Lost In The City - Qaf

You once told me that we were masters of our fate. You once told me that it was our choices that we were responsible for and that everything we chose to do led to different consequences. If that was true then the reason I’m lost here was my own doing and not the doing of anyone else.

I wanted to see this city, so different from my own with you. Instead of skyscrapers and glass buildings, this city was filled with stone buildings and old domes where each building seemed to have a story to tell. Rather than the jeans, suits, and shirts that decorated the city of my own world, this one was filled with long tunics, dresses, boots, and trousers. Even now, it still feels as if I had stepped into an Arabian fairytale from 1001 nights rather than my own world.

Down and down, I wandered looking for any sign of you, dressed just as strangely as any of these people were. No, “people” wouldn’t be the right term. After all, did you, yourself not tell me that in this place, humans are still few and many who walk these streets have never been mortal.

Walking past a colorful stand with a woman yelling for passerbys to buy apples, I stop and admire the color of her green skin, so different from my dark olive-toned skin, yet beautiful in its strangeness. Not aware of my surroundings and drifting past stall after stall, I don’t notice that I’d wandered into an alley. The sandy colored buildings housing numerous apartments are so closely packed together that you cannot walk side by side to anyone, not that it made any difference in my present lost state.

With my sandals clicking across the stone alleys, and the emptiness beginning to frighten me, I continue to walk without a direction in my mind. My only thought is that I must find you before night falls in this strange city located in this foreign dream-like world.

As I pass one tiny alleyway, I stop, for there I see a light and as a starving man shone but a grain of rice, I turn towards that light and I run, carrying the edges of my dress as my feet race to it.

There I see the sea, its blueness just as striking as the sea in my own world. The only difference was that rather than boats and docks of metal and iron these were of wood. Even so, in that single moment the dock seemed to be even more beautiful than anything I had ever laid eyes on.

For you were there and I was lost no more.

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