The Desert

Photo by Gerardo Meléndez

I looked up in awe and contemplated the starriest sky I had ever laid my eyes on. I gazed in disbelief at the uncountable number of luminous dots casually scattered through the galaxy, as the wind carefully displaced the sand from one dune to another, shaping the surreal landscape around me.

The Touaregs –the people from the desert- were amused by my fascination with the celestial vault, and didn’t care enough to suppress their laughter when I started dancing in circles trying to capture the essence of the firmament at once. For a moment I felt as if my eyes and brain were not able to process the beauty of every ephemeral instant; within the mighty nothingness I felt, once again, insignificant.

I chose to stay outside of my tent for the night. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep knowing where I was anyways, so I took an improvised mattress with me and spent the next few hours in the company of no one. A year earlier, if I had been told that I’d be spending a night in the Sahara, I wouldn’t have believed it.

The sequences of events that lead to a specific point in time are not always clear, and are never predictable. Our lives depend on every act in our past, yet sometimes a single episode in the chain of events that determine us can drastically alter the flow of our destiny.

This kind of thoughts went through my mind as I waited for the sunrise in the world’s vastest sand desert. I tried to trace back that single critical point in the progression when my life took a turn and converged to the moment I was living: it had been before the camel ride through the dunes, the Throats of the Todra and the nights in the Médina; before the immigrant in Barcelona, the choir in London, the old man of Budapest, and Prague’s cathedral; the convergence had been stronger after dinner in Saint Petersburg, but I was sure it preceded the sunset in Venice and the concert in Paris, the ice of the Arctic, and the cold waters of Stockholm; perhaps it was closer to China Town in San Francisco, walking through the streets of Harlem at night, or racing up the Great Wall in Beijing.

For all I know, the vital event I am looking for could be hidden in an innocent sentence I read in Borge’s Aleph, or in the day The General –my grandfather- met Haile Selassie in Addis Abeba, before I was born.

I hope I'll find my crucial moment within these recollections. You're invited to read my stories, and perhaps you'll find some connection to your own moment somewhere inside of them.