With every step my feet sink into the snow, and with every moment they ache until I almost fall into its depth and its deceptive kindness, the memories extend to me, as if its pure whiteness is no different from her purity and her gentleness. The snow is no different from her, in reality. Both seem tender from afar, but when you get close to them, or move too far away, you feel the light fade from around you. And perhaps you yourself lose your light the closer you get; it disappears, vanishes, and is reflected away. You wish to embrace it and never leave it, but you are forced to do the opposite if you want to resist the illusion of salvation and its pleasure, if you truly want to live your life.
Honeyed sand we walked on before, and the artistic rubble of a city that no longer has a name, leading to a dream and a hope given to me by a person I believed would change the features of this story. And I felt that she, as she always was, knew everything, and she seemed so confident then that she possessed a solid plan. But she first shocked me with a bombshell when I saw the ship without a ship and without its passengers, then again when no one answered my light except for winter. With the first snowflake that fell upon me from the sky, I realized that this story, that this day nicknamed the seventh in it, would be no different from its predecessors. There would be no return. Survival would remain our highest hope, and it would need a miracle to be realized. And we will witness one fall followed by another, one catastrophe and another, until the conclusion finds us surrendering somewhere amidst the ruins of this earth.
And how can I be so sure of this happening? How, when everything that has happened so far, all those successive events, my skin, my limbs, my eyes, my ears, and the entire world around me in which you left us, O our Mother—if you are hearing my address—and the signs I used to see that represented your love for us, and the chasing of the illusion of return, and the flight paths full of the remains of machines we will never know how to use; all of it has allowed me only to say: Look, O our Mother, if you can see us through the clouds up above, amidst this gloom that does not clear no matter how many days pass, amidst the state of our hearts that we can barely breathe because of, until the most we can console each other with is that we are, at least, still breathing to this day. Look, we are living our lives, our days, singing our old anthem as we walk upon the white carpet of the earth. And the return, as I imagine it, will take millions of years. Even if we lived that entire time, and survived by a miracle, I do not believe we will ever return to you.
Returning is no longer an option for me, or perhaps it never was from the beginning. For how can four torn, lost souls, amidst the wonders of this paradise, and their current selves, cross a void that a hundred complete stars could not cross at the beginning of our journey? We have seen the truth of fragility here, our truth, and the truth of the illusion in which we lived for so long. We no longer carry the same naive hope with which we departed, nor the same blind faith that was shattered with the first impact. We now realize the price. We realize that some journeys have no return, no matter how we try, and that the light we hope for may be farther and harsher than we imagine. We have changed, O our Mother, changed to the extent that returning to you is like returning to a time to which we no longer belong, or to a dream we no longer even dare to believe. We didn't just find the answers we longed for; we discovered what is deeper. For with the stories of this world, we realized, and we found in ourselves, how we are, in fact, closer to humans in our weakness and our ignorance, in the overflow of our emotions and the fluctuation of our thoughts, and even in our composition, our voice, and our speech, than to you, O Mother Sun.
Important Note: This story is a work of fiction. All names of characters, organizations, and the like are imaginary. The story has no connection to any real events, similar to those that may have occurred or might occur at some point.
Which Sun Are You Talking About?
By: Ahmad A Rahaa
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or stored in any form or by any means, electronic or physical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the author.
ISBN: 979-8-89965-694-1
Note: This English translation was generated by Gemini2.5Pro AI Model from the original Arabic text.