Egypt, Chapter VII — The Fire and Everything I No Longer Had to Earn
The fire came.
Not immediately.
First, the desert had the elegance to extinguish the day slowly.
A man walked along a ridge.
He was so small he looked like an imperfection in the mountain, a dark comma accidentally left between earth and sky. The sun was behind him, low and fierce, and his body no longer possessed a face, an age, a history, or a destination.
He walked.
I did not know where he was going.
Perhaps home.
Perhaps toward someone.
Perhaps he was merely crossing that ridge because it was the quickest way to reach the other side, and I was the only asshole sufficiently inclined toward symbolism to turn a walk into a metaphysical crisis.
But after a day spent asking myself which road to choose, that figure felt like the desert’s final provocation.
I kept demanding a destination.
He put one foot in front of the other.
Perhaps the problem was not knowing where the fuck I was going.
Perhaps it was this need to justify every step through something large enough to be called destiny.
The sun sank behind the mountains.
The shapes lost their substance.
Every outline became shadow, then the shadow became another mountain, and the mountain ended inside the sky.
The desert was erasing the edges.
The distances.
The differences.
All those lines that, during the day, allow us to say: this is me, that is the world, my story ends there, and what does not concern me begins.
Before night arrived, it asked me one final question.
What are you willing to let burn?
I had prepared the correct answer.
The fears.
The excuses.
The need for approval.
The inability to choose.
The running away.
The cynicism.
The past.
Practically the complete catalog of every spiritual retreat run by a white man in linen pants with three divorces behind him and a remarkable talent for billing other people’s enlightenment.
I was ready to offer the fire every wrong part of myself.
I would watch them burn.
Pronounce some definitive sentence.
Return home renewed, purified, and perhaps photogenic enough to look credible while explaining to others how to free themselves from their egos.
Then I got angry.
Not with the desert.
Not only with the desert.
I got angry at the question.
Why did I have to let something burn?
Why must every transformation always resemble a funeral?
Who the fuck had decided that, to become a better person, I had to declare war on the person I had been?
I had already spent enough time regarding myself as a defective project.
A man to be corrected.
A child to be disciplined.
A series of dysfunctional behaviors held together by a camera, a few good intentions, and a decent vocabulary with which to make structural damage sound fascinating.
Perhaps I did not need another sentence.
Perhaps I needed an amnesty.
The night before, I had thought about the child convinced he had to accomplish something important in order to deserve love.
He was still there.
Standing inside me.
Small.
Watchful.
With that fucking anxiety in his eyes that belongs to children who have become too good at reading adults’ moods.
The child who shows you a drawing and checks the viewer’s face before he even looks at what he made.
The one who learns early to be intelligent.
Funny.
Well behaved.
Special.
Useful.
Whatever it takes to make someone stay.
He grows up believing love is a salary.
You have to produce.
You have to distinguish yourself.
You have to make people proud.
You have to become important enough to compensate for the inconvenience of having been born with needs.
Then you become an adult and continue.
You look for a prestigious job.
A desirable body.
A story worth telling.
Someone beautiful enough to prove that you too must be worth something.
You cross countries.
Take photographs.
Write.
Create.
You work your ass off to become somebody and, when someone finally looks at you, discover the child has not moved.
He is still there.
Waiting to find out whether this time he was good enough.
But a child should not have to do anything important to deserve love.
Nothing.
He should not have to become special.
He should not have to be brilliant.
He should not have to make himself easy to manage.
He should not have to turn his pain into talent, his loneliness into independence, or his fear into a personality entertaining enough not to make adults uncomfortable.
He should be loved because he is here.
The end.
Everything else is emotional bookkeeping.
And bookkeeping, however necessary when the accountant arrives, is a shitty way to raise a human being.
Perhaps that was what I had to let burn.
Not the child.
The contract.
That clause written by no one and signed by me thousands of times, stating that I would receive love only after proving I deserved it.
Burn the courtroom.
Not the defendant.
The mountains turned black.
The sky held on to one last orange strip, then a dirty purple, then that deep blue that arrives a few minutes before night and makes everything distant and intimate at once.
We entered the tent.
The light was red.
Not red like sunset.
Red like the inside of a body.
Fabrics, rugs, ropes, and objects emerged from the darkness in fragments. A man dressed in white sat before us. He was speaking, singing, telling a story, or simply holding the evening together through his presence.
I did not understand every word.
It was appropriate.
I had spent the entire journey assigning meanings to stones, animals, and silences. At last I met a human being who spoke, and I could not understand a fucking thing.
But the voice reached me.
The tone.
The pauses.
The way his hands accompanied the sentences.
Not all understanding passes through words.
Sometimes you know someone is sad from the way he laughs.
You know a person is afraid from the precision with which she organizes everything.
You know she wants you to come closer precisely when she makes every possible effort to appear unreachable.
I had accused myself of being difficult to reach.
It was true.
I had built a respectable number of doors.
Some armored.
Others revolving, particularly useful for letting someone in and sending them straight back out before they could understand what was happening.
I used cynicism.
Silence.
Distance.
Irony.
That expression of a man who needs nothing, very effective until he truly ends up alone and begins wondering why no one guessed he was only acting.
But does being difficult to reach really mean being impossible to understand?
And above all, does it mean we do not deserve to have someone try?
Fear makes us complicated.
Not evil.
It makes you close a door at the precise moment you desperately want someone to knock.
It makes you say “it doesn’t matter” when it matters enough to keep you awake.
It makes you leave someone before that person can choose to leave you.
It is a protection system designed by a drunk engineer: it prevents some accidents by causing larger ones.
Of course, no one should spend a lifetime trying to break down our walls.
Love is not a tactical unit assigned to storm the emotional apartment of a man barricaded behind the couch.
We cannot hurt people, disappear, return, close ourselves off, and then accuse everyone else of failing to interpret the Morse code of our trauma correctly.
Sooner or later, we have to open up.
Even a little.
Even badly.
Leave a light on.
Provide an address.
Say: I am here, I am afraid, and I will probably ruin the first part of this conversation, but do not leave yet.
Perhaps being understood does not mean someone has to guess everything.
It means finding someone willing to listen to what we manage to say, and becoming brave enough not to hide the very part we hope will be seen.
The man continued speaking beneath the red light.
His face moved in and out of shadow.
I did not understand the sentences.
I stayed.
Sometimes understanding begins that way.
Not with translation.
With not leaving.
On the rug were a small kettle and a hookah.
Metal.
Glass.
Tubes.
Decorations.
Objects built to turn fire into smoke and time into something to share.
Someone prepared the charcoal.
The hands worked carefully.
Lifting.
Arranging.
Checking.
The red of the embers reflected on the fingers and the foil. Every piece looked dead until air passed through it. Then it glowed again.
The fire was not yet the great blaze that would come later.
It was an ember.
A small concentration of heat resting on something people had built to contain it.
I thought about an easy life.
I had always felt a certain shame in wanting one.
A simple life.
Enough money.
Time.
Travel.
Photographs.
Stories.
Someone to love without having to turn every week into an emergency session of the United Nations on emotional boundaries.
Work capable of supporting me without devouring everything else.
Mornings without the feeling that I was already late for a competition I could not remember entering.
What was so wrong with that?
Why must every honest desire immediately be accompanied by a voice reminding us how much we will have to suffer to obtain it?
Do you want to live from your creativity?
Prepare to starve.
Do you want to be free?
Prepare for loneliness.
Do you want to love?
Prepare to be devastated.
Do you want to know yourself?
Prepare to meet hell.
Do you want to be well?
Work on yourself for the next forty years, buy seventeen books, forgive seven generations of ancestors, wake at five, plunge into ice, and preferably stop eating anything with flavor.
We are obsessed with difficulty.
We treat it as a certificate of authenticity.
If something came easily, it must be worth little.
If you did not bleed, you did not learn.
If you did not destroy yourself, you did not love.
If you did not come close to a nervous breakdown, you did not work hard enough.
It is a religion built by priests, executives, and particularly vindictive personal trainers.
Pain confers authority.
Those who have suffered may speak.
Those who were lucky must apologize.
But not everything difficult is important.
Taking a shit with hemorrhoids is difficult too, yet no one should turn it into a spiritual mission.
Suffering does not automatically make what we are living profound.
Sometimes it merely makes everything more painful.
A complicated relationship is not necessarily more real.
A job that consumes you is no more dignified.
A poor artist does not make better work because the refrigerator is empty.
Hunger can produce urgency.
It also produces terrible decisions, neglected teeth, and a certain difficulty concentrating on transcendence when the rent is due Friday.
Simplicity is not a crime.
Relief is not a moral failure.
An easy road is no less of a road.
It carries us forward without requiring us to become martyrs to the journey.
If a winning number truly existed, I would have accepted it gladly.
Without pretending to be detached.
Without that bullshit about money not buying happiness, almost always repeated by people who have enough of it not to be forced to test the opposite every morning.
I would have taken the number.
Cashed in.
Paid whatever needed paying.
Bought time.
Freedom.
Tickets.
Equipment.
A house quiet enough to hear my thoughts and close enough to an airport to carry them elsewhere when they grew boring.
I would have helped someone.
I probably would have bought some useless shit too, because purity belongs to saints, and I remain dangerously attracted to camera lenses I do not need and cars with more personality than safety systems.
What would have been wrong with that?
No one becomes morally superior by receiving confusing directions.
If the universe truly knows the future, it might occasionally refrain from communicating it through a bird seen at 5:17 p.m., three tilted stones, and a song heard by chance while you buy toothpaste.
It could send an arrow.
An address.
Six numbers and a bonus number.
An unambiguous message.
“Go there.”
“Trust this person.”
“Do not sign that contract.”
“This time you are not simply afraid: it really is a terrible idea.”
That would be convenient.
Merciful too.
And I see no reason why mercy should be considered less spiritual than suffering.
The world has convinced us that everything precious must come at a cost.
Perhaps because if it were free, no one would know how to bill for it.
The embers were placed on top of the hookah.
The man inhaled.
The charcoal came more fully alive.
Then he exhaled a white cloud.
Smoke covered his face.
For a few seconds, the man disappeared behind what he had just released from himself.
It struck me as an honest image.
We do the same thing.
We fill the space with words, jokes, plans, noise, and carefully edited versions of our identities, then complain that no one can see us anymore.
But the smoke was not the man.
It passed.
The face remained.
Perhaps my defenses were like that.
Smoke.
They served a purpose.
They made the air less transparent.
They allowed me to hide.
They could make the eyes of anyone who came too close begin to water.
But they were not my nature.
They were what I had learned to exhale whenever someone looked in the right direction.
The man smoked while seated among other hanging hookahs.
Around him were glass, metal, tubes, and red reflections. He looked surrounded by small breathing apparatuses built for a species incapable of keeping its hands still during a conversation.
There was no hurry.
No one talked about productivity.
No one measured the economic return on that moment.
Charcoal was prepared.
People drank.
Smoked.
Listened.
Let time pass without immediately feeding it into the industrial machinery of meaning.
Perhaps living to the fullest did not mean filling every day.
Perhaps it meant being completely inside it.
The fullest is not always a quantity.
It can be an intensity.
Truly looking.
Truly listening.
Eating when you eat.
Loving when you love.
Leaving when you leave.
Staying when you stay.
Not spending half your life imagining the alternative and the other half photographing the first one to prove it existed.
Simplicity does not consist in owning little.
I had seen enough to know how easy it is, for those who can afford it, to turn other people’s poverty into philosophical decoration.
Money matters.
Safety matters.
Food, a home, medical care, and the right to make mistakes matter.
There is nothing spiritual about being unable to pay a dentist.
Simplicity is something else.
It is not building an altar around what we need.
Earning without turning money into the unit by which the soul is measured.
Working without making exhaustion a personality.
Owning without letting every object become a piece of our identity.
Doing what must be done, then having the courage to consider it enough.
We, on the other hand, have turned busyness into a religion.
We have to grow.
Optimize.
Expand.
Monetize.
Become the best version of ourselves, as though the current one were a free app full of ads and happiness could be unlocked only by purchasing a premium subscription.
More achievements.
More money.
More experiences.
More awareness.
Even the soul has to show a quarterly growth curve, or some cosmic consultant might summon it to discuss its performance.
But what if the purpose were not to grow forever?
What if it were to deepen?
What if a life did not always have to grow larger, only truer?
Outside the tent, night had occupied everything.
Several people sat on the rocks.
They were scattered along the hillside in small groups, lit by a warm light that could not fully reach their faces.
Behind them was nothing.
Or at least nothing the photograph could record.
The darkness had erased the desert.
The mountains.
The tracks.
The distance traveled.
Bodies seated on the earth remained, suspended in a space without coordinates.
Daylight divides us through details.
Clothes.
Roles.
Ages.
Objects.
Night returns everyone to the same condition.
Temporary presences gathered around something that produces a little light.
Seen from there, no one appeared destined to accomplish anything important.
It was a relief.
Perhaps the need to be important is merely the terror of disappearing.
We know time will erase us.
So we build.
Sign.
Publish.
Accumulate.
We put our names on buildings, companies, books, photographs, plaques, and children, hoping something will go on pronouncing them when we can no longer answer.
But the desert had swallowed entire civilizations.
Pharaohs.
Armies.
Names carved into stone by men convinced they had defeated death through sound typographic strategy.
Sand possesses more patience than the ego.
Sooner or later, it covers everything.
And so perhaps I did not have to do something important.
Perhaps I had to do something alive.
There is a difference.
The important demands witnesses.
The living happens even when no one is looking.
A conversation.
A journey.
A photograph that will win nothing but keep a face from disappearing completely.
A story told well.
A question capable of opening a space inside someone.
A laugh at the wrong moment.
A hand resting on another without trying to fix it.
Perhaps that could be enough.
The great fire was lit shortly afterward.
The flames rose quickly, as though they had waited beneath the earth all day.
Wood.
Sparks.
Smoke.
The wind moved the heat.
The fire possessed none of the symbolic delicacy with which we love to describe it.
It burned.
If you came too close, it hurt.
If the wind shifted, smoke entered your eyes and destroyed all mystical dignity within seconds, leaving you coughing like a teenager taking his first drag from a stolen cigarette.
The flame rose.
Bent.
Vanished.
Returned higher.
Every second it had a different shape.
No shape complained about its brevity.
The fire did not try to preserve itself.
It consumed what it had.
Made light.
Then let it go.
I thought again about running away.
I had told myself that sometimes I was not free.
I was simply fleeing.
It was true.
But since when does running away exclude freedom?
A prisoner’s first form of freedom is leaving the cell.
He does not need to know where he is going yet.
He does not need a five-year plan, a resolved identity, and a home furnished with Scandinavian restraint.
He has to cross the threshold.
Sometimes flight is cowardice.
Other times it is survival.
You can run from a responsibility you ought to bear.
You can also run from a life that is slowly extinguishing you and finally call that movement by its proper name.
Leaving.
Saving yourself.
Breathing somewhere else.
The world loves to judge those who leave.
Especially the people with an interest in making them stay.
They will tell you that you did not fight hard enough.
That you should have tried again.
That relationships take work.
That real jobs are hard.
That family is always family, even when it uses guilt like a chain wrapped in good intentions.
That adults do not run away.
Bullshit.
Adults run away all the time.
Sometimes they do it just in time.
Running away ceases to be freedom when it no longer serves to get us out of something, but to keep us from ever truly entering anything.
When every closeness becomes a cage.
Every promise a threat.
Every difficulty confirmation that we chose the wrong road.
When we keep leaving because we never learned the difference between a place that imprisons us and one that simply asks us to remain present.
But not every departure is an escape.
And not every escape is a fault.
You can be free while running away.
Not because fear has ceased to exist.
Because, at least that once, it is carrying you away from what wanted to destroy you.
The fire grew.
People watched it.
From a distance, it was a bright stain inside the dark.
Up close, it became a wall.
The photograph could choose.
A small light surrounded by night.
Or a blaze large enough to occupy everything.
We do the same with our stories.
We decide the distance.
Up close, every pain is enormous.
From far away, it looks like an episode.
Neither image lies.
They are two truths incapable of existing in the same frame.
A man stood near the fire.
His face was lit on one side and swallowed by shadow on the other. He watched the flames with an expression I could not interpret.
Wonder.
Weariness.
Waiting.
Perhaps he was wondering when the show would end so he could go home.
We always demand that faces contain the meaning we want.
But people retain the right not to symbolize anything.
That man did not have to embody the wisdom of the desert.
He might have been bored.
Hungry.
Worried about a bill.
He might have been thinking about a woman.
A child.
A game.
How much firewood was left.
That was the limit of every story I told.
I could gather images.
I could not possess the truth of the people inside them.
Perhaps telling stories meant accepting that distance.
Coming close enough to see.
Remaining humble enough to know something would stay outside.
Not capturing the world.
Letting it pass through me.
Then the fire-breather arrived.
He brought the flame to his mouth.
Inhaled.
For an instant, he held inside himself something that could burn him.
Then blew.
A tongue of fire crossed the night.
His face disappeared behind the explosion.
People watched.
Someone applauded.
I took the picture.
It was spectacular, dangerous, and slightly insane.
Therefore, naturally, very human.
Take something capable of destroying you.
Put it in your mouth.
Return it to the world in the form of wonder.
Perhaps that was what it meant to create.
Not to heal.
Not to purify yourself.
Not to turn every wound into an uplifting fable in which pain is thanked for its valuable contribution to personal growth.
Pain can go fuck itself.
It does not deserve gratitude merely because we survived.
But we can take it.
Hold it close enough to learn its heat.
Then spit it out in a form that illuminates someone else’s face for a moment.
A photograph.
A page.
A story.
Not because what burned us was right.
Because it has happened, and letting it consume everything else would show far too much respect for what hurt us.
The fire left the man’s mouth and vanished almost immediately.
Darkness remained.
Then another flame.
Another gesture.
Another brief portion of night made visible.
Perhaps this was what I had always sought by traveling.
Not a final answer.
A temporary light.
Bright enough to reveal something.
Brief enough to force me to keep looking.
I wanted to question the world.
Gather stories.
Photograph the marks people leave on things and the marks things leave on people.
I wanted to pass through places whose language I did not know, sit beside someone, listen to what I could understand, and carry back an imperfect testimony.
I wanted to increase understanding.
Not the kind useful for sounding intelligent over dinner, nor the kind accumulated to win arguments with particularly irritating strangers.
An understanding capable of enlarging the soul.
If a soul exists.
I have no proof.
It may be merely a poetic term for the part of us that cannot be fully explained by a medical chart, a bank statement, and a browser history.
But if something exists within us that is not merely human, perhaps it does not want a career.
It wants breadth.
It wants to see.
To know.
To be changed by what it encounters.
It wants to return from every journey a little less certain and a little more capable of containing lives different from its own.
The rest was human.
Money.
Reputation.
Achievements.
The fear of falling behind.
The need to possess a definition clear enough to recite when someone asks, “What do you do?”
I photograph.
I write.
I travel.
I tell stories.
Useful words.
Labels pasted over a mystery so others can file us away without wasting too much time.
But this hunger for the world?
This need to look into an unfamiliar face and wonder what story carried it there?
The need to preserve a gesture, a light, a piece of silence, and return them to someone who was not present?
No.
That did not seem merely human to me.
Or perhaps it was the most human part of all—the part with so little to do with society’s ordinary functioning that it seemed to have arrived from somewhere else.
It did not always produce money.
It offered no stability.
Guaranteed no love.
But it kept me alive.
Perhaps the mission was not to become important through what I created.
It was to remain alive enough to keep creating.
The distinction struck me with almost offensive simplicity.
I had spent years asking how to turn my art into a life.
Perhaps my art was the way life passed through me.
The work remained.
So did the bills.
Poetry does not automatically pay for electricity, and the landlord has rather limited sensitivity toward vocational crises.
I had to build.
Sell.
Organize.
Choose.
Do all those human, boring, unavoidable things that keep a dream from dying of an administrative problem.
But I did not have to worship them.
I did not have to confuse the scaffolding with the house.
The tools served life.
Life did not serve the tools.
A little farther on, two men held a large white paper shell illuminated from within.
A lantern.
The light swelled the paper and made their faces look almost childlike.
They smiled.
They did not wear the expressions of men busy solving the meaning of existence.
They were doing something simple.
Protecting a small flame from the wind.
Waiting for the hot air to fill the paper.
Letting the light become buoyant enough to rise.
I thought of the desires I had entrusted to the sea.
The mission.
Money.
Love.
Maturity.
Perhaps I had loaded them with too much weight.
I had asked for a mission as though it had to justify every day of my life.
Perhaps it could be only this: paying attention and telling what I had seen.
I had asked for money as proof that my talent had value.
Perhaps I needed enough resources to continue, not an economic verdict on the quality of my soul.
I had asked for someone beside me.
Perhaps I did not first have to make myself perfectly habitable.
No one is.
People are houses built during an earthquake by workers who lost the instructions and drank too much wine at lunch.
I could be loved even with some rooms locked.
Provided I stopped pretending they did not exist and handed over at least one key.
I had asked for maturity.
Believing it meant silencing the child.
Perhaps it meant finally sitting beside him and telling him what he should have heard long ago.
You do not have to become anyone.
You do not have to accomplish something enormous.
You do not have to astonish the world.
You do not have to earn the right to be loved.
You may fail.
You may be afraid.
You may change your mind.
You may even run away.
I will stay.
The adult I wanted to become was not the one capable of controlling the child.
It was the one who would no longer abandon him.
The men released the lantern.
It rose.
Not quickly.
For an instant, it seemed uncertain, suspended above their hands as though even light needed reassurance before leaving.
Then the wind took it.
The white became smaller.
The night larger.
I did not know where it would fall.
I did not know how long the flame would last.
I did not know whether the thing represented a wish, a tradition, a show for tourists, or simply a sufficiently evocative way to risk setting something on fire miles away.
But I watched it rise.
And I wished again.
Without shame.
I wished for an easy road.
I wished for the winning number.
Readable directions.
Someone capable of understanding that sometimes I would be difficult to reach, but enough of a bitch not to let me use fear as a license to behave badly.
I wished to travel.
Photograph.
Gather stories.
Tell them.
Live long enough to become ever more curious and ever less certain of my conclusions.
I wished not to have to turn everything into a battle.
Not because I wanted to avoid life.
Because I finally wanted enough energy to live it.
There was nothing wrong with that.
Wanting ease did not mean demanding freedom from responsibility.
It meant ceasing to regard suffering as a mandatory tax on happiness.
Life would hurt anyway.
People would die.
Love might end.
The body would fail.
Some projects would collapse.
Time would keep taking away what I loved with the motherfucking punctuality for which it is known.
There was no need to add artificial obstacles to make the journey more authentic.
Life did not need my help to become difficult.
I could accept every easy stretch as a gift.
Without distrusting it.
Without sabotaging it.
Without wondering what tragedy it was preparing around the corner to restore the proper narrative balance.
At last, a few people remained sitting around a small light.
Not the great fire.
Not the flame breathed into the night.
A fire lit on the ground.
Little light.
Enough to see the hands.
The legs.
The faces nearby.
The rest of the desert was blue and black.
The final scene possessed nothing heroic.
No mountain to conquer.
No solitary man on a ridge.
No test.
No purification.
People sitting together.
A light between them.
Perhaps the entire story of humanity began and ended there.
Someone finds a fire.
Someone else comes closer.
To keep it from going out, they tell stories.
Stories keep them awake.
Teach them where the water is.
Which animals to avoid.
Who died.
Whom we loved.
Where we came from.
Why we are afraid.
What we saw beyond the mountain.
Before books, photographs, platforms, algorithms, and that fucking need to turn every form of expression into a positioning strategy, storytelling served this purpose.
To keep a little light among human beings.
Perhaps I did not need a more important mission.
Gather stories.
Carry them elsewhere.
Add a face to the memory of someone who was not there.
Question the world without demanding that I solve it.
Increase, encounter by encounter, the amount of reality my soul could contain.
Live to the fullest, yes.
But not as we had been taught.
Not by consuming everything.
Not by running everywhere.
Not by turning existence into a list of experiences to complete before death catches us with a few boxes still unchecked.
Living to the fullest could mean not being absent.
Not moving through one day thinking only of the next.
Not looking at another person while waiting for your turn to speak.
Not photographing a man in order to use him, but allowing his face to keep asking questions even after the picture is taken.
Living with the fullest possible presence.
With as little bullshit in the way as possible.
The great fire began to subside.
The lantern was distant now.
The embers preserved small pockets of red.
I had not received the winning number.
A serious administrative failure on the universe’s part remained.
I had no precise directions for the future.
I did not know how much I would earn, whom I would love, where I would live, or which parts of me would remain difficult to reach.
I did not even know whether the simplicity I wanted was truly possible, or merely another elegant name for the desire to evade everything that frightened me.
But I did not have to deliver a verdict that night.
I could live inside the question.
It was what I had always done.
Perhaps it was what I did best.
The sea had signed no promises.
The desert had dismantled my excuses.
The fire had not purified me.
Egypt had not transformed me into a man who had everything figured out.
Thank God.
Men who have everything figured out are often unbearable creatures. They have an answer for everything, an opinion no one requested, and a dangerous tendency to begin sentences with “you just have to.”
I had figured out nothing.
I had become more attentive.
Perhaps that was enough.
I had begun the journey asking what the world wanted from me.
I was ending it with a much simpler possibility.
Perhaps the world wanted nothing.
Perhaps I was the one who wanted to look at it.
Pass through it.
Question it.
Gather what I encountered and tell it in my own way.
With beauty.
With anger.
With irony.
With all the imperfections of a man who sometimes runs, sometimes hides, sometimes demands an easy road, and still longs to be found.
I could work without worshiping exhaustion.
Love without being completely healed.
Leave without calling myself a coward.
Stay without calling myself a prisoner.
Desire relief without feeling weak.
Accept good fortune without inventing suffering that would let me deserve it.
And when pain arrived—because it would—I would try to turn it into something that gave light.
Not to thank it.
To keep it from having the last word.
The fire still lit the faces.
No one spoke loudly enough to defeat the desert.
There was no need.
Silence was no longer a judge.
It was space.
The night demanded no achievements.
The sky did not check résumés.
The stars did not know how old I was, how much money I possessed, or how many times I had run away precisely when I wanted to stay.
We were there.
For a moment, it was enough.
I watched the final ember lose its color.
I thought of the child.
His waiting.
Everything he had tried to become in order to deserve love.
At last, I had an answer for him.
Not a great truth.
Not a teaching carved in stone.
A simple sentence.
Nothing has to be difficult all the time.
Nothing has to hurt.
And you do not have to accomplish anything important.
You have to live.
When the final light went out, I understood that I had not gone to Egypt to find a life I could earn.
I had gone all that way to remind myself that I already had one to live.