SHort Story
The Day I Came Back From the Deserts
Spoken by Gavor Qol Oram about a night they shared with a close friend in the forest of Gewareh Glent on Oraea, recorded as it was spoken.
This short story was included in contribution to a collection of Oraean stories about the discoveries of love titled Love Knows, Love Grows.
The day I came back from the deserts there was a party to welcome me.
I'd left home around age twenty. Took up a research expedition post in the deserts of a planet in another solar system. Another solar system!
And I'd been there ever since.
I'd been there for thirty years.
Hadn't brought much to those deserts to begin with except for a few memories, and in this return to the forest of my birth I'd mostly only brought memories of this other life. An often wondrous life and a still-more-often quiet life, and simple, but it was mine.
Almost everything here was a bit different, only just, but just enough so that I felt… felt as if I were a note who could hear melody all around me, yet couldn't find a way in to the song. People welcomed me - but I wasn't who they had known either.
I'm from a forestful planet, and I had been in the deserts. Out there. Way out there sometimes, almost far enough that even the mirages made from memory might begin to flicker. But truth is truth, and it will not desert us. Even if we try to deny, it waits, always ready to be found. When out there in the deserts, in the cold of myself and under the stars, I knew where I was. I had work to complete, work of benefit, work that would never be complete.
Here, under the tree canopies of my youth, surrounded by currents of life that seemed to only flow around me, I felt myself dry and grainify.
Of course I'd brought a few rocks to show at the party, but found it hard to talk. So I let them talk for me. They drifted away in the currents of the crowd.
My hands were empty. What was I doing here? What was any of this doing here?
Then I felt something cool enclosed in my hand. "Drink", said a voice. A voice I knew. A voice of a remembered reality, of an unerodable memory. I drank and the water brought me back to life, from cells to bones to heart to eyes.
The glass was taken from my hand, and replaced by a hand; the hand of the one memory I'd treasured over all others, the one I'd truly never forgotten, now leading me through the party as if I'd never left our forest.
