The city

The city was not merely a city, but a meeting point between time and the absolute, where the boundaries between inside and outside, between arrival and waiting, faded away.

I did not walk toward it; rather, it was drawing me inward, as if I were returning to a place I had never truly left.

The road was not a distance, but a slow revelation—I was not searching for it; I found myself within it before I even arrived.

The air was saturated with voices that had not vanished. The footsteps that once passed still echoed in its space, and the light was not a reflection, but a lasting trace, extending from the very first moment the word "Read" was spoken.

The marble was not a solid surface, but an archive of time, preserving all who had passed. The walls were not merely walls, but a memory left unfinished. Time was not constant, but coiled around itself, disappearing only to return again.

At the grave, I was not a separate entity; I was part of the fabric of the place, a trace added to what had accumulated across centuries.

Standing there was not an isolated act, but an extension of those who had stood before, those who carried in their voices a reverence layered over time.

I did not hear my own voice, but the continuous resonance of those who came in search of a moment of complete merging, where the line between self and place was no longer clear.

The city was not a point of arrival but a redefinition of what it means for a human being to remain in constant search of peace.

It was not a destination, but a state of new awareness. It does not leave those who enter it; rather, it stays within them, even after they depart.

I did not leave it entirely, nor did it ever fully leave me. I remained within it, even while outside—as if the distance between us had never been physical, as if the road to it never ends, but reshapes itself with every step, with every backward glance toward who I was before I crossed into it.

~Firas Alwaily

United States of America