The Ship

Description

At its core, we are alone. Our lives are like Chinese boxes: a box within a box—and the boxes diminish in size until we reach the smallest box at the heart of them all. And inside it—not a precious ring from the Sultan’s daughter, but a secret even more precious and wonderful than solitude. Did I need to be uprooted and thrown between the hooves and claws, between the blazing desert and the fragrant oil cities, to know that? The fabric is wide, the blackness is abundant, and the spots are few and far between. The student flees from her father to the graves to meet her lover. Two terrifying moments illuminate the blackness of the fabric, and I return to pains like the pains of crucifixion in a tragedy that is renewed. They say about me: My decadence is cunning, contradicts itself, worships the shark, his land no longer means anything to him. It’s as if they want me to carry a handful of its soil in a paper bag in my pocket as evidence of my pain. I carry all its blue volcanic rocks in my blood, in the smallest box at the heart of all the boxes. With my solitude and desolation, we are all alone.