Dear friends, welcome to Ad Astra. I’m so glad you’re here.
For this week’s issue, I decided to get away from it all: the C-word, the news, the anxiety, and the flood of advice on how to work from home, how to be productive during quarantine time, how to quell your worry, or how to wash your hands.
Instead, I’d like to share with you a story I wrote in 2015 when I was on the verge of quitting corporate (in fact I wrote it exactly nine months before I quit).
One year later, this story was picked up by Lonely Planet for their annual travel anthology (you can see it here).
Without further ado, I present to you “The Night Is Young.”
The Night Is Young
My guide Mohammed dismounts his camel, takes off his worn leather sandals and steps on the hot desert sand. The onset of dusk is adding a hint of sorcery to the dunes that loom all around us and I can no longer see the homes of Merzouga village behind the rare Saharan palms.
I cling to my camel, Bob Marley, and follow Mohammed into the desert for an overnight stay.
Bob Marley’s flesh is hot against my skin. The sun is still strong and I am grateful for the elaborate red-cloth turban Mohammed tied on my head a minute ago. Through the narrow slit in the turban, I track Mohammed’s indigo tunic, lit in the ochre dunes, as he guides us deeper into this land. I lose sight of him when we cross a large dune — a sleeping giant — and realize that a camel thread in Mohammed’s hand is the only tie connecting me to another human.
I have to believe that the thread is strong enough.
Bob Marley takes careful steps, sinking to his knees but coming back out each time. After a while, the camel and I get into an ancient rhythm, advancing as one through the desert.
The quiet dunes surround our small caravan and at times seem to cover us whole. Still, we keep going. Mohammed gazes far beyond the horizon and charges ahead as if an invisible path were etched into the dunes.
I catch the last glimpse of the sun before the next slanted dune hides it from view. The air cools down and my camel perks up. The night is quickly falling on the Sahara and Mohammed’s slim silhouette is dissolving into the darkness.
I pull on the camel thread to ensure we are still connected. As if he is sensing my fear, Mohammed turns and sends me a bright wide grin. He must be only a kid, eighteen or twenty at most.
I realize I don’t know much about him, except that his family lives in a nearby village. By the time I go back to New York, he’ll take ten other people on this nightly trek.
I too will have business to attend to upon my return, an unfinished conversation.
It began years ago when I started my corporate career and soon recognized this path was not right for me.
Unhappy with my status quo but afraid to change it, I continued working and tormenting myself and my loved ones for years.
At last, one mild spring night in New York a close friend had asked me, “Why are you wasting your years on something you do not care for?”
The question hung unanswered that night but kept simmering in my mind all the way to the African continent.
Mohammed suddenly breaks the silence with his first words to me, “Algerian border.” He points somewhere far, smiles, and says it again, “Algerian border, there. We are close.”
Ten minutes later our caravan stops at a low valley formed by a circle of barely visible dunes. I say good night to Bob Marley as Mohammed helps me dismantle. The camel, unfazed by my good manners, lies down for the night and we step into the dark.
The sand is now cool to the touch, a welcomed change from the earlier furnace. I drop my bags and run up the nearest dune.
There, on top of the mound, the first star of the night emerges into view. In vain, I try to decipher its elusive flickering message and finally go back down.
Below, Mohammed unhurriedly tends to a fire, looking graceful and fragile at once. I half expect him to turn around and tell me, “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
Instead, he pours me a hot cup of tea — ‘Berber whiskey’ — a mixture of fresh mint leaves and odd mountain herbs that grow in the nearby mid-Atlas mountains.
The tea soothes my body, sore from the two-hour trek across the shifting dunes.
Mohammed takes out a large cylinder drum from Allah knows where and starts humming a simple tune, gently at first, but louder and louder with each rhythm.
Zamaza, zamaza
A-zibi-bauwi-zibiba
Asalam-aleykum a mama
Asalam-aleykum a baba
Zamaza, zamaza
A-zibi-bauwi-zibiba
I pick up another drum, smaller in size, and join in.
Zamaza, zamaza
A-zibi-bauwi-zibiba
Asalam-aleykum a mama
Asalam-aleykum a baba
Zamaza, zamaza
A-zibi-bauwi-zibiba
Mohammed pours me more tea and I look up at the skies. The earlier single star of the night has bloomed into a plentiful garden of light, with myriads of tiny and large constellations weaved into one bright carpet.
This richness of space, lost on the city dwellers, is re-igniting a fire I thought to be almost dead. I run back up to the dune and throw up my hands. “Fearless,” I whisper. “Be fearless.”
Oceans away, I finally say out loud what I could not bear to speak of before. I am afraid to drop all the piled up expectations. I am afraid to fail. I am afraid to be vulnerable with my life.
Driven by fear, I continue to make choices that steer me away from all that is risky and grand — creativity, freedom, passion.
I have become a passenger in my life, watching the years unfold to someone else’s scenario.
The stars keep shining as I cry and fall into the sand. My fear, acknowledged, quietly walks off the dune.
Some minutes later, I find Mohammed sitting atop the same dune, his face barely visible under his heavy turban. Only his eyes are alight, twinkling as they reflect the lights of the fire below.
We sit together in silence for a while, surrounded by stars, and then start our descent. As we slide down, Mohammed offers his second and last words of the night to me. “The night is young,” he says.
The night is young.
Onwards,
Yulia
Issue #13: The Night Is Young