Hisam’s friend, Karim and his wife, Amira welcomed us at their house which was in the heart of blue city of Chefchaouen. From houses to doors, back alleys and narrow streets of the entire city, everything was painted in different shades of blue. It’s a spacious house with oriental design and structure. Irem and I had to share a room on the first floor. Amira was pregnant, so Irem and I helped her with the dinner and cleaned the place afterwards.

The rooftop terrace gave the view of the entire city. After the breakfast, I went to the terrace and leaned against the wall to see the view when Amira joined me.

“It’s peaceful, isn’t it?” She asked sitting down on a chair and I nodded. “Karim and I have never thought that we’d settle down here and start our family.”

“It is indeed peaceful here” . “Are you seeing someone?” Her question caught me off guard.

“Hallucinations?

She let out a laughter and said, “No, I’m talking about being with someone.” I flushed in embarrassment. Since when did I become this unhinged?

I told her that I wasn’t seeing anyone and didn’t want to be tied down to one place.

“I feel I don’t belong anywhere.” This constant feeling of self-exile, and being displaced even at a right place is a burden. I had a house, and family but not a sense of belonging. I had never been at home. In the end, I didn’t know what a home was.

“Home is a feeling, not a place. You will belong to a place when you find home in yourself.”  Amira answered and I realized that she wasn’t wrong about it.

“Do you also think there’s a third being that mysteriously guides us?” I asked her.

“I do”, she replied. “In Islamic account, it’s believed that Khidr resides in waters, and guides those who seek truth. He had appeared before Moses and imparted the knowledge of Al-Ghaib to him.”

“Is he the unseen one?”

“He is a mysterious being. One can’t tell if he’s a saint or prophet, but when he met with Moses where two seas met, it’s place that separated two worlds: the world of seen and the unseen.  There’s a fine barrier between the higher and the lower realm, and the intermediary realm materializes what’s abstract and imagined.”  

I suddenly became interested in her insight and asked, “What’s this place called then?”

“Does it matter what’s that place called?”  Certain things can’t be named but it doesn’t mean they are any less real. Say, your mind is also a place where you see the imagined. Both you and I are places, but if it assures you we call this place Barzakh or Imaginary Realm; a place that divides the two worlds.”

The more I questioned about these things, the more confused I became. If there’s third realm, then who are the people of that place?

Amira suggested me to visit a library if I wanted to learn more about it. I  visited a public library with Irem, and asked the librarian for the section of philosophy. I looked for Ibn Al-Arabi’s works in the aisle and picked out his book, Fasus-Al-Hikam. His book, Seal of Wisdom is on mysticism and spiritual nature of knowledge through the prophetic figures of Adam, Enoch, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and others as well.

 I sat down at a table, and opened the book to look for the chapter of Moses. The chapter mentioned Khidr meeting with Moses and imparted him knowledge of the unseen.

Al-Arabi wrote Al-Khidr had inspired Moses with the knowledge of self  through the incidents he had witnessed during their journey. The sinking of boat was parallel to Moses being put into ark in Nile; the killing of a boy to the Copt Moses had killed, and Khidr’s straightening of wall of the orphans to Moses being protected in Pharaoh’s household by God, Himself. There’s inward wisdom to all the outward acts Moses had encountered in his life.

I read more on the parable of Moses and Al-Khidr, and learnt that Moses and Joshua had met Khidr at a place where two seas met, and the dead fish disappeared into the water making a channel through it as in a tunnel.

Tunnel? I paused reading.

The salted fish that was in vessel for eating had come back to life and escaped into the water.

Where could it have gone? Did it escape to another realm? The place where two seas met, and a dead fish coming back to life. How could it be possible?

I immediately got up and looked for other books in the section. There were various interpretations of this incident, but I wasn’t interested in any of them.

I recalled Amira’s words about an intermediary realm between Higher and Lower, the Barzakh.

I picked another book, and tried to read it. Barzakh is a barrier or place of dead before resurrection. However, in mysticism it’s a Imaginal Realm that materializes the form from the Noetic Realm to our Material  World.

I closed the book, unable to digest it any further and analyzed the picture.

I met Yousef and Irem, and both of them led me to other things. Yousef himself was a  scholar, but he pointed out Hisam to me through Irem which made me follow him to Morocco. Amira was merely a housewife, but she suddenly mentioned the account of Khidr to me.

Did it mean the things I might have experienced had hidden meaning to them as well?

The old man at the book shop in Paris who sold me the book, the woman on train, the boy in the desert and Yousef and Amira, they all were guiding me to something else.

They all had wanted me to find Something. I had told Yousef about Dylan, but when I showed him the hairpin, he said that couldn’t help me further, but instead asked me to see Hisam who brought us to Amira. They were not ordinary people.

The dagger had materialized itself in this world, but what about the hairpin?

I pulled out the hairpin from my purse, and carefully inspected it. It’s plain gold hairstick with a plum flower design at its head. For some reason, I sensed something might be missing.

The design was too simple. Shouldn’t there be a pearl or stone?

The dagger that suddenly appeared here, and the hairpin that I forgot in that world only to be returned again showed that there’s a connection between the two. Since I was the holder of this hairpin, this could be the reason that I kept returning to that place.

 I put the book back on shelf and I came out of the library to call my mother. I asked her about her well-being, then inquired about the origins of grandmother’s hairpin.

‘Why are you suddenly asking me about it?’ She questioned. I  told her that I was looking at the hairpin and started missing her. She knew that among her children, I was the closest one to grandmother.

‘Mother-in-law got it in an auction when she went to China.’ In the year 1948, she had went to Changsha with my grandfather who gifted that hairstick to her.

 ‘Your sister had wanted that hairstick, but your grandmother left it for you’, said my mother.

I wanted to tell her that she had left a curse to me. Why would someone get a hair relic unearthed from some ancient tomb or left behind by a dead person?

 I asked her if she could find some old pictures of grandmother wearing that hairstick, and send them to me. I talked to her for a while about my vacation then, Irem came and I ended the call.

“Did you find what you’re looking for.” She asked me. I had become wary of her as well, so didn’t tell her the whole truth.

“Sort of. I don’t get it much, the philosophical stuff.”  I couldn’t trust anyone around me.

“Hisam called and asked us to go come back. We are leaving for the desert.”

“Desert?” My brows furrowed.  

“He said that they have found a person who might know about the dagger.”  What a person with such knowledge could be doing in the middle of desert?

Irem and I went back, and Karim briefed us about their professor whose colleague was in desert with his team.  I started packing as we had leave early in the morning.

I was on the terrace again, sitting on a stool and enjoying the view, when Irem came to give me a cup of coffee.

“We are leaving in the morning.” She said, breaking the silence and I nodded.

“I’m afraid.” Irem admitted. “I think something bad is about to happen.”

“Why do you think so?” I asked her, and the girl leaned closer after making sure we two were alone on the terrace. “There’s something that I need to tell you”, she said. “My uncle has been acting strange since he met you.”

“Yousef?” For some reason, I wasn’t entirely surprised, and asked her about him.

“Would you believe me if I say I don’t really think that he’s my uncle?”

She confessed, and I became baffled.

“What do you mean that he’s not your uncle?”

“My uncle, Hisam and others went to Egypt few months ago. However, ever since he came back from the desert, he’s been acting strange. I think it’s not him.”

“Then, who is he?” Did somehow happen to this group of people in the desert?

“I don’t know, but I really don’t think he’s my uncle. I can’t explain it, but he’s changed after their survived a sandstorm in the desert. Even, there’s something off about Hisam. He’s been obsessed with finding an artifact to study about realms.”

As Irem said it, I suspected it wasn’t just about studying realms. He’s looking into the objects that could open a portal to another realm.

“Were Karim and Amira also with them?”

“Amira was on the team back then.”

I sank back at her revelation, and realized I got caught up in something bigger than I had imagined. Yousef, Hisam and Amira weren’t ordinary people, and had set me up to get back to the desert.

I might not be the dead fish, but there’s someone else who wanted to escape from this world.

I turned to Irem, and asked her if she had mentioned it to anyone else besides me.  She shook her head, and told me that she couldn’t trust Hisam and his friends.

 I took her hand in mine and said,  “Listen, no matter what happens in the desert tomorrow, you will stay close to me.”  We two became silent, and turned to look at the glowing city lights under the night sky of Chefchaouen.

That Night, I called mother and siblings to tell them that I was going to the desert and would return soon. However, I knew what lay ahead of the road. If something happened to me during the trip, and I couldn’t come back, I’d die without regret of not letting them know.

‘About the pictures, you had asked me to find. I’ve sent them to you’, Mother told me.

 I checked my phone and opened the pictures. The first few pictures were grainy and black and white, so the quality was low. I had to zoom them in to see properly. It’s the sixth colored picture of the grandmother that caught my attention and my suspicion was right.

It’s a red stone on the flower as that of Hachim’s dagger which was missing. I became the target because of the hairpin connected to that place.

I might be a pawn in someone’s game, but I’ll be the one to end it.