thought we were going to leave our blue lifeless feet behind!

Canada: Expectations and Reality

 

Before coming to Canada, I had many expectations. Actually, the thought of living here was first like a distant dream; hazy and blurred, my mind unable to distinguish the exact details, but successfully drawing a perfect colorful and cheerful picture of how things would probably go. When our moving date approached, we started doing researches, making thus the image a bit clearer, a bit more real. We looked up where we would stay when we land, where to buy groceries, what should we wear, how to get our papers done, the public transit itinerary… long story short, lots and lots of work! But in my head, it was still as though I’m diving into a magical trip, so supernatural and surreal. A trip out of this world.

Becoming a writer

 

When my boyfriend, now my husband, asked seven years ago what was my vision for the next five years, meaning what I would like to do with my life, I shrugged my shoulders and looked away, “I don’t know, I don’t really care, doesn’t matter anyways”.