Echoes of Silence

Those harsh events that you endure, you will engrave them one day upon the edges of your heart… and then those harsh events will forge you into a different person.

Then, O mind, you return to the quagmire of silence… to the realm of nothingness… to where impetuosity ends and the soul unravels from its existential knots… What is the tale? The tale… is that the aperture of light through which you perceived that world has also been extinguished… and that radiance has vanished… and the long road has returned to its former darkness… and you have retreated into silence once more!?

Well… perhaps the desert and survival are two opposing poles, like fire and water, each extinguishing the other, but where will you go? Will you go to a place where the past cannot find you? Or will you go to a present that your future shuns, or will you go to your past itself, which has become ashes carried away by the wind?

You are mistaken… Do you not know that the present and future of the desert is the past itself?!

Your will to change within the desert of silence is not shattered by despair… nor is it crushed by deficiency… it is shattered and crushed by your silence alone… What is (silence)? It is akin to the settling of desert sands upon everything… when that silent desert buries beneath the stillness of its sands the rocks and the splendor of flowers and the beauty of faces and everything that shines in life… silence is the nightmare of the mind… and the void of existence… the repository of your slow death… whether you will it or not.

By: Khalid Al-Otaibi