His Last Morning

On his last morning in Morocco before sunrise, before an orange sunburst ball of gas broke sky edges he flew north to Amsterdam and west to Seattle and east over Cascade Mountains.

Before leaving Saad’s home in Casablanca, The Other who’d been up all night anticipating another departure, took a gigantic shit over a hole in the ground and swept sweet smelling kid’s sanitized paper wipe over his ass, stumbled through the dark with Rex the shepherd who lived in the wood pile out in the furniture factory on his heels pouring water from an old green bottle into the holy plumbing system, waking the dead on their highway of life crowded with whiners and complainers.

The toilet paper was crap in Spain. In Morocco it was nonexistent. It felt good to blast yesterday out of his system and he knew all their bilingual time, trouble and effort and cost not measured in material things had been worth it. Because it was a refreshing drink of water, a hard desperate breath during a climb for a clear perspective.

Light severed the sky, illuminating white Andalucian and Arabic villages, stone paths, brown Moorish doors, idle men, shifty eyed one armed merchants, unemployed dissatisfied immigrants.

As an entity from history he traversed light, space, and time near vaulted arches kissing everyone on both sides of extended faces shaking hands with everyone confirming his flight. His exile dream vision.

All the adults were tired, wasted, beat. Moroccans walked, stopped, looked around with hesitancy, this delay, this question on their boarding card faces.

Their visa stamp bled through their indigo robes piercing shirts, blouses, delicate woven craft work designed by millions of minimum wage children in twisted alleys without a visa. Lucky to make a buck a day. They needed a bread visa, a scrap of meat visa, a tea visa, freshly cut sweet smelling green long boiling tea to mix their life’s colors with sweetness.

At the Casablanca airport he waited in line for a military man to stamp his passport. Exit. Two beautiful women received preferential treatment and a Moroccan man behind him remarked, “I love this country but hate the system.”

“I know you what you mean,” he replied knowing countless countries where people felt the same way.

“There are only two stories in the world,” he said to the man as they carried their boarding cards through the terminal. “A stranger arrives in town or a person goes on a journey.”