You wake up—or rather, you are reborn—into a foreign room. The past feels so distant that an epiphany strikes you: reincarnation is real. Just as we rise from deep sleep, we keep awakening from the slumber of death into a new consciousness.
Your past, in particular, is something you long to bury—so many blunders, so much suffering. How can someone so right fare so poorly in life? What did you do to deserve this fate? Were you too righteous? Did you, perchance, disturb some cosmic balance between good and evil—drawing in all the world’s misery the way a healer draws the sick?
You rise and face your new destiny with resolve. Stepping into a modest kitchen-dining room, you find a single plate of dumplings waiting for you. You devour them ravenously, hunger overtaking all decorum. Then, you step outside into an orchard bathed in morning light. There stands your host—the sturdy woman you glimpsed in the final, drowsy moments of your journey. She greets you with warmth. You glimpse into her heart—pure and straightforward, incapable of guile. Not like yours, layered like a mille-feuille of bittersweet intricacies.
You strike up a vivid conversation with her. She speaks of her simple life, and you listen—as if it mattered, as if you weren’t leaving soon. Yet you pour your heart into the moment, offering her your undivided attention. For a while, you forget your tribulations. Beneath the diaphanous sky, there are no sorrows. Everything feels in its right place, as though the world had briefly fallen into perfect order. You wish to prolong this moment, to linger a little longer in its stillness—but you know you can’t. There’s a mission ahead, whether ordained by life or nature. You must return to your own path—the only way of life your limited soul can comprehend.
She senses the shift in your spirit, now visible in the lines of your face. Gently, she asks about your journey, your plans, and how you came to be in such dire straits. You tell her it all happened for a reason: your friends’ betrayal was simply the natural outcome of your blindness to their unspoken longings and your own uncompromising righteousness. You sought a deeper meaning in life, embarking on this journey across the world, completely disregarding the needs of those closest to you. Their perfidy, in the end, was born of necessity—just as a slave might betray a master who trusts him to never run away
With all your closest relatives gone, you entrusted your best friend with the care of your properties and burdened another with a will in her name, fully aware that your demise would offer her financial redemption from all her debts. You could hardly believe the Machiavellian path you’d fallen into, exposing your friend to the potential martyrdom of bearing the guilt of inheriting money born from her best friend’s death.
You don’t blame them for what they did to you. How could you? You were blind to the fact that one of your closest friends was a dissolute bourgeois, while the other harbored dreams that only money could fulfill. How much must it have cost them to plot against the friend they had loved so dearly for much of their lives? How much must it be costing them now, as they believe their best friend is dead? You didn’t want to fathom it. Was it their fault they believed their best friend had gone mad? Could they be blamed for wanting to preserve the wealth left behind by loving parents to an ungrateful child whose only aim seemed to be squandering it all on haphazard chimeras?
They had simply resolved to fulfill their friend’s death wish and leave this poor soul to wither in a faraway desert. Together with you, they had ridden to its very edge, under the false pretense of accompanying their companion on a wasteful, life-changing journey. Then, beneath the cover of night and slumber, they had likely drugged their unsuspecting victim, leaving the body for slave traders to seize—or for the sand to swallow.
You didn’t know why or how you later found yourself in the middle of the desert—or was it really the middle? Had you simply lost your bearings, blinded by heartbreak and deception, wandering deeper and deeper into the abyss instead of finding your way out?
Only one thing was clear: your friends had abandoned you, and you didn’t know if you had the strength to survive. This despondency ignited your soul, fueling a rage that momentarily restored your energy—only to see it spent in futile outbursts of hatred against inanimate objects that, in your mind, stood in for your duplicitous friends. This madness carried on until you reached the end of your strength, and with your wrath spent, all that remained was understanding—and, eventually, forgiveness.
That’s when you came across the caravan—the turning point that set in motion the chain of events that ultimately brought you here, to this woman’s orchard, amid apple and pear trees. But now, you’ve had your fill of rest. It is high time you moved on, you conclude, as the woman looks at you with quiet understanding. You tell her you need a means of transport, and she nods in agreement. Her trader friends, she says, left behind a dromedary that can serve that purpose. In return, she asks only one thing: that you fulfill your destiny—whatever you believe it to be.
You try to explain your plan of having no plan, your decision to never decide again. In the spur of the moment, you begin a diatribe against life, but she cuts you short. She doesn’t want to hear it. She’s here to help, not to enable your self-destruction.
She urges you to keep moving—anywhere or even nowhere, so long as you avoid stagnation. “Like in chess,” she says, “we’re forced to make a move, whether we like it or not. Refusing to move is forfeiting the game.”
You understand. And you’re readier than ever to go. You bid her adieu and mount the dromedary she gave you.
***
You head toward the city’s main square, where the noise of life hums like a distant drum. You don’t know what awaits, but for the first time in a while, you’re no longer afraid to find out. – go to this page
***
You head outside the city, leaving behind the comfort of newfound affection. The unknown stretches before you like an open wound. – go to this page
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