The Hourglass of the Unseen

THIS ARTICLE IS A PART OF THE SERIES “Metaphysical Echoes — صدى ما وراء الوعي,”

Although my awareness is limited, I wrote this series when I realized I am still blind to the world and perphaps to myself

What about you?

Have you felt the same confusin between awareness,action and resistance beneath the weight of this fragile existence?

What have you truly realized?

This millennium is strange; it is unlike any other time in history, and it does not seem to have any real desire to be a ‘millennium.’ For years, I have felt it to be nothing more than a mixture of faint, fragile threads, as if someone had woven them while drowsy, then left them without tying the final knot. Nothing in it is stable. Everything that happens serves to remind me that humans are nothing but insignificant atoms in a vast void of futility, and that humiliation is sometimes more present than reassurance.

But within this general ruin there was something else... a place that cannot be seen, but which exists, pulsating between the folds of the soul, in one of those cavities that human consciousness cannot reach unless the soul is shaken violently. There, in the inner chambers, I felt that the revolution that I thought was capable of carrying my soul to the light had collapsed, as if it were an old roof that had fallen on the head of time itself.

And yet... it was not entirely a disaster, but rather a prelude to the emergence of a trinity I had forgotten:

the language of the soul – the source of being – and my existence as a body passing through this age without guarantees.

I had always seen time moving, but in those days, time began to shake. It no longer moved in a straight line, but seemed to me to writhe like a snake trying to determine its direction. Events passed at a slow pace, but each tremor touched a deep nerve within me.

Amidst this fluctuation, the question of existence appeared in all its weight:

Is death a person?

Is death a body?

Is there an entity behind all this, observing the formation of existence, intervening at the moment of decay, returning things to a black void?

Or is life too big to be reduced to an equation of creation and destruction?

Perhaps there is a second life behind those dark walls that resemble the bars of an invisible existence. Walls that only open to those who possess an immaterial recipe, a recipe that transcends the limits of human understanding and reconstructs the soul in another way.

Amidst this deep confusion, the hourglass appeared.

It was an old, small piece, covered with a layer of dull copper. I got it from an old woman I met one strange evening. I don't know why I was walking there, or how I came across her on a road I had never taken before.

The old woman was in her mid-forties, but the wrinkles on her face suggested that time had not passed her by, but had taken up residence within her. She had a strange beauty bordered by an even stranger fear. Her eyes were uncomfortably round, with an unhuman absent-mindedness, and a dark mole in the middle of her nose, so that you couldn't look at her face without seeing it first.

An Arab face, Berber features, an African soul... a mixture of all races, as if she were a woman who had emerged from all the nations of the earth at once.

She walked with confident steps, followed by a trail of burning tobacco. When I approached her, I felt as if the air around her was changing, as if she carried within her an undeniable magnetic field.

She stared at my face for a long time, then said in a dry voice that sounded as if it came from the throat of a rock:

‘Boy... there's a hole in your forehead.’

I didn't understand.

‘A hole? What do you mean?’

She raised her slender finger and touched the air in front of my forehead, then said:

‘It can't be seen... but it's a dark ring, a small black hole that almost swallowed me when I saw you.’

Her words vibrated inside my chest like something suddenly remembering itself, even though I didn't remember anything.

Then she handed me the hourglass as if she were handing over a piece of my destiny.

The hourglass had a small hole in its base, a hole like a drop of ink that had fallen on an old page.

I asked her:

" How does it work? That hole will let the sand leak out!"

She smiled a smile that I couldn't tell was love or mockery:

‘It works with you... not with sand.’

Then she disappeared, or so it seemed to me, because I closed my eyes for a second, and when I opened them, the road was empty, as if the air had swallowed her up.

Since that night, something inside me has changed.

I began to hear myself as I hadn't heard myself in a long time.

Was I the clock? Was I the one leaking?

Is the sand that falls my life?

Or my memories?

Or does a person, once they become aware of themselves, begin to crumble bit by bit?

I felt a strange heaviness, as if the clock were tied to my wrist even though I was holding it in my hand. As I thought about it, I noticed something else:

Every time a grain of sand fell, it reformed on the other side.

But the question that terrified me was:

Is the compensation equal to the original?

Is the time regained equal to the time lost?

Or is what returns not what was lost?

These questions gave me an internal headache, as if the thoughts themselves were fighting in a small head that could not contain them.

That night, as the clock shook between my fingers, I saw something that cannot be described by human standards...

There was an old wooden box, as if it had been built specifically to imprison something beyond comprehension.

The box was in a room I had never entered before, but it was not unfamiliar to me. It was as if it were one of the rooms of my soul that I had forgotten since childhood.

Inside the box, someone was imprisoned.

I did not know who it was, but its presence weighed heavily on the air.

It questioned my creation, my existence, and my mortality, as if it were not a prisoner but a guard.

Although it did not speak, I could feel its words echoing in my head:

‘Where does the story unfold? Is it in time? Or in the eyes that see time?’

Hours passed like years,

and years shrank like a blink of an eye,

all between my eyelashes, as if the eye itself were a gateway to life and death.

At a certain moment, the box opened, and a goblin carrying a lantern came out.

He was not as scary as goblins are usually imagined to be, but rather resembled a drunken shadow of broken light.

In the lantern was a woodcutter's daughter, small and trembling, not knowing how she had entered a world unlike her own.

I raised the hourglass towards the goblin, and he trembled.

It was as if the hourglass shackled his power and limited the scope of his evil.

I suddenly realised that the goblin did not want to kill souls just for fun...

He was looking for something to fill his emptiness.

A void like a hole in a soul without origin.

But even so, his evil intentions were clear,

and he had to be stopped.

At that moment, something strange happened:

a silence like the interruption of time descended upon the place,

and a hidden voice that no one but me could hear said:

"The immortality of things lies in the beauty of their death...

Everything reaches its peak at the moment of its demise,

as if the universe grants it one last dance before it returns to its Lord."

Then I saw a spectre;

a lost soul, beautiful despite its sadness.

It smiled at me, without a mouth.

And it told me without a voice:

‘The universe speaks... but not everyone hears it.’

Silence stretched between me and the spectre like a long conversation without words.

It asked me:

Have you ever listened to the currents that rage within you?

The currents of success?

The currents of depression?

The currents of arrogance?

The currents of fear?

Maybe... maybe not.

Because I heard myself, but I didn't listen.

The scene suddenly ended,

and I moved to another garden,

a garden full of wolfsbane flowers.

Suffocating flowers, spreading poison in the air, as if they were the source of evil or a curse passed down through the centuries.

In the middle of the garden was a clairvoyant woman, picking flowers and injecting their poison into her mouth.

She was not committing suicide...

She was quenching her thirst.

As if the poison was her primary nourishment.

The spectre reappeared, sat in front of her, kissed her forehead, and said:

"Enough of ruining your life with the curse of a wolf who has lost his pack.

He who harbours a demon becomes a helmet behind which he hides the shame of his deeds."

The woman raised her head, looked at me half-consciously, then said to me:

‘Come closer.’

I approached.

"To complete the ritual, bring me a black goat dyed white.

Nothing works without irony."

I brought the goat.

She looked at it for a long time, then said:

"The colours of things do not deceive... humans do.

Let's see: is this real?"

But her answer was known.

Nothing is real except symbols.

She took the goat's horns and made a strange trumpet out of the shell of an old snail.

She said:

"Blow.

Let what lies between the dark lines come out into the light."

I blew...

and the words exploded.

They turned into breaths that filled the universe.

Then she asked me:

"Are there limits?

Or are you the one who draws them?"

I did not answer.

Because the universe itself was waiting for my answer.

And because at that moment I realised one thing:

that I was not the driver of events...

but rather part of the breath of the universe as it rearranged itself.

And so...

in the chaos of the soul, and in the vagaries of time,

a new chapter began to take shape.

The question was no longer:

‘Who am I?’

Nor: ‘Where am I going?’

But rather:

What is leaking out of me?

And what is being reconstituted?

And which of these is the real me?

The hourglass was in my hand,

and the universe was waiting.

And the story...

was just beginning.

Series: Metaphysical Echoes — صدى ما وراء الوعي

Author: LUCCIAN.LAYTH

Follow for upcoming chapters exploring the metaphysics of being and consciousness.

Perhaps it was an ethereal dream accompanied by a flicker of awareness that trembled beneath transparent meanings, striking you with a confusion that was not a flaw, but rather a gift from existence itself; to truly test you: will you bear it? Or will you look at it with the gaze of a blind man at sunlight and the moon's sheath? What is confusion and bewilderment? Without them, can we say that we are beings who have realised or realised when we were lost and confused? Or is the moment of bewilderment that precedes realisation the very spark of consciousness? Is confusion the beginning of realisation, or does it precede it, foreshadowing what is to come? The meaning here remains ambiguous, and perhaps there is only one way to unravel it: a steady stream of questions that seem tedious at first glance, but which alone reveal meaning when certainty exhausts us.

The Silent Forge.............................................................................

The Architect of Dust.....................................................................

The First Confusion: Between Action and Perception.................