The Adventurer

To wake. To live, to breath. To search. The world is an ancient treasure chest, a sentient beast full of well kept secrets of creatures past. For as long as humans have wandered sandy shores, stalked thick jungles, slept on the moors of this great skin, the land has kept us. We have been fattened and thinned, bred and pruned. Humans are the livestock of something greater, bending over backwards at nature's whim.

I separated myself from the flock. From white-brick classrooms watching a slide show of the extremes of this beast to running to them, I was chosen. Whoever claimed the Earth will hold tight to the promises it made to past generations was correct. Prying gems from the depths cost me everything. Love, family, support: I abandoned my modern people as they abandoned me.

They called me obsessed, haunted by things surreal, and their words ring true. From the age of seven when I first heard the stories of ancients buried in jungles and deserts, my mind whirled around it. Every dream I experienced, I was there. I lived among the people, speaking their languages, eating their foods, and soaking in their rich culture. I've lived their life once, and at the edge of the Golden Desert, I was determined to find a sign of that past world. To prove, not to myself but to others, that my nighttime visions were more than nonsense created by a sick mind... I wanted to show them that I was a soul out of time, burdened by memories of my past existence.

I stepped outside of the hostel, my feet wrapped in the strips of thick beeswax cloth of my dreams. That is what my true people did so it is what I did. The dark of early morning hid the shifting dunes around me, but I knew where my city laid.

After days and days of breathing deep the sand of windy noontimes and following the stars of clear nights, I had found nothing. Was my city of towering stone lost forever? I turned to seek modern civilization. However, after another amount of countless, never-ending days, I sat in the trough of two dunes. I felt the heart of my city was buried a million miles beneath me, and here I was without a shovel. Sand cut my palms as I pushed it away, deepening the trough and my despair. No energy, no water, no help: I felt the end come near. My experiences, past and present, burned in my body like the scorching sun.

Is the past real? Is the future? Am I a flea destined to dehydrate then starve on a dry patch of the Earth's skin? If the world is a breast, then what am I? Less than a flea? An invisible, indistinguishable mite? Does the world feel me?

I laid down.

Maybe I am cursed. Maybe I am blessed. Cursed and blessed to have my mind, my memories, my body to sink within the Golden Desert. The land of my father's father was wringing me of my blood.

I could become sand.

For that, I felt grateful. Grateful to join the gems, the life and bones of those who haunted my dreams, I pushed the sand of the dune over top of me. Managing to twist and dig and roll, I buried myself alive the best I could. Deep into the skin of the world's back, I tucked myself away to become one. The noontime wind brushed my face.

I was nature: I was dust. I was where I belonged... in such a position for my bones to sink back to where my origin was kept secret by the Earth's promise to my true people.

I whispered to the depths, "may time pass me quickly. May those who recall me do so without tear. May my mother think of me and know I passed in peace."

Engulfed in the desert's parched silence, I was nothing but another grain of sand in the wind.