Korero

When you woke up this morning, the bright sun seemed not to have moved since the day before. Everyone was sleeping. With half-closed eyes, you tiptoed to the restroom. The unknown reflection in the mirror shocks you—you are losing the “you” that has always been a trusted companion! Squinting only confirms that nothing is wrong with the vision; it was your disappointed peering. What you witnessed is absolutely correct. A dispiriting feeling restrains your movement. Time betrayed. You assumed otherwise. The key to your quests was still missing, and the perspicuity of how things ought to be is worthless. Suddenly, you hear an indistinct knock on the door, yet it blurs your sight momentarily, so it seems. That’s all you remember for a long time.

Time is not always linear. You were here not long ago, you reason. Silence falls and becomes maddening, a weighty heart bereft. Brain-throbbing soliloquy begins again; you interrogate your assumptions and cannot fathom how you got where you are! Utterly exhausted, within a minute or so of trying, you shut your eyes as if the answers were in the darkness. You hear a sound similar to your voice but not quite the same: Why does it matter where you are? You wanted to argue that terrain and time are essential to human cognition, but could not speak.

Being a city person with a respectable job, you blacked out in the morning from severe dehydration. How could that be? The question repeated in your mind like a Ferris wheel, along with a badly bruised elbow, skin laceration on one side of the forehead, and a chick. You were lucky, and it could have been worse because of your age, experts comforted. The wounds and physiological peculiarities are the least of your concerns. Bodies withstand tsunamis of caloric abuse. It protests passionately when the “Qalb,” the heart, becomes too barren yet heavy to carry. You devoured energies to avoid going into a black hole of ebb. That is your last recent recollection.

Your crisis is not from a directionless, meandering journey but the exactness of your search criteria. Searching implies you understand what to look for in the first place—most don’t, and neither do you too! It’s an imperfection. Love, passion, and tenderness may begin with serendipity; only struggles, grinds, and sweats reveal it.

Emptied of vitality and hesitant to talk, you meekly ask for guidance! The offering of the voice continues: You are a single cell for up to 30 hours after conception before the cell starts division. Everything about you—appearance, temperament, likes and dislikes, and how you will become—was etched in a cell, in the oneness of only a single cell. Everything is tied together solely with hopes and prayers in a minuscule chamber. The lung develops and remains a fluid-filled organ moments before your first breath. A miracle chaperones it to complete the crucial adjustment instantly after birth: turn into an air pump and begin breathing. Since then, the clock does not count up as you age; it counts down towards your demise. You become of your past for the remains of your doings, of your caring you leave behind.

There is no better guidance; instead, you attend to what the sun and the moon have been whispering to you. Haven’t you delayed enough? When the sun saunters to the other side of the earth to usher in dawn, the moon begins its play to tug the waves of the sea. The water anchoring to the shore or receding to the sea is from the precise dance of the sun, moon, and earth. The sea is uninvolved, and the tide doesn’t assume better possibilities are available back in the sea. Only the inevitable awaits.

Everything emerges choreographed and marches towards a faithful destination—your trailing knowledge that has escaped acceptance until now. You, a person of books and reading, surrender to pule. That is what this moment dictates! A teardrop, genuine remorse, could incite your pilgrimage to mend the barren “Qalb.” So what, if anything, should change in measures?