⛈️ Storm Symptom ⛈️
I would sometimes get migraines when the sky clouded over, as though they were a warning that the rain was about to descend upon this desert city.
Rarely had I felt rain against my skin.
Clear, limpid water flowed only through hydraulic conduits, with no pure springs where we could cool ourselves or quench our thirst.
It was always hot there, upon that ochre, barren earth.
The city of Tébah had obviously not been born out of any desire for comfort. I had not asked to be born there, either.
And yet, it was where I had taken my first steps, clinging to the city like a weed that could never quite be pulled from the ground.
You learned to live with the heat there, more out of habit than love.
But I was reaching the age when you began to understand that leaving this forsaken land might be the only way not to lose yourself.
A dream of elsewhere that existed only in my thoughts, never quite finding the strength within me to become real beneath my feet.
—What’s the point of leaving? my mother would repeat.
—Everything, I wanted to tell her.
But deep down, I could feel that misfortune lay beyond the borders, perhaps because of those distant clouds, thick as walls, keeping us confined to a place we were never meant to cross.
Sometimes, I felt as though I were the only one who could see them.
The longing for elsewhere felt like a bad omen, much like those moments when I would paint with watercolours in the veranda and a crow would crash into the windows, marking the grim end of its long journey.
And yet, there were no crows in Tébah.
My mother took it as an evil eye.
She would burn sage to cleanse the house, to drive away whatever evil lingered there without ever quite knowing what to call it.
I would never believe in those shamanic rituals, straight out of some esoteric handbook.
But what could you do?
You cannot spend forever letting crows crash into your windows.
And I could not let my own thoughts grind me down inside a reality that would never be mine.
So I went outside, wandering between the few local shops and the wooden houses with their peeling white paint.
I walked alone, the only one willing to venture beneath that merciless sun.
A human desert that never seemed to fill, abandoned by the great civilisation beyond it.
It was not so much this place that was wrong.
It was me.
I was profoundly out of place, like an anomaly no one could quite correct.
The few people who lived there kept their distance, despite the polite smile that said, Her again…
Perhaps it was my bad aura that set me apart from this little world, as though those heavy clouds had gathered around me entirely, concealing the person I was.
If only I had the slightest idea who I truly was…
I wanted to leave.
But where would I go?
The distant reaches of Tébah, beyond the red hills, held no taste of freedom.
I knew, of course, that somewhere, another place was waiting for me. I also knew I would not like it.
Tébah was my city, my mother’s conscious choice of where to sink my roots, because I knew she herself had fled from the distant world beyond it.
And all of it because of one man’s sacred curse.
My father.
At the mere thought of him, the sky clouded over.
