Egypt, Chapter VI — The Truths That Remained When Every Distraction Disappeared
After the faces, the stones returned.
The people I had met during the day had made room for me beside them, offered me bread and tea, transformed that hostile expanse into a temporarily human place.
The desert, however, had no intention of being equally kind.
It does not offer you a chair.
It does not sweeten the tea.
It has no interest in the temperature of your emotions.
It leaves you standing before an obscene amount of earth, mountains, and silence, then waits for you to finish all your lovely bullshit.
I had brought plenty.
I had arrived in Egypt with questions about my mission, creativity, love, life, maturity, and how to become a better man without turning into one of those perfectly functional adults who look dead by seven in the evening but keep changing cars every four years to avoid arousing suspicion.
In practice, I was not looking for an answer.
I was looking for a complete existential overhaul.
Preferably quick, painless, and covered by an international warranty.
The sea had listened without promising anything.
Marsa Alam had shown me men who could not afford to make mistakes.
The children had reminded me that not every childhood receives the same protection.
The Bedouins had invited me to sit, eat, and stay, proving that a home can begin the moment someone shifts his body to make room for you.
Then came the desert.
And the desert did not want to know what I had already understood.
It wanted to see whether I had finally stopped lying.
We resumed our journey.
Ahead were barely visible tracks, pale earth, dark mountains, and figures so small they looked like mistakes on a landscape photograph. Men and animals crossed spaces that could have swallowed them without changing their appearance in the slightest.
I watched.
Photographed.
Thought.
And I felt, with a growing certainty increasingly difficult to dismiss as coincidence, that every time a question took shape inside me, the desert arranged something before my eyes.
Not a voice.
Not a sentence carved into the mountain.
Not a fucking burning bush accompanied by operating instructions.
A figure.
An animal.
One stone on another.
A tree growing in the wrong place.
A reflection in a side mirror.
A pile of bricks with no house around it.
That was how the answer came. Boom!
Without introducing itself.
Directly in front of me.
I do not know whether the desert was truly speaking to me or whether I, finally far enough from the noise of my life, had become able to connect things.
Perhaps signs do not exist independently of the person who sees them.
Perhaps a stone is only a stone until someone arrives before it carrying the right question inside.
During the first few days, I had thought the world was not full of signs, only things that happen and people desperate enough to turn them into messages.
I still believed it.
But I was beginning to understand a distinction.
The sign is not the thing.
It is the collision between what happens outside and what, at the same moment, is moving within you.
A stack of stones remains a stack of stones.
But if it appears while you are asking what balance might support your life, then those stones have just spoken your name.
Not because the universe arranged the landscape to satisfy the symbolic needs of an Italian photographer with a respectable collection of unresolved problems.
Because in that instant, you are finally capable of listening.
The desert spoke a language without words.
Its grammar was made of coincidences.
Its alphabet of stones, animals, distances, tracks, shadows, and voids.
It did not explain.
It showed.
We were the ones who had become illiterate.
We live in a world that never stops shouting.
Advertisements.
Notifications.
Advice.
Predictions.
Opinions.
People who failed to sort out their own lives but started a channel to teach you how to sort out yours in five simple steps, the fourth of which usually requires purchasing a consultation payable in six convenient installments.
Everyone talks.
Everyone knows.
Everyone has discovered the definitive method for becoming rich, loved, productive, spiritually aligned, and preferably equipped with abs visible enough to prove to God that we did not waste our incarnation.
The world sells answers to people who never had the courage to formulate the question properly.
The desert sold nothing.
That was why it could afford to be honest.
The first question was always the same.
Where the fuck am I going?
Not only at that moment.
In life.
At work.
Inside relationships.
In that long series of attempts I had called freedom, searching, creativity, or destiny, depending on which word best dignified the fact that I still possessed no precise direction.
Ahead of me, men and animals moved along an almost invisible track.
I saw only earth.
They saw the way through.
They followed variations I could not recognize, read the shape of the mountains, the texture of the ground, the tracks left by someone before us.
The desert was not without roads.
I simply did not know the language in which they had been written.
That was one of the first lessons.
Sometimes you are not lost.
You are merely ignorant.
The distinction is less romantic, but considerably more useful.
I had spent years regarding myself as a man without a path, an independent spirit, an explorer of his own existence, because “someone who doesn’t know where the fuck he’s going” has limited narrative appeal and tends to worry women after the second date.
I liked to think I followed no one.
It looked like courage.
Sometimes it was only arrogance.
I had confused autonomy with refusing directions, as though learning from someone represented defeat and asking for help meant handing over the keys to my dignity.
The desert placed before me men who knew how to read the land.
I did not.
To continue, I had to follow them.
The end.
No humiliation.
No loss of identity.
Only the recognition of a fact: in that place, my safety depended on their knowledge.
The world keeps telling us we have to become completely self-sufficient.
Need nothing.
Depend on no one.
Show no uncertainty.
Be strong, resolved, financially secure, emotionally independent, and preferably capable of assembling a bookcase without reading the instructions, because apparently even one leftover screw can call the whole of Western manhood into question.
It is one of the worst scams we ever sold ourselves.
No one crosses everything alone.
Someone knows a stretch of road you cannot read.
Maturity does not consist in pretending you already own the map.
It consists in recognizing who can guide you without turning that person into the owner of your destination.
A little farther on, I found stacked stones.
One on top of another.
Different in shape, weight, and angle.
They looked about to fall, yet remained there, motionless in the wind, building a kind of primitive tower on ground that offered almost nothing vertical.
I thought about stability.
I had asked for it many times.
A stable life.
A stable income.
A stable relationship.
A version of myself stable enough not to change desire, direction, or identity every time something stopped providing the initial excitement.
I looked at those stones.
None was stable on its own.
They supported one another through their mutual weight.
Their balance came not from the absence of pressure, but from the way that pressure was distributed.
And I understood how dishonest what I had always wanted truly was.
I did not really want stability.
I wanted a life without weight.
I wanted to be loved without having to support anyone.
I wanted to create without discipline.
To earn without turning talent into repeated, concrete, and sometimes mortally boring work.
I wanted to mature without surrendering any of the irresponsibility that had made youth fun.
I wanted freedom without loneliness, closeness without dependence, success without exposure to failure, and a mission large enough to justify my life, provided it did not require too many mornings spent doing things I did not feel like doing.
I did not want balance.
I wanted freedom from consequences.
That is different.
The stones seemed to know it.
They remained standing because each accepted both receiving and bearing weight.
I had fallen many times because I demanded to remain balanced without allowing anything to weigh on me in earnest.
A responsibility.
A person.
A promise.
A definitive choice.
Everything that might hold me in place was immediately registered as a threat to freedom.
Then I complained that I could not build anything that lasted.
Brilliant.
I had spent years protecting myself from foundations and kept wondering why everything collapsed.
The desert did not tell me I had to accept every weight.
Some stones crush.
Some relationships consume.
Some responsibilities are merely chains we have given respectable names so we feel less ashamed to wear them.
But nothing stable is built without pressure.
That was the part I did not want to hear.
Shortly afterward, a pile of bricks appeared.
Hundreds.
Perhaps thousands.
Stacked in the middle of nowhere, abandoned on the earth like the interrupted project of someone who had started building a city, then gone for coffee and never returned.
No wall.
No roof.
No door.
Only material.
I stopped to photograph them.
They were absurd.
Everything required to begin something, and no form capable of saying what.
I thought about my photographs.
The projects.
The accumulated ideas.
The pages begun.
The possibilities.
The folders on hard drives, the work imagined, the contacts never approached, the proposals left inside my head because as long as something remains only an idea, it retains the privilege of being perfect.
Potential is a marvelous drug.
It allows you to feel destined for something without running the concrete risk of discovering you may not be capable of it.
You can say you will write a book.
That you will make a film.
One day.
That fascinating landfill where we bury everything we lacked the courage to begin today.
I had collected bricks for years.
Talent.
Experience.
Equipment.
Time.
Images.
Stories.
Wounds interesting enough to fuel a respectable artistic output and decisions questionable enough to ensure I never ran out of material.
I had the bricks.
Where was the house?
The desert placed them before me without mercy.
A pile of possibilities offers no protection from the night.
Talent is not shelter.
Inspiration is not a wall.
Desire does not become a work merely because you desired it with particular intensity while smoking in front of a window.
You have to choose a form.
You have to sacrifice all the others.
You have to take one brick, place it on another, and continue even when what you are building still looks like a shitty wall and no one but you possesses enough imagination to glimpse the house.
I had always said I wanted to live from my creations.
The desert showed me that creating was not enough.
I had to build.
And building means excluding.
Choosing one photograph means leaving out all the others.
Choosing one road means relinquishing, at least temporarily, the directions you did not take.
Choosing one person means ceasing to use the world’s infinite availability as an excuse not to know anyone in earnest.
Every form is a renunciation.
That is why we so often remain formless.
Not because we do not know what we want.
Because we want to preserve every possible life at once and then are astonished when none of them becomes real.
The pile of bricks remained there.
Perfectly useless.
A monument to potential.
It resembled me more than I would have liked.
We set off again.
A camel appeared far away, alone in the landscape, dressed in colors that seemed more alive than everything around it. Behind it were bare hills. Ahead, more earth.
The desert had a peculiar ability to reduce every living being to its true scale.
In a city, you can feel important.
You have a name.
A job.
A car.
A profile.
People who know you.
Someone owes you money, someone desires you, someone else despises you with enough consistency to confirm at least your relevance.
In the desert, you are flesh with a bottle of water.
Your résumé produces no shade.
Your followers cannot point out the way.
Your bank balance can pay for the journey, but it cannot persuade the sun to lower the temperature a few degrees because you are going through an emotionally complicated time.
The desert is not impressed.
This indifference may seem cruel.
In reality, it is a brutal form of freedom.
If the world is not obliged to recognize your importance, you can finally stop trying to prove it.
But first you have to bear the wound.
Because we say we want freedom from other people’s judgment, then publish photographs, thoughts, bodies, journeys, and achievements while waiting for enough strangers to tell us that we exist in the correct way.
We want to be independent of approval.
Provided approval arrives regularly.
I was no different.
I photographed because I loved doing it.
That was true.
I photographed because it was my way of seeing.
That was true too.
But I also photographed because I wanted to be seen through what I saw.
I wanted someone to look at my images and say: you caught something we had not noticed.
It is not a shameful desire.
Art is born partly from the need to be reached.
It becomes dangerous when the absence of another’s gaze begins to erase the gesture’s value.
The camel had no audience.
It continued being a camel with remarkable professional conviction.
I had to learn the same insolence.
A bird crossed the sky.
Only one.
No clouds, no branches, no elements capable of offering scale. Only a dark dot inside an almost offensive quantity of blue.
I thought about freedom.
Again.
I had used that word so many times I had nearly emptied it.
Free to travel.
Free to create.
Free to choose.
Free to leave.
That above all.
My idea of freedom had always included an emergency exit.
If a place tightened too much, I left.
If a relationship asked for something I was not ready to give, I began watching the door.
If a project demanded discipline after the initial phase of enthusiasm, I wondered whether it still truly represented my path.
I was very good at leaving.
I called it movement.
Sometimes it was only flight with a better vocabulary.
The bird looked completely free.
But an infinite sky does not tell you where to go.
An abundance of possibilities is not a direction.
It can become a refined form of abandonment.
If you can choose everything, you can avoid forever the responsibility of choosing anything.
The contemporary world has handed us enormous freedom and left us emotionally incapable of bearing it. We can change jobs, cities, relationships, identities, opinions, bodies, profile pictures, and the app through which we search for someone to love until three in the morning.
Every possibility remains accessible.
Every alternative keeps flashing behind what we chose.
So nothing is ever enough.
The person before you competes with thousands of people you do not know.
The job you have competes with every career you might have had.
The life you are living keeps losing to other people’s edited, color-graded, published lives.
We did not become free.
We became customers in a supermarket without checkouts, condemned to push the cart until we forget what we came in to buy.
The bird crossed the frame and disappeared.
The sky remained.
It did not tell me what to choose.
It showed me only that space by itself is not enough.
Farther on, I watched the landscape through the off-road vehicle’s side mirror.
A figure appeared in the reflection, small, distant, almost erased by the frame.
Ahead of us, the route continued.
Behind remained people, tracks, dust, and every stretch of desert we had already crossed.
I thought about the past.
It was a subject in which I possessed almost academic expertise.
I had spent years mentally returning to places that no longer existed, finished conversations, failed relationships, and versions of myself I wanted to correct with the unfair advantage of knowing how things would turn out.
The past is irresistible.
It does not change.
You can edit it forever.
You can turn yourself into the hero, the victim, the asshole, or all three, depending on your mood and how much wine is in the glass.
Absent people cannot contradict you.
Missed opportunities become perfect because they are no longer required to face reality.
Looking back is useful.
That is what a mirror is for.
It lets you know what you are leaving, what is approaching, and whether something might run you down while you change direction.
But no sane person drives while staring only at the mirror.
I, however, had traveled long stretches of my life exactly that way.
The body moved forward.
The head remained behind.
Then I was surprised that I kept swerving.
The desert did not ask me to forget.
Forgetting is a form of amputation, and frankly, life had already taken enough pieces from me without requiring my cooperation.
It showed me a proportion.
The past should occupy the space of a rearview mirror.
Large enough to consult.
Not large enough to replace the windshield.
We continued among the mountains.
Light entered through openings, struck the animals, bounced off the dust, and for a few seconds transformed ordinary scenes into apparitions.
Two camels stood before the sun.
Their shadows stretched across the ground.
One moved beside the other, without merging, without promising each other eternity, without posting a photograph with a quote about true love written by someone who had divorced three times.
I thought about companionship.
I had asked for someone with whom to share the road.
I had asked the sea, destiny, the gods, and whatever invisible administration kept stubbornly ignoring my application.
But how capable was I, truly, of walking beside someone?
Not ahead.
Not behind.
Not hanging on.
Beside.
I wanted a companion without wanting a savior, at least according to the adult, carefully edited version of the story I told myself.
The less elegant truth was that part of me still hoped love might absolve me from the work required to become habitable.
I wanted to be welcomed with all my contradictions, wounds, sudden needs for distance, fears, and habits of a man who had been alone long enough to regard every compromise as a military invasion.
Romantic.
In practice, I was looking for a woman capable of loving me exactly as I was while I carefully evaluated which parts of her would be compatible with my schedule.
The desert placed before me two animals walking together, each carrying its own body.
Neither walked in the other’s place.
That was the answer.
Sharing does not eliminate individual weight.
A person can walk beside you.
Offer you water.
Warn you about a hole.
Remind you of the direction when fear makes you stupid.
But she cannot inhabit your body, heal in your place, or forever drag the part of you that refuses to grow.
Love is not roadside assistance for emotionally stranded men.
I had already sensed it.
In the desert, I saw it.
Then a camel came almost inside the lens and looked at me with a face so disgusted that it interrupted every attempt at spiritual elevation.
That too was a lesson.
Not everything has to become a symbol.
Sometimes a camel is merely an enormous animal with questionable breath looking at you as though you were the one built wrong.
Spirituality without irony quickly becomes narcissism.
You begin to think every cloud is talking about you, every number contains a code, a burned-out lightbulb represents the end of a karmic cycle, and the entire universe has nothing more urgent to do than comment on your love life through supermarket receipts.
The desert spoke.
But it did not always speak.
I also had to learn the silence between sentences.
We passed near a tree.
Low.
Twisted.
Armed with thorns.
People sat beneath its shade.
The contrast was almost obscene.
A plant grown in a place capable of drying out everything offered someone shelter.
It was not a spectacular tree.
No one would have chosen it to decorate an elegant garden. It had crooked branches, insufficient leaves, and thorns long enough to discourage even a particularly determined embrace.
But it produced shade.
Little.
Real.
I wondered what gave a life value.
What it meant to become a better man.
I had always imagined improvement as a kind of moral cleaning: eliminate flaws, control impulses, resolve trauma, develop healthy habits, and finally become that marvelous piece of emotional furniture that bothers no one and perfectly matches maturity, sensitivity, and financial solvency.
The tree suggested something else.
Perhaps becoming better does not mean becoming beautiful.
It means becoming useful to someone else’s life without ceasing to be alive in your own.
Offering a little shade.
Creating something in which a stranger can rest.
A photograph.
A page.
A presence.
A conversation in which the other person does not have to defend himself.
Not saving the world.
The world has dimensions and problems incompatible with my résumé.
But keeping the sun from burning someone completely for a few minutes.
Perhaps I could do that.
Then I saw the thorns.
And the desert immediately corrected the romantic part of the lesson.
The tree offered shade, yes.
But it did not allow just anyone to approach without care.
Survival had made it capable of protecting itself.
I thought of my thorns.
I had grown quite a few.
Cynicism.
Irony.
Independence.
Mistrust.
That ability to identify someone’s weak point and turn it into a joke before they could find mine.
I called them character.
Sometimes they were only fear with a better press office.
I had learned to hurt elegantly.
To appear distant when I was terrified.
To pretend I needed nothing at the precise moment I wanted someone to come closer.
Then I complained that people stayed away.
What a bastard.
I built fences and accused the world of not coming to visit.
Thorns protect what is alive.
But if they grow everywhere, eventually they keep life from entering too.
The desert did not tell me to tear them all out.
A man without boundaries is not good.
He is available for plunder.
It asked me which still served a purpose and which I continued carrying merely because I had never checked whether the danger had passed.
I could not answer.
That question hurt more than the others.
A foal walked near a tree.
Small inside the landscape, with slender legs and a body that still lacked the confidence of adult animals.
It did not seem to know much.
It walked all the same.
I had been waiting for years to feel ready.
Ready for a project.
Ready for a relationship.
Ready for a decision definitive enough to exclude all the others.
Ready to expose myself completely through what I created.
As though readiness were a certifiable state, a kind of emotional license issued after passing life’s final exam.
It never comes.
Another piece of bad news no one includes in motivational speeches because it makes selling planners with gold covers more difficult.
You do not become ready.
You begin while part of you is still trembling.
Courage is not the moment fear disappears.
It is the moment you stop recognizing its right to decide everything.
That young animal had not waited to possess perfect legs.
It used them.
I already possessed far more than I needed to begin and kept negotiating with uncertainty as though, given enough time, it might finally sign a peace treaty.
Uncertainty does not sign.
It moves with you.
All you can do is stop letting it drive.
Nearby, a camel rested beneath a tree.
On the ground were blankets, ropes, objects, and everything it had probably carried until shortly before.
Its body was finally lowered.
I wondered why I was so tired.
The answer seemed obvious.
I carried everything at once.
The expectations.
The unfinished projects.
The people I had failed to save.
Those I had wanted to keep.
The desire to prove something.
The fear of wasting time.
The feeling of being late.
The photographs still waiting to be selected.
The alternative lives I kept imagining whenever the real one failed to produce enough excitement.
Even while I rested, the load remained tied to my back.
The body could lie down.
The mind kept carrying.
I had confused rest with stillness.
They are not the same thing.
You can remain still for an entire day and keep running inside your head.
You rest only when you agree to set something down.
Not solve it.
Not destroy it.
Set it down.
The problem is that we identify with the weight.
Without the work, who are we?
Without the pain, what do we tell?
Without the person we are trying to save, what purpose does our goodness serve?
Without the future project, how do we justify the present we dislike?
Setting down the load means meeting the part of us that remains.
That is why we keep carrying it.
We are not always tired because we have too much to do.
Sometimes we are tired because we are afraid to discover who we would be without the exhaustion.
The camel rested.
It did not seem to experience this as a moral failure.
No animal apart from the human being is ashamed to stop.
We have turned exhaustion into proof of worth.
If you are tired, it means you work.
If you have no time, it means you are important.
If you sleep little, it means you possess ambition.
Then we collapse inside lives we built to prove we deserved the right to exist.
It is a marvelous system.
A machine designed to grind up human beings and sell them supplements so it can keep turning.
The desert did not run.
It had been there for millions of years.
It had not missed a single deadline.
From the off-road vehicle’s dashboard, I watched the mountains approach.
Objects, fabrics, and small good-luck charms swayed before the windshield. The man driving kept the vehicle on a track I continued losing every time I looked away.
The road existed only because someone knew how to recognize it.
That image made me think about faith.
Not religious faith made of formulas, buildings, hierarchies, and people very interested in explaining that God shares their exact political opinions.
A simpler faith.
The decision to continue without seeing the entire route.
I had always demanded certainty before moving.
I wanted to know a project would work before investing years in it.
That a person would stay before I opened myself completely.
That a decision would be the right one before I surrendered the alternatives.
That a road would take me somewhere before I entered it.
It was not prudence.
It was the childish demand to receive the ending before accepting the risk of the story.
No life can offer that guarantee.
You can know the next stretch.
Perhaps the next turn.
The rest remains behind a mountain.
Faith does not mean being certain everything will be all right.
That is advertising.
It means deciding that you will continue moving even while knowing something might go terribly wrong.
It is less reassuring.
That is why it is true.
At one point, several figures appeared on a ridge.
Men reduced to a few inches against the sky.
From that distance, I could not recognize their faces, ages, wealth, fears, or the kind of pain each carried.
They were presences.
Nothing more.
The desert reduced every private tragedy to a dot on the horizon.
That might have seemed comforting.
It was not.
The fact that the world is enormous does not make pain small while you are living it.
Someone who has been left still feels the emptiness in his chest even if billions of galaxies exist.
A man who loses his job cannot pay the rent with the vastness of the universe.
A mother who loses a child is not comforted by the geological scale of mountains.
Suffering does not become insignificant when viewed from far away.
It becomes invisible.
That is different.
The world knows nothing of most of our battles.
It awards us no medal for the nights endured in silence.
It does not stop traffic when we manage to get out of bed on a day when we wanted to disappear.
It continues.
That indifference made me angry.
Because part of me kept demanding that suffering at least produce meaning.
If I have to go through something painful, then I want to learn.
I want to become better.
I want there to be some fucking narrative reward capable of keeping all that pain from looking like nothing but devastated time.
But the world does not work that way.
Some wounds teach.
Others only wound.
Some people enter our lives to show us something.
Others enter because they were lonely, confused, excited, frightened, or simply available that Tuesday evening.
Not every loss conceals a gift.
Not every tragedy is a door.
Sometimes it is only a wall you smashed your face against.
Meaning is not always found.
Sometimes it has to be built afterward from the pieces that remain.
Perhaps that was what I did with photographs.
They did not prove everything had happened for a reason.
They took what had happened and tried to give it one.
The desert did not justify my wounds.
It asked what I would build with them.
It was a harder question.
And a far more honest one.
Then I saw a generator.
It sat in the middle of the landscape near a post that, seen from a certain angle, looked almost like a cross planted in the earth.
It made me laugh.
We had dragged two of our favorite inventions into the void.
Electricity and the hope that someone, somewhere, was listening.
One powered devices.
The other, fear.
Both promised light.
The service was not always available.
The generator was dirty, noisy, out of place. A small machine charged with producing energy in a place that already possessed the sun, the wind, and enough natural power to remind us how ridiculous our electrical outlets were.
And yet it was useful.
Because human beings carry noise everywhere.
We do not know how to inhabit silence without trying to power something.
A lamp.
A phone.
Music.
A screen.
Any device capable of keeping us from hearing ourselves too clearly.
We fear the void because the void does not distract us.
It sells us nothing.
It does not tell us who we should become.
It returns what we already are.
And that is where the problems begin.
The desert had switched off almost everything.
No traffic.
No store windows.
No crowd.
No advertisement assigned to remind me that my body, car, home, love life, and even the way I slept could be improved by buying something before midnight.
I remained.
Not the professional version.
Not the seductive one.
Not the ironic one.
Not the photographer.
Not the man who travels.
Me.
The animal worried about failing to use its time well.
The child convinced he had to accomplish something important to deserve love.
The adult who had turned freedom into a religion because commitment meant offering the world something it could take away.
The cynic who laughed at other people’s illusions to avoid admitting how desperately he needed his own.
The desert saw everything.
Not because it possessed eyes.
Because it offered too few hiding places.
That was its most violent lesson.
It was not telling me whom I should become.
It was showing me all the people I had played to avoid meeting who I was.
And it made me angry.
At myself.
At the world.
At that shitty culture that first convinces us we are not enough, then sells us prefabricated identities with which to cover the shame.
Be productive.
Be desirable.
Be strong.
Be special.
Find your mission.
Monetize your passion.
Build your personal brand.
Turn every pain into content, every journey into social proof, every moment into material to post, and every relationship into a photograph convincing enough to make strangers envy you.
Even the search for the self has become a market.
They sell us retreats, courses, rituals, journals, energy crystals, and water bottles with motivational slogans, because evidently even enlightenment needs packaging suitable for that fucking human error called Instagram.
I was not innocent.
I had crossed the desert with an expensive camera and was already turning what I lived into a story.
Even my introspection would have a title.
A selection.
A publication.
So what the fuck was the difference?
Perhaps none.
Or only one.
I could at least try not to lie.
Not pretend I had healed.
Not sell the journey as a completed transformation.
Not write that the desert had delivered every answer and that I had returned pure, resolved, and ready to lead seminars for other confused men in convenient monthly installments.
The desert had taught me.
Yes.
But every lesson opened another wound.
Every answer pushed the question a little deeper.
It had shown me that I was not without direction: I demanded guarantees before choosing.
That I did not lack materials: I avoided building so I would not have to relinquish the possibilities.
That I was not always free: sometimes I was simply running away.
That I was not misunderstood: often I had made myself difficult to reach.
That I was not tired only because of what I did: I kept carrying what I could have set down.
That I was not always looking for love: sometimes I was looking for someone capable of absolving me from the responsibility of becoming an adult.
Marvelous answers.
I would have preferred a winning number and more precise directions for my future.
The desert had a rather bastard sense of humor.
The mountains kept passing beyond the windshield.
Now and then the vehicle stopped.
We got out.
Silence closed around us again like water over someone who has just stopped struggling.
I had not solved life.
I still did not know what shape my creations would take, who would walk beside me, or whether I would manage to become disciplined enough to turn intentions into a road.
But the questions had changed.
I no longer asked only what I wanted to receive.
I was beginning to ask what I was willing to bear.
Not what my mission was.
What daily work deserved to become it.
Not who could love me.
What part of me made doing so difficult.
Not when the right life would arrive.
What life I was avoiding building while I waited.
The desert did not predict the future.
It dismantled excuses.
That was its language.
A stone.
An animal.
An invisible path.
A tree full of thorns.
A pile of bricks that had not yet become anything.
Every image took one of my thoughts, turned it over in its hands, and returned it without the elegant packaging with which I had tried to make it bearable.
The day began to fold.
The light lost its hardness, and the mountains, one behind another, became ever thinner, almost transparent. Shadows lengthened. Animals climbed toward the ridges. Human figures began turning into silhouettes once more.
I thought the lesson was over.
Naturally, I was wrong.
The desert had not yet spoken its final sentence.
Until then, I had asked what I was supposed to find.
Before the light surrendered, it changed the question.
What are you willing to let burn?
I had not yet seen the fire.
But night was coming.