What Trekking Did To Me -By Islamiat Bint Abdullah

“Just then, I staggered blindly towards the gutter. “No….!” I shrieked helplessly but it became only a pitiful, long-drawn-out wail, as when the air goes out of a bellows. I could barely hear my own voice. I gasped for air. Short, wheezing gasps that contracted my dry, sore throat more and more.
I couldn’t breathe! There was no more air!
I am going to die… Here and now! I…”
“Quick! Carry her! Follow me!”

“Death approached, but i no longer saw a cape-clad old man without a face in his hood, but with a scythe resting on a bony shoulder, for death had become painfully present in her every breath.” I lay completely still. I listened to my own rasping breaths. They were quieter now and deeper. But my lungs still burned like fire when I breathed a little too deeply. I knew I had stood on the threshold. I pictured it clearly. It had changed my conception of death.

Death is no longer an old man whom I could have begged for mercy or negotiate with about a postponement. After death had come so close, I have lost all my notions about that unmerciful reaper who had followed me from childhood. I no longer see a thin, cape-clad figure, a death’s head in the dark beneath the hood, an imperious bony hand stretched out, a scythe that lay ready to harvest life’s crop. Now death is dissolved, formless. Flowed as quietly as a dark river away from my naked anguish.

I now understand that I would not be meeting death. It would overtake me. Not attack or outwit me. Just calmly and naturally, at its own tempo, stride on past my allotted time. Death is time. Time that is endlessly old. One day time will turn towards me and dissolve me within it. Then my life would be ended. But time would continue. For all eternity.

#Justice for the Masses

Bint_Abdullah