Because I was twenty-four, an entitled American full of wants. I wanted, and not necessarily in this order:
- Morocco to change me, to allow me to reimagine myself, to teach me to see the way it taught Delacroix, to open me up to new colors and patterns and perspectives the way it did for Matisse.
- Chris to be my new best friend. To have friends and, better yet, a best one.
- Sabrina’s attention, admiration, love. Sabrina.
- The self-pitying man-child I’d been in suburban New Jersey to, through the alchemical processes of living abroad, magically transform into a self-confident, capable, charismatic young man.
Because, because.
Chris, mentor, knowledgeable expat. Sabrina. Moroccan. An artist. Beautiful, smart, ambitious. She was everything I felt I wasn’t. I loved that in her, that otherness.
But did I love her? And she, me?
Answers came in January during a day trip to the city of Moulay Idriss. Sabrina and Chris and I climbed the hill up through the medina. Houses of tile and stucco climbed the hill with us, either in the process of being built or abandoned and crumbling, it was hard to say, construction and decay can look so similar. We reached a gap between two buildings, white walls framing a swath of newly clear sky. A muddy plain, green and brown under an intense, weighty blue.
“I’d love to paint here. To capture this,” Sabrina said, smiling into the weak winter sun.
“When the weather changes, come back with your easel. I could tag along,” I offered.
“Let me show you the minaret,” Chris said quickly, pointing farther up the hill. “It’s the only cylindrical one in Morocco.”
I left the sun reluctantly and followed Chris and Sabrina into the shade of the alley. Around a corner, the Sentissi Mosque swelled into view, a large cylinder coated in green tiles, encircled in white Arabic script, with three balls on the spire decreasing in size, the smallest at the top.
“Alex. We have to sketch this,” Sabrina said. “It’ll be a useful exercise. Chris, want to try?”
“Sure, I’ll have a go.”
We three sat on the curb and started to sketch. When I first met Sabrina, I’d overstated my interest in sketching as a way to play up any point of connection. I wasn’t interested in sketching; I was interested in her. In the way she might help me fill out the unfinished sketch of myself. I watched Sabrina’s hands slide and drag the graphite across the paper as she churned out a series of line drawings, a rush of squiggles that made the miniature minaret leap off her page. Chris seemed concerned solely with perspective and drew a series of dark lines leading down the alley, a blueprint more than a sketch, though I had no idea what he might be building.
Sabrina looked at the listing tower of smears on my page and laughed.
“What? I studied art history, not studio arts,” I said.
“No, it’s good,” she said.
Chris laughed.
“Good?”
“Yes, well, it’s expressive,” she said, scrunching her face up at it.
“What does it express?”
“It has emotion. Ah,” she said, snapping her fingers. “It’s the pathetic fallacy.”
“Excuse me?”
Chris laughed again. So did Sabrina. Together, they laughed.
“You know, like in painting,” she said. “When inanimate things take on human feelings.”
“What feelings has this sketch taken on?” I asked, blushing because I suddenly knew the answer.
“It’s your drawing, you tell me.”
“What about mine?” Chris asked before I could answer.
Sabrina smiled at him and praised his clear, confident lines, his illusion of depth.
We took a photo together before we left. I set my camera up on an empty milk crate and used the timer but didn’t make it to them in time. My back is the dark foreground in the photo, a faceless stranger running toward Chris and Sabrina, a couple standing together, smiling. Sabrina and Chris. Not me. A them, not an us. When did that happen? I still don’t know. The how of it. The why. Though the photo memorializes it. Chris and Sabrina and, behind them, the flattened world: blue sky, muddy fields, and the faintest outline of the Roman ruins of Volubilis. In the center stands Chris, his arm around Sabrina. In her hands is my sketch full of unsaid and unreturned feeling, one smeary, pathetic page.
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Kent Kosack is a writer living in Pittsburgh, PA. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh where he teaches composition and creative writing. He also serves as the Director of the Educational Arm at Asymptote, a journal of world literature in translation. His work has been published in Tin House (Flash Fidelity), the Cincinnati Review, the Normal School, Hobart, and elsewhere. See more at: www.kentkosack.com