Editor’s note: this piece concerns the death of a friend, migration, and human remains.
Wednesday, Ayyasha, Larache — March 18, 2025
My dear friend Hamza,
The school break has arrived, stretching out the hours of free time, and with them, the hours of solitude. I have finished all the tasks behind which I used to hide, and now there is nothing left to distract me from myself. My wife and son are asleep. The night is long, followed by an even longer day, asking nothing of me.
I remain as I am, living in the loose-fitting garment of the simple man, burying every attempt by the complicated man within me to take shape in my image—to fill my head with questions that have no easy answers, and with thoughts about the kind of life I live, and the kind of life lived by rational and irrational beings on this planet.
I throw myself into reality with all my strength, and lock the beast of my anxieties in a dark corner of my being, like a loathsome jailer holding its breath and allowing it no right to exist except for a single moment: when I stand on the rooftop in the darkness of night, a moment worth no more than a burning cigarette.
But if you were to ask me now: What has changed?
I would tell you that the prisoner’s torment has passed to the jailer, and that I have allowed regret and profound sorrow to overrun me.
I thought I had healed the pain of losing my brother—my childhood friend, Mohsen—after that hysterical fit of weeping in front of his mother, when she confirmed to me that he was gone, that the news of his death was real.
I had taken comfort in the words of Dhu al-Rumma:
Perhaps the falling of tears will bring relief
from longing, or heal the secrets of a heart in turmoil.
I thought that involuntary outburst of tears was the final physical expression of my grief for my friend, and that I would fold the pain of his loss into the wounds of my chest, a medal of loyalty. Then I would once again tread, with indifference, upon human suffering—or perhaps I should say: contain it within my heart as part of the human experience on this earth.
But the strange plot of his story loosened the knot of my tears and battered down the walls of my patience. It was a story whose complications had been moving toward resolution, whose hero had been only a step or two away from a happy ending.
Ever since my friend left the classrooms of middle school, he had thrown himself into the embrace of unemployment. Bad luck followed him down every road he took and stood waiting at every door he knocked upon.
He wanted to serve society by learning a trade, but his meager certificate did him no good in the eyes of employers. He wanted to serve his country and enlisted for military service, but his poverty—and his father’s lack of connections—did him no good with the brokers who controlled recruitment.
He lost hope in the country and its people. He turned his back on a homeland that had given him nothing but disappointments and attempted to cross secretly to the other shore. But the frailty of his body did him no good with the coast guards. They descended upon him like hyenas upon prey, tearing his back with batons and kicks.
When the winds of migration from the north failed to carry him away, and he found the sea’s door firmly shut, he turned his compass eastward. The only passage still open to him toward the Arab world was to buy a work visa. A visa, after all, is not for those who need it, but for those who can pay for it.
He stayed among them for three years, claiming that life was easy, that he was living “like a king.” But fate arranged for me to follow him there, and I discovered the lie behind his claim: life under the mercy of a sponsor was “a goat’s life.”
His Arabness did not save him. His sponsor accused him of assaulting him, and the Arabs imprisoned him without evidence, then forcibly deported him back to his country.
How terrible silent sorrow can be.
My friend never spoke openly of his pain. He hid it inside his heart and drank coffee and cigarettes over it. I would long to see him after returning from the sea, and I would find him in his usual place, in a café that received few customers, spending his time browsing Google Maps, searching for some place in this vast world to which he might escape from himself.
Those maps were a promise of freedom.
His immersion in that dream led him to meet a Chilean woman, a foreigner old enough to have been his mother. She fell in love with him. She believed in his dream—or perhaps she pitied his condition—and decided to finance his new beginning.
He traveled to Turkey, attempting to cross into Europe through Greece. But the Syrian refugee crisis did him no good. In the eyes of the border guards, he was a man without a cause; being Moroccan did not grant him the right to asylum. They did not ask him why he had come. To them, he was merely a black sheep among a white flock, a routine task, another number added to the deportation lists.
He watched others cross the borders while the doors of his own dreams closed behind him.
He came to see each deportation as another failed adventure to add to his long record of failed adventures, a ridiculous joke whose details he would turn into something to laugh about.
We never sensed despair or helplessness when he spoke of them. By then, we had long since moved beyond the age of fragility: I, after becoming accustomed to the madness of the sea; he, after being tossed from one deportation prison to another.
His relationship with the Chilean woman encouraged him to turn his compass toward the New World, to become Columbus—a latter-day Columbus without colonial ambitions or hunger for fame and wealth. He was driven by the desperate hope of finding a land that would embrace him, a land capable of embracing his hunger for dignity and social justice.
He set out for Brazil, for the vast land of samba.
There, he began working as a delivery rider, cycling through the crowded streets of the capital with neither the language nor any real cultural understanding of the world around him. But his courage, his eagerness to make up for lost time, and his determination to achieve some stability and save enough money to continue his journey northward became his way forward.
My friend was a courageous man, the kind of man whose likes are becoming rare in the postmodern age—an age in which human beings fear the unknown and wage war against anything that disturbs their comfort.
He was not one of those who, the moment their feet touch the first circle of safety, reach for bricks and cement to build towering walls without doors.
His previous disappointments did not stop him. Nor did his bad luck. Not even his small victory in making it this far.
He gathered whatever money and information he could—though neither was nearly enough—to begin his overland journey from Brazil to the United States of America, one of the longest and most dangerous irregular migration routes in the world.
I tried to dissuade him. I tried to plant hesitation in his heart. In my voice messages, I raised my voice, warning him about bandits and human traffickers who knew no mercy; about losing his way in the forests, the cold of the nights, and the thirst and hunger of the days.
But it was useless.
My friend had already made up his mind, and to him my voice lacked the proper texture of manhood.
He said mockingly:
“You’ve become soft from spending too much time around women and children.”
If I had tried then to give voice to his convictions, the following verses by the Mamluk poet Safi al-Din al-Hilli would have expressed them best:
No one mounts the heights of glory
who has not mounted the back of danger,
and no one attains the highest station
who has placed caution before courage.
Whoever seeks the heights without effort,
will die without ever reaching what he sought.
From the heart of Brazil, my friend cut his way northward. He crossed Ecuador, slipping through mountains and forests, heading toward Colombia, where he spent long days in the perilous Darién jungle—with its brutal terrain, raging rivers, wild animals, armed gangs, and vast, disorienting wilderness.
Without so much as batting an eyelid, he continued toward Costa Rica, where the journey grew even harder.
We heard nothing from him throughout that stretch of his journey. Then he crossed Nicaragua, followed by Honduras, and finally stopped for a while to catch his breath and reassure me that he was alive and well.
He asked me to lend him some money.
I told him to give me some time to find a way to send it, since my bank card did not support international transfers. I contacted my brother, who lives in Qatar, hoping he might find a quick solution.
But my friend disappeared again after that conversation.
I reassured myself that he must have found a solution. He always found a way forward.
I was certain he would not stop, that he would never allow an obstacle to stand in his way.
My friend reappeared once again, this time from Mexico.
On his overland journey, he was folding distances into himself, moving through the geography of the world on his own feet, just as he had once moved through it virtually with his fingertips. It was a real-life version of the same journey, propelled by a determination that seemed capable of piercing borders, and by the mind-set of a soldier moving through enemy territory: advancing according to carefully considered strategies, avoiding roads controlled by gangs and gatherings that might arouse suspicion.
Even after reaching Tijuana, the final border city, where the lights of the New World shimmer on the horizon, teasing the imagination of dreamers, he remained calm and patient, waiting for the right moment to cross.
From the very beginning, my friend had chosen to be a lone wolf, unwilling to fall into the mouse trap set by patrols for crowds attempting to cross together.
Under cover of darkness, he slipped through a small opening and moved as though walking along the edge of a blade through the border zone, until he reached the urban outskirts of San Diego.
After that, he decided to proceed through legal channels. He requested to appear before a court and opened an immigration case in his name.
They gave him a distant court date, in November of that year, and temporary shelter: a cheap hotel paid for by the state.
There, he met some Moroccans who offered to take him with them to New York. He refused.
He told me that he wanted somewhere that resembled him, somewhere different, where life moved more slowly and people were less noisy.
He chose Chicago as his first destination, so that he could shake off the exhaustion of his arduous journey, settle his financial and social affairs, and search for a small, safe, stable town—a place with a low cost of living and suitable work opportunities for someone of his modest means and limited qualifications.
And so, in the end, our communication gradually slowed.
I had reassured myself that he was safe, and I thought he had reached the destination he had spent so many years pursuing. I, too, became absorbed in my daily life: my move to Ayyasha, my wife’s pregnancy, and my attempts to adjust to my new working environment.
Our last voice message exchange took place in August 2024.
I asked him whether he had found some Moroccan company to ease the loneliness of being a stranger in a foreign land.
He answered me sarcastically:
“Moroccans are everywhere. But I’m not looking for another Morocco. Every Moroccan in whom I smell the scent of patriotism arouses my hatred. I came here to learn, to integrate, to open myself to the world. Most of the people I know are from South American countries…”
I wished him well.
And so my message remained suspended somewhere between waiting and forgetting, and I did not press him for news afterward.
Between my companions and me, there had always been something like an unspoken agreement: to love without making love conditional upon presence or absence; to remain absolutely loyal and blindly trusting; an agreement upon what we called “honorable friendship,” much like the friendship I have with you.
But this time, the matter was not one of absence and presence.
Bad luck—or perhaps inevitable fate—had played the final card in my friend’s story.
I learned of his death after I returned home to Meknes. We were gathered around the lunch table when my father said to me, in a dry voice:
“Your friend Mohsen died. He was burned.”
I could not put the food into my mouth.
I tried to deny the news. I told my father that Mohsen had moved to Chicago, far from the wildfires that had recently swept through some American states.
I left the table and rushed, almost like a madman, to his home. With every step, I prayed to God that the news might be a lie, a rumor, anything but the truth.
But the truth, as I would discover later, was harsher than his mother’s mere confirmation of his death.
He had been riding a trotinette, quietly traveling along the roadside, when a massive truck struck him.
My mind could not comprehend such an ending.
Doubt entered me—doubt about the story of his death, doubt about everything.
I searched obsessively through social media for the Chilean woman’s account until I found her.
She, in turn, told me the story of her search for my friend after his disappearance.
She said she had searched for him by every means available, until intuition led her to search his name on NamUs, the American National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
A page appeared before her, written in English, bearing the title:
“Unclaimed Body.”
She suffered a nervous breakdown and wept bitterly for him.
Even now, whenever I ask about her, she shares with me the grief and depression that have tightened their grip around her since his departure.
But at the time, she gathered whatever remained of her strength.
She contacted them, and they reassured her that they would retrieve him from the cemetery and keep his body at the medical examiner’s office for a year, until someone claimed it.
But she smelled lies in their words.
So she continued searching.
She knocked on door after door and pressured them in her own way, until they finally gave in and showed her the updated final report.
The report bore the case number: ME 2024–04378.
We had returned to numbers once again.
That was how life had reduced him from beginning to end: numbers in prison and deportation records, numbers in missing-person databases, numbers in the records of the dead.
In their dry report, my friend was nothing more than an expendable body, a piece of flesh crushed onto the pavement by a speeding vehicle:
He had been accompanied by two other men, but they fled because they, too, were undocumented immigrants.
They took his phone and documents.
The only thing found with him was a church slip—the paper from the church where he received food—with his name written on it: Mohsen Mounir.
Alejandra continued her account:
“They kept his body at the morgue for only one month. Then they disposed of it.”
How deeply the manner in which they disposed of him wounded me, my friend.
They did not bury him as we do in Muslim lands, in accordance with the famous saying, “The honor due to the dead is burial.”
Instead, they burned his body, for what they claimed were technical and practical reasons.
If only they had burned his body for a human reason—for a religious belief, as the Hindus do.
What hurt me was his fear of fire.
Thus, the “law of nature” was innocent of his blood.
It was the “law of man” that turned death into an administrative matter.
As for the “law of heaven,” every night I look silently toward the sky.
Questions about justice, and about the meaning of evil and suffering in this world, have become an exercise in absurdity.
If Alejandra sees in that church slip a sign of God’s mercy, I can see no meaning in my friend’s death.
After defeating monsters, he was finally defeated by the absolute absurdity of existence itself.
Not even his faith could secure for him a shroud or a patch of earth in which to rest.
Love and peace to all the wounded of this earth—to my friend, to all of us.
Once you notice an inconsistency like that, it becomes difficult to unsee."
Creative Non-Fictionwaiting rooms are strange places to build faith
Creative Non-FictionThe feeling of leaving behind the home maybe that's what I wanted the most, maybe that's the biggest relief moving away from home, maybe it will be li