Everyone aches for something the same way they ache for a question without an answer. But for me, I didn’t know the answer I needed… or perhaps I should say I didn’t know the question I needed answered. You could say that either of those were correct, neither of them was wrong. There are many things like that in life, and they have always eluded me, just like the smoke I was trying to grasp in my hands.
I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel my hands either. I floated above a body. Below me, I saw a corpse laying there, a rag doll slowly sinking into the earth. Empty, cloudy eyes stared back up at me. I could have thought of anything in that moment; but all I had were questions. They swirled around wildly in my head, thrashing against the inside of my skull. They were the very same ones that used to keep me up at night, as intangible as my soul.
As I drifted on, my life flashed before my eyes. There was a pattern that I couldn’t deny. In all my memories, I’d always wavered, unsure of where I stood. There was only one thing I had always felt confident about and that was whenever I thought of myself as nothing. I could have sworn that if you had cut open my chest, there would have been nothing inside. The emptiness would spill freely to the ground and if you had touched it, you could have washed your hands until they bled, and it wouldn’t have mattered at all.
No, it’d never come off. It was just as well either way. I knew the world would keep spinning with or without me in it. The sun would still rise each day and set each night, just as the tide would surely come and go. The world didn’t need me; no one did.
I could have ruminated for an eternity, but my concentration was broken by what looked like a small flickering light. It looked only as big as the flame on top of a candle, but it burned so brightly that I couldn’t look away. The light seemed to flicker and grow the closer I came to it.
My feet clumsily put themselves one in front of the other, dragging myself closer and closer to it. The shuffling of my feet against the sand and the brief rustling of the wind were the only sounds to break the stillness of the eternal darkness. The air was cold, and it prickled my skin, but I barely noticed. My thoughts were wrapped around how familiar this world felt. It was like it embraced me. I was reminded of the sensation of looking into a mirror and having the mirror gaze back into me. I felt seen. Was that what it felt like to be loved?
My head was still spinning when a sharp pain arched up from my foot. It stung like something had split open the skin. I expected to find myself bleeding, but when I staggered backwards and looked down, there was none. Strangely enough, there was no sign of an injury at all. It was then that I realized I could see my foot, the ground, and even what I had walked into: a small, jagged stone jutting out of the sand. Where was all this light coming from?
I straightened up and came face to face with the source of that small flame. I was disoriented to find it was neither small nor a flame. Suddenly lightheaded, I wavered on my feet. No, the light was not a small speck in the distance at all. It appeared to be a large spotlight beaming down from the sky, and it was blindingly bright. Squinting, I raised my hands to shield my eyes from its intensity.
As my vision adjusted, I saw a man standing on the other side of the illuminated clearing. He was standing perfectly still. In fact, he was standing so still that I could have sworn that he was frozen in place. Maybe he wasn’t even breathing; it was as if he had died still standing on his feet. I carefully crept toward him. It wasn’t until I had come within a few paces of him that he roused and turned back to look at me. No, I thought, not a corpse. However, it seemed like whatever he was, he could keep me company.
Should I have said something to him? What was the etiquette in this situation? I mulled it over in my head, but it didn’t matter in the end because he spoke before I had decided what to say. "Another one,” he muttered. No, I thought again—not a corpse. “Another what?” I asked, scrunching my brows together. “Another soul,” he answered. I could have sworn that I misheard him, but it was like something stirred inside me, and the pieces began to click together.
The image of a body flashed in my mind’s eye. I had seen a body before. Yes, I had seen a body sink into the earth under my dangling feet when I had been floating in the sky. I didn’t recognize it then, but now, with a clearer head, it was obvious. That body had been eerily familiar, and it had my face, my hands, and my feet. “I’m dead.” I exhaled, holding up my hands in front of my face and flexing my fingers to see if they would still move. They felt like they creaked as they bent into place. Were they always this stiff?
I had been conflicted, ricocheting back and forth between acceptance and denial since my death. Part of me had already known, and part of me was unwilling to admit it. “You’re dead,” he echoed back to me before turning around. I could have asked him something then, but I didn’t know where to start, and I didn’t know if it even mattered. Instead, I settled into standing by his side, left alone with my thoughts.
I’d never prided myself on being a good judge of character, but even I could tell that he was a strange man. I didn’t know what was strangest: the man himself, this uncanny world, or the fact that I was now a lost soul. My legs trembled beneath me, and in a desperate attempt to steady myself, I pressed my hand to my chest. In… Out… In… Out… No, no matter how hard I tried, my chest didn’t rise and fall with my breath. I was now also perfectly still, the same way he was, like someone who had died standing on their feet.
I didn’t even need to blink anymore; I was only continuing to do it out of habit. It was the strangest thing to realize that something I did so often that I barely even noticed it was no longer necessary. The beating of my heart, the rise and fall of my chest, and my eyes always blinking as steadily as a metronome. How often had I ever thought of any of these things? My form now felt alien to me, and I wanted to cast it away.
Turning my attention from my strangely still form, I squinted into the distance, straining my eyes against the darkness. I saw the sands that seemed to stretch on forever, the shadows that never gave way, and the emptiness that filled this place. As far as I could tell, there was nothing else here. I should have been disappointed; any sane person would have been. Was I disappointed? I didn’t know how I felt.
I had always found myself standing still while the world sped past me at dizzying speeds. I thought there was something beautiful about the monotony of this world. I was in a small and stationary world, and time would never move too fast for me again. Is this what I have always been looking for? My lips twitched, unable to decide if they should smile or frown.
The man beside me didn’t speak again, and I was grateful. Maybe he noticed, but if he did, he didn’t say anything. We had come to a silent understanding with each other. It would have been a stretch to call us friends; neither of us knew what to do with the other. Despite that, there was something unusually familiar about him, and it was like I’d known him since the beginning of time. What was it that made him familiar? I couldn’t have told you if I tried.
I spent most of my time inside my head, lost in my thoughts. The outside world slowly faded away from my consciousness. Afterall, there was nothing to ground me anymore. Nothing here was constrained by time. The sun never rose or set, there was never a moon in the sky, and there were no tides to come and go. Even the light above us would always beam down steadily at the same spot where we stood. I learned not to let it bother me. The sands, the light, and the man I had found at my side had long since become staples of my waking life.
I had grown complacent with the peace and quiet until I was broken from it by a voice. “Names aren’t worth much here, but do you want to know mine?” he whispered. I barely registered his voice the first time he said it. When he repeated himself again, I nearly jumped out of my skin. It had been so long since he last spoke that I had almost forgotten that he could speak. “For whatever it’s worth, it’s Isaac. My name that is, it’s Isaac,” He continued. “You can forget it if you like, it doesn’t really matter after all.” His name was Isaac. His words broke something in me, and everything suddenly came crashing down.
What was my name? “Oh god, I don’t know.” I gasped. He glanced in my direction. “What is it?” he asked me, looking a bit apologetic. “My name… I don’t know what it is,” I murmured. I had his name, but I didn’t have mine. It felt like another one of those things that I couldn’t grasp, like the smoke that had passed straight through my hands.
I searched through my fragmented memory, desperately hoping that I would find my name in it somewhere. However, the longer I looked, the more obvious it became that I wouldn’t find it. I only remembered fleeting silhouettes calling out to me. Dread rolled through me as the realization sank in. I didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t know what my name was either. And do you know what the worst part was? I cared. I cared for the first time since I entered this place. What was this man doing to me?
He sat there studying my face before lowering his head knowingly. “You don’t know, do you?” He asked. I couldn’t look at him. “No.” I conceded. “I don’t.” And I didn’t. Suddenly, long dormant feelings bubbled up inside of me. I might not have known where they came from anymore, but I could feel them just the same. There’s a type of emptiness that holds you in its arms and tells you that everything will be the way it was meant to be if only you would let go, and it was all I ever had. I knew it. I recognized it. I was it. Whatever I felt now was a stranger, and it burned through my veins like acid.
It felt like my fingers creaked as I forced them to scrape against my palms. My form had already felt alien to me before, but now it also felt like a stranger. I didn’t know what I was or who I was anymore, and it ate at me. Isaac just sat there, looking wistfully at me, before looking up at the sky. “Don’t worry,” he murmured. “You don’t need things like that here. Names exist for a world full of people, and we’re the only ones here right now. Remember that.” The only ones here right now… He was right. There was no one else here, and there was no one to judge us. No, nothing fit right, but what Isaac had said was still a small comfort to me. Before, I felt as if this world might have been made in my image, but now I wondered if, in the end, this world wasn’t made for me either.
Isaac rose to his feet and stood tall over me. He offered me his hand. “I can’t give you back your name, but I can walk.” He gestured with his head into the abyss before continuing. “Do you want to come with me?” I wasn’t sure if I had heard him right. I forced the gears in my head to turn, but they all came back empty. “But-but what’s the point?” I stammered, blinking back my confusion. He smiled at me. “There isn’t one, but you’ll feel better on your feet. Come on, let’s walk,” he said. His eyes glinted with compassion, and in that moment, I felt it again — that strange sense of familiarity.
Maybe he felt familiar because we were the same. We were both lost, broken, and weary, trudging through a world that wasn’t made for us. No, not only was this world not made for us, but it seemed to disorient us. It was a small consolation to have a companion that was suffering just as much as I was, but I didn’t have any reason to complain. I took his hand and followed him into the dark.
In the end, walking was not enough to occupy my thoughts. I had so much time; perhaps I could have used it to think about what my life had been, but I couldn’t remember it. I could only remember fleeting fragments—nothing solid or clear enough to make sense of. Isaac had mirrored this sentiment as well. For him, all he could remember were glimpses of the faces of people he used to know, and he felt a sense of loss and alienation he couldn’t understand. What good any of that would do him was lost on me.
We walked endlessly, our footprints leaving behind parallel trails in the sand that vanished almost as soon as we had made them. There was a light breeze that swept through the desert every so often. I counted them as they came. One… Two… Three… They seemed to be synced to our steps, and they swept the imprints of our feet from the sand, leaving them as pristine as they were before we had come. It was the only purpose the wind seemed to serve since it would stall whenever we stopped to rest.
The stillness of the never-ending darkness was the only sign we had that we were no longer where we used to be. Eventually, sitting down to rest was no longer enough to restore our strength, and we laid down to sleep instead. We slept against each other, back-to-back. We had to; it was the only comfort we had against the cold.
As my consciousness faded away, I saw a little girl. She was barefoot, and her vast, sunken eyes peered out from behind her black hair. Her white dress looked as pure and untouched as the sand. “I’m just like you,” she whispered, barely audibly. I almost didn’t hear her. I wanted to ask her what she meant, but when I reached out to her, the ground stretched beneath our feet, and the faster I ran to her, the further she drew away.
She stared back at me impassively across the widening guff between us, and I screamed for her. “Come back!” I cried as she shrank into the distance, but she wouldn’t budge; it was as if her feet were mounted to the ground. She just stood there and stared at me with those innocent and painfully empty eyes. I felt her whisper in my ear from impossibly far away. It sounded like pleading, but I couldn’t make out any of it, and once again, I didn’t understand a thing.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
My eyes shot open, and I jerked forward, propelling myself upright. A slight trembling shook my hands as I clumsily brushed my hair from my face. Isaac was still sleeping beside me; it was a small comfort, and I exhaled deeply with my lungs that no longer needed to breathe. My head drooped in relief until a sickening realization sank in. It was bright—too bright.
My eyes were straining against that same familiar undulating light. I wailed, throwing my hands up over my head. Isaac startled awake and rubbed his eyes before looking over at me. At first, he seemed confused, but then he just smiled wearily at me and slowly pulled himself upright as well. No, he wasn’t surprised. His casual demeanor told me everything I needed to know.
“You knew this would happen.” I gasped, shifting my twitching eyes to fix on his.
“I did.” He admitted.
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Why?” I asked, my voice trembling.
“Would you have come with me if you knew it would?”
He watched for my reaction as it seeped across my face and my shoulders fell. “No.” I confessed. “I wouldn’t have.” He rose to his feet and looked away into the distance.
“No, you wouldn’t have. No sane person would have.”
“What about you then? Are you sane?”
He looked back down at me and shrugged. “Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not. Does it really matter?” he muttered. “Sanity doesn’t mean anything in a place like this.” I hated to admit it, but he did have a point. I didn’t know what sanity meant here either. I didn’t feel sane, but there was that saying that said that in an insane world, a sane man must appear insane. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I did, and I felt it too. Could I be a sane person in an insane world? There was an unsettling ambiguity about this place, and it made words lose their meaning.
I rose to my feet stiffly and stood beside him. “Are we back where we were before then?” I asked. “Who knows?” he replied. “There’s no way to tell. It is possible that we’ve traveled to a new location, but it is also possible that we’ve been walking in place and the light simply shrank and then reappeared above us instead.” My eyes shot open. “Then there’s no way to know…” I gasped. “No, there isn’t,” he answered bitterly, scrunching together his brows. “You understand now, don’t you? This is why I haven’t looked past the light in ages. You could walk until the end of time, and it wouldn’t mean anything. Every time I searched, all I found was more sand, more darkness, and this same infuriating light shining down on me every time I woke up. It’s enough to break anyone’s spirit.” He dragged his hand across his face, sighing deeply. “But there is one benefit to walking,” he mused.
“What is it?”
“It gives you something to do.”
I wanted to argue, but there was nothing wrong with his argument. I was satisfied with simply standing still before, but I felt restless now. “Then let’s walk,” I replied, and we did, endlessly, through perpetually repeating scenery. Eventually, we settled into a comfortable routine. When we woke, we’d chat a bit before setting out. We’d walk almost silently, hand in hand. It was necessary to hold hands to not lose each other in the pitch blackness of the rolling sands, and any time we stopped to rest, we’d exchange a few quips back and forth. Sometimes, we even laughed together. We had learned to enjoy the absurdity of it all. I didn’t know how we could still laugh in a place like this, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
If time was something that could be counted here, it could have been days, or months, or years that passed by as we walked. It didn’t really matter. Neither of us were too bothered by it anymore, and we didn’t have anything better to do either. I didn’t know what mattered anymore. There was a part of me that thought it might be Isaac, and there was another part of me that thought it couldn’t be.
We had barely spoken to each other for most of the time we had known each other. We simply stood side-by-side, gazing off into the dark. Isaac had been frozen, too used to being alone, and I was still in shock from being torn from my body. It wasn’t until he told me his name that we began to speak freely, and the period that came after his name was much smaller than the period that came before it.
Each time we woke, we held hands to stay together in a place so dark we couldn’t see two feet in front of our faces. We slept against each other to protect ourselves from the cold. We laughed together because if we didn’t, we’d cry. The two of us being together felt just as natural as breathing. Why did it feel like we were meant to find each other? I didn’t know, and if Isaac had an answer for me, he didn’t share it.
It became so natural to spend our time the same way each waking period that I’d started going through the motions on autopilot. Once again, I barely noticed that I had already started walking, and I didn’t notice that my legs were still moving either. Even if I didn’t notice what I was doing, it could still wear me down, and I was now tired. We stopped to rest; there was no reason to delay; every spot was just as good as any other. That was both the blessing and the curse of this strange place. In a way, it simplified things, and I was grateful for that.
When I laid down and closed my eyes, that time, I saw a woman. She was an angel; there was nothing else that she could have been. She was plainly dressed without any wings or a halo, but there was something about her, something ethereal, and I felt it. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did. "Who are you?" I gasped, nearly blinded by her light.
She gazed at me impassively before responding. "That is not the question you are meant to ask. The question you are meant to ask does not have an answer." My eyes widened, confusion flooding through me. "But if there is no answer, why would I ask it?" I exhaled, unsteady on my feet. Her expression softened, and her eyes began to glint with kindness. She beamed at me. "You’ve found it at last—the question you were meant to ask." I wanted to ask her what she meant, but before I got the chance, she faded away, and I was ripped away from my vision.
It felt like the world was shaking. No, that wasn’t right. It was me. I was the one shaking. Isaac’s hand was on my shoulder as he jostled me awake. As my eyes flashed open and I jolted upward. I shielded my eyes from the blinding light with my hand. I hated that light; it felt like it was taunting us. “Take a look over there,” he laughed. Isaac seemed so unnaturally at ease that it caught me off guard.
He pointed towards the center of the circular beam. As I squinted towards it, my eyes adjusted to the light, and a shape finally came into view. It was beautiful, and I was mesmerized. There, in the center of the light, was a single white feather. It rotated lazily in the air, repeatedly floating up higher before twirling back down again. It seemed too perfect to be real. How could something so beautiful exist in this ugly world? I rubbed my eyes, expecting it to be a trick of the light, but when I opened my eyes again, it was still dancing in the air.
“Is it a trick?” I gasped.
“Don’t question it,” he responded.
He was radiating a sense of peace, and something about it didn’t sit right with me. “Why are you happy?” I asked. He refused to look at me, trying to hide his smile. "Don’t worry," he replied. “This is a happy ending for you. Go on, take it,” he said, far too eager. I suspected there was something he was withholding from me, but I didn’t want to wring it out of him. No, it felt improper. I didn’t know why I would care about etiquette at a time like this, but I still did. It was a remnant of my time on Earth as a human, another one of those excruciatingly ordinary things I couldn’t bear to throw away.
I crawled forward on my hands and knees, too scared to stand. I didn’t want to disturb it; I was afraid it would disappear. Cautiously, I inched towards the feather until I suddenly recoiled like I was burned. There was something that felt strangely definitive about touching it, and I couldn’t bear it. Part of me felt like it was the last decision I would ever make.
“What is it? What does it do?” I asked.
“That’s not for me to know; you have to find out yourself.”
“Why me?”
“It’s providence,” he responded. “I can feel it.” He stepped softly over to the feather, placed it in my hands, and closed my fingers over it. “You don’t belong here,” he stated this with absolute conviction, but how could he possibly know? “Who are you?!” I cried as the wind began to pick up under my feet. “Someone you don’t need to know anymore,” he replied. The winds under my feet turned into a powerful gust and whipped me into the sky. No, not yet! I wasn’t ready to go. I forced my will against the wind with my teeth gritting and my arms outstretched towards him. Briefly, I stuttered in the air. “Tell me why!” I screamed at him, but he just looked at me and smiled.
“It’s not for me. It came for you; I couldn’t take it if I tried.”
“I don’t understand!” I screamed.
“I’ve watched countless souls pass on from here, and I knew you would too because everyone always does—that is, everyone other than me. This world wanted you to find your answer, and you have. It has recognized your answer and now it wants you to go.”
“But I didn’t find any answers; I only found another question!” I wailed.
“Then maybe that’s the answer.” He responded. “Maybe the question was the answer the entire time. Just go; there’s no reason to draw this out. I still have something to do here.”
“What?! What could be more important than leaving with me right now?!” I screamed.
“I don’t know. Believe me, I’d tell you if I could,” he admitted.
“Why would you give up this chance for something you can’t even explain?! Come with me!” I demanded, rage billowing up from inside me, but he just looked up at me peacefully. “The truth…” he conceded. “Is that I don’t know what the right thing to do is either, but I need to do this to prove that I was once alive. I’m sorry; I don’t want you to think that none of this mattered. Everything always matters, no matter how seemingly insignificant or meaningless it is. Someday, this will all make sense to you. Now go. Go find your name and be at peace.” It didn’t make any sense. Nothing he said had told me what I wanted to know, and I couldn’t accept such a meaningless answer.
I knew he was making a mistake, and I scraped my nails at the air as if it could hold me in place. The wind rushed past me, and I was swept into the sky. Suddenly dashing forward, he screamed, “My name! I'll tell you as many times as you want, and you can forget it as many times as you need to! My name is Isaac!” Why would he say that to me now? What did it even mean? What good was his name to me without him in my life?
My head ached with frustration. The only thing I could still do was scream so I did. I screamed like it was the only thing left in the world. I screamed like nothing else mattered. I hated everything as I crushed my hands into fists, knowing it was a lost cause but unable to accept it. No, I’d never accept it. As I disappeared into the heavens, I watched him vanish into the earth, becoming nothing more than a grain of sand against the endless desert.
I thought I caught his expression just before I was thrown from that unlit place, and I could swear that it looked bittersweet. There was this sense of regret mixed in with a sense of relief, and I didn’t understand it. I didn’t believe him. I was right there; he could have just taken my hand. What was stopping him? It hurt him, and still he didn’t try. I wanted to know why he would do that and how many times he had done it before, but I’d never know.
As the void bled from my eyes, I was thrown into the primordial soup, the waters of creation. There was a sense of fleeting bliss and beauty before my consciousness was ripped away from me. I had been chosen to reenter the cycle of rebirth, and so my soul was broken down into its components. I wasn’t the same anymore; I wasn’t meant to be. No, I wasn’t meant to stay stagnant.
I was remade countless times. At first, there was nothing, and then there was the land and the sea. In the sea, I swam through the waters, and on the land, I walked on my unsteady feet. I walked on four feet until my four feet became two. I then rose, standing upright, and my soul took on a familiar form. Once again, I was human, and I was thrust back to where I had been in the beginning. Or perhaps it was really the end. It was also possible that there was no beginning or end, just like the snake ouroboros, biting its own tail.
Eventually, I found myself floating once more in the wide, open sky. Large, white wings framed my back, a halo gently illuminated my head, and clouds stretched endlessly beneath my feet. “In the end, everything led back to here,” I murmured to myself. I was no longer just a girl or even a woman. I was something much greater and much more beautiful than either of those creatures had ever been. I was an angel, and I was no longer ignorant. I now held the wisdom of countless lives.
Closing my eyes, I tried to pull forth memories of a time long past and a man I once knew. What was his name? Did it matter? He had told me I could forget it after all. I shook my head, but it did nothing to bring his name back to me. Perhaps it was just another one of those ordinary things I had lost over the course of time.
Then, memories of those dreams, or rather visions, I had experienced in that cycle came back to me. A little girl who told me we were the same and a woman, or rather an angel, who told me that the question I needed to ask would not have an answer. Finally, the words of the man in that fleeting place entered my mind. He had told me that if I had not found the answer that I needed the question must have been the answer itself.
Shaking my head, I lamented the fact that no one had ever given me a straight answer. I wondered what I would have done to be given a proper answer even once, laughing softly to myself. Perhaps the point of the entire experience had been to teach me to let go of the search for closure. Perhaps I was meant to accept that the answer to some questions was that they would never be answered at all.
Images of him glimmered in my past, a visage of a man I had known many times, but each time had always been the same as the first. I would find the same answer, and every time, I would lose it again. That is, every time other than the last. That was the time when it stuck. We were destined to meet. At the end of every life, when I found myself trudging through purgatory, I spent it looking for something I had lost and which, in the end, I had never found. Maybe it was him the whole time, or maybe it was the clarity he promised me. Who could say?
I squeezed my eyes shut tightly before quickly opening them again to that beautiful world before me. He had told me that someday it would all make sense to me. He had told me to go find my name and be at peace. And find my name I did, for I had had many different names over my lifetimes, and each of them had been meaningful to me in its own, individual way. He told me that everything mattered, no matter how seemingly insignificant or meaningless, and in each of those lives, I was insignificant and meaningless in a different way. Yes, no matter how strong or important I was, I was also always small and weak.
I had been small, weak, and fragile. I had been insignificant and meaningless. I had been important and powerful. Through it all, he had been right. All of it mattered; everything mattered, no matter how seemingly insignificant and meaningless it was.
Finally, his name came back to me. “Thank you, Isaac,” I whispered into the void. “My time with you was beautiful, and I am grateful for it. Wherever you are now and whatever form you take, I hope that you will haunt me until the end of time.” I turned and flew towards the sun, reaching further and further into the heavens and closer to my kin. I saw their winged silhouettes framed against the bright, blue sky, and I knew with absolute certainty that it was where I belonged. Everything was beautiful, and I was not afraid.