This article was automatically translated from the original Turkish version.
As the clock neared ten, a spasm gripped his body, and he found himself staring rigidly at the ceiling. It always happened this way—when he collapsed, powerless, struggling to defend himself. His eyes seemed to blaze as if flames would leap from them, but in truth, it was his heart itself that burned with the cruelest intensity.
Then two tears fell from his eyes, resembling two stars drifting—one eastward, the other westward. With a deep breath, he wished for his heart to find relief, for its coldness to finally settle.
This time, it had not happened. Hope was merely a possibility cast into the inner pool of his being—the notion that after the final door you knock on and find closed, what you seek lies behind the next. This thing called doubt gave strength on one side while making one feel like a fool on the other. How much longer could he walk like this? Amid a sea of uniform blackness, where everything except a few guides dissolved into nothingness, the North Star, the lighthouse, the towers signaling ships...
Each time, he returned with all the questions he carried in his sack, having tried to extract wisdom from the sage whose words he strained to catch like pincers pulling information from his lips. Worse still, a few answers had broken along the way.
He lifted his head to the sky and screamed with a piercing voice: “I no longer have the strength to chase after questions as I once did. My hope of finding answers fades with every passing day. I am bleeding out, dying with time, and within me, a new being awakens—another rises from my soil.”
He could not digest any of this. Inside him, the ingredients of dough had mixed into a lumpy, uneven mass. The yeast would not hold; it would not rise to its proper consistency. His heart overflowed with bitterness and resentment, and in his hands lay the thunder of rage.
Could he, this time, still drive the sack into himself? He remembered the sage who had walked beside him, and spoke to himself in solitude.
“If you understood the impact and necessity of just a few words spilled from those lips, you would not remain silent. Is he not as responsible as the man who refuses to offer water to one who comes from the desert, and turns his back on the wanderer lost at a crossroads?”
The young woman was right.
It was not in his power to remain stranded in the midst of this construction. Once a person recognizes an illusion in their vision, they can never again see as they once did.
If your questions are of the mouse variety, sir, then the expensive garment on the high shelf is not meant for you. You must always remain in the state of a student, so that along the way you may gather stones into your sack, taking on the silhouette of a traveler who wanders neighborhood by neighborhood. Is not learning the most worthwhile thing of all, sir? What else could bind a human to the world more than loving the purpose of one’s existence?
