The Ship

“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 wondrous: solitude. Did I need to be uprooted and thrown between hooves and claws, between the desert flames and the fragrant oil cities, in order to know that? The fabric is wide, and the blackness in it is abundant, and the spots are few and far between. The student fleeing from her father to the graves to meet her lover for two terrifying moments shone in the blackness of the fabric, and I return to pains like the pains of the crucifixion, in a tragedy that is renewed. They say of me: a deceitful degenerate, contradicting himself, worshipping the penny, his land no longer means anything to him, as if they want me to carry a handful of its soil in a paper bag in my pocket as proof. “With my pain, and as 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 my loneliness, we are all alone.”