When I finished running, I found myself in the middle of the desert, the sky darkened by both the clouds and the night- I had no point of reference. The moonless night made it worse, and all that I was seeing around me was darkness. I could only slightly make up the shapes of the dunes like masses of darkness. I found myself on the ground, looking at the dark sky, my tent left in the oasis, the cold rising, I was afraid. In the distance I could hear the howling of the sandstorm getting closer, like packs of hyenas hunting for their wounded prey.
"God, help me." I said first.
"God, why?" I said later, and then silence.
The strangest thing of that moment - as I was lying on the ground seeing nothing but darkness, crying in fear, angry at my situation - was that to distract myself, I started to think of other than my impending death. What did I learn during these years? The words that the strange man told me resurfaced "What did I learn?" I said to myself. I remembered the happy moments I experiences during my travels but also the sad ones, the hungry and suffering people I saw, the children starving, the sick. Many of them I tried to help, but I knew deep that that that was nothing more than an egotistical craving of me wanting to get rid of that scenery, for I knew that somewhere else many more were suffering. I understood that in all these years I had learned nothing. I was the same egoistical monster, the same filthy mass of ego that wanted to surround himself with pleasures and nothing more. I just changed pleasure, like a child who first fancies a candy and then another, I had become intoxicated with the illusion of learning new things and knowing more than the rest, and for that I had used as a sacrificial lamb the suffering of others. I. Had. Learned. Nothing.
By the time I got to that line of thinking the darkness around me started to play tricks on me, slumber started to overtake me, and I could not understand what was real and what was not anymore. The absence of stimuli to my eyes caused me to experience hallucinations. I saw flickers of colors first, lines of various shapes, and then faces, voices, then only one voice. It was the old man.
"So, you understand now." Said the man.
I could not see him of course, nor did I know if I was dreaming or not at that time, but I could sense his smiling even through that darkness, a darkness of night and mind.
"Yes." I answered.
I did not fear him in that moment, perhaps due to my altered state of mind. I had convinced myself that I was dreaming. I could still sense my body, I knew that the sandstorm had reached me, I knew that my body was being buried slowly by the sand, the wind being my gravedigger. I knew that those could have been my last moments. Was I hallucinating? Was my subconscious mind trying to grasp some logic out of my life in those last moments? Maybe, so I spoke with the man.
"What's it all for? Struggling to gain more and then die?"
"So, you think that's what it's all about…?" Then he continued "Can you know light without darkness? Can you know love without hate? Can you know happiness without sadness? Can you know life...without death?" Said the man.
I felt like I started to understand something, like the feeling of a forgotten memory still in the oblivion of the mind and yet present, pocking at me trying to get my attention like a child ignored for too long pulling at his father's shirt.
"Even if that was the case, who chooses who suffers and who lives a happy life? People who live in despair all their lives know very little of happiness and vice versa. Worse, most people live in heedlessness. I did...!"
"And yet here you are, understanding it slowly, like a baby learning to walk. You were free all along, you just needed to choose, to understand that you were more than a machine built to consume and replicate itself." Said severely the man as I was losing the sense of touch, was I dead already?
"How would you have done it?" Prompted the man surprising me " How would you have taught people?"
-"I..." then a shameful silence "Stories of sages, mystics and prophets came to my mind as if answering me in my stead."
"Yes…" said the man delicately and gently, as if trying to extract a thread of light from the dark sea of my heart.
"I am a Messenger of the Maker and I have come to you with an offer." Said the Messenger.
"The Maker? You mean God?" I never really believed in a God. I used to say that no God would allow the suffering that the world was filled with. A rotten world down to the core, I thought, and I was one of its most rotten parts.
"He has many names, but you can call Him like that. He has chosen you, the reason and the wisdom once again - like this life - will be up to you to discover and they elude even me. You shall live for some time in Alem, a world of His creation in another dimension. It's similar to this world and yet very different. In that world there is also a lot of corruption but there will be a difference, you will be there. You shall be given a gift...a miracle if you like. You will be able to see in the hearts of the living creatures but that will come at a cost. That is all I can tell you."
"What!? What's the cost and what's with this story anyway? I must really be dying, and these are surely the delusions of a dying man hoping to see new life, hoping to keep leaving. Yes! This must be a trick of my mind played on me to make me tranquil and happy at the delusion of another life, before meeting oblivion."
"Delusion? Yes...many think the same as you in this world, but not in Alem. The rules are different there. And yet to me that is no excuse. Wouldn't the One who made you from dead space dust the first time, moved the gravity and forces of nature and shaped through controlled events the evolution of your kind be able to create you once again?" he chuckled almost...mockingly as if I was the stupidest man in the world, which I felt.
"Well, your journey begins Lode. You shall be born as the son of the dean of the Academia of Abkar, the capital of Alem. A word of advice if I may, do not think that in your new world you shall find only joy, that is not your paradise, and that lesson will be hard to learn. Also, you will lose your memory until the proper time comes. That has been deemed as the most efficient way to give you enough attachment to that world and its people," Said the man as only silence filled my mind. A man in his final moment, that is how I thought of myself. A man that for the first time in his life knew about faith. Yes, I had faith that those words would be true, that I would have the chance to live again, to understand more, to ponder on the few and yet profound things I had acquired.
As my consciousness drifted away the sound of a camel and my guide were heard from the distance, I then left my old world with an ironic chuckle...and with hope.