The man told you Zalenica lies more than two hundred miles away, and the next city — Dahranjia — is thirty miles to the west. Though you haven’t yet rested, it’s not resting what will lighten you, but the lifting of that crushing dejection. Your goal—however illusory—is all that matters now.
If your steadfastness pays off you’ll arrive in the city of Dahranjia before sunset and be one step closer to your final destination. You give for lost all the wealth your friends may have taken from you. You let bygones be bygones. That past—your material past—is behind you now. You’re never returning to that life, so perhaps they did you a favor by stripping you of the things that once bound you to it.
Yes, they betrayed you. But in truth, you would have given them everything anyway—you just didn’t have the mind to do it back then. And so, retroactively, you gift it all to them. You allow them, in your heart, to divide among themselves everything that once belonged to you.
Your muscles are killing you. You can’t go on without rest any longer. You don’t know the desert—and, as with all things unknown, you fear it. The sky begins to turn orange, and all you see around you is sand. Still, you refuse to despair. It’s not in your nature. Your have faith in your good fortune; you know it must eventually rise to meet your courage.
And so it does. You spot what appears to be a mirage shimmering ahead—but you’re not deceived. It isn’t a mirage, but a real oasis. Nestled within it are several small tents. You approach one and find an old man seated beside it, calmly sipping tea. He looks at you reassuringly, but before you can greet him, you collapse onto the sand from sheer exhaustion.
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 the tent into the soft morning light, where palm trees sway in the gentle breeze. There sits your host—exactly as you found him when you arrived, as if he hadn’t moved an inch. He must be somewhere between eighty and two hundred years old. Perhaps the sand preserves people from aging. He greets you with warmth. You glimpse into his 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 him. He speaks of his simple life, and you listen—as if it mattered, as if you weren’t leaving soon. He used to be a trader. Now he’s retired to this heaven on Earth. You agree that it’s heaven, at least compared to its surroundings. You pour your heart into the moment, offering him 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.
He senses the shift in your spirit, now visible in the lines of your face. Gently, he asks about your journey, your plans, and how you came to be in such dire straits. You tell him 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 paradise on Earth in the company of this old man. But now, you’ve had your fill of rest. It is high time you moved on, you conclude, as that frail excuse of a man looks at you with quiet understanding. You ask him whether he has some provisions he can spare for the road, and he nods in agreement. He has plenty of dry goods well-suited for the journey. In return, he 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 sharing your theories on life, but he cuts you short. He doesn’t want to hear it. He’s here to help, not to engage in dialectics.
He urges you to keep moving—anywhere or even nowhere, so long as you avoid stagnation. “Like in chess,” he says, “we’re forced to make a move, whether we like it or not. Refusing to move is forfeiting the game.”
You understand, and feel readier than ever to continue. You ask him which direction leads to
Zalenica. He isn’t certain but recommends a trustworthy guide.
You accept his suggestion and are introduced to a thin, young man with starry eyes. You bid adieu to the old geezer and prepare to set off with the guide.
You politely decline the offer, explaining that your good fortune has led you well so far. Resolute, you set off alone.
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