‌The Royal Truth

He sighed and looked at the sky, where the moon hung low over the horizon, solitary and majestic. His face was both pensive and shadowed with regret; the remembrance seemed to have cast a pall over his features.

He turned and gazed at me questioningly for some moments.

I straightened up. It is certainly safe inside a house, I agreed, but safer inside a story where everything connects, which is more than can be said of our story, where we cannot even seem to agree upon the most basic elements, such as what the two wanderers looked like. Perhaps it is because in retelling our various encounters, each one of us is intent on honesty, as well as the absolute commitment to memory that inspires what we storytellers, with our voracious appetite for physical detail, call the imagination. And so it transpires that even as we free ourselves from the bondage of time, we deliver ourselves into ever more subtle bonds of our own making. But then again, to rephrase a question I asked earlier, what is the truth? Do we speak the truth, or do various, often incompatible versions of the truth speak through us? Especially here, in the Jemaa, where what matters at any given moment is only that which is most significant. That which holds the attention. That which convinces. Now, and for the next several hours or years. That which is beautiful, above all, and forged of love, because truth is beauty’s sister. Like the luminous young woman and her dark and taciturn companion, truth and beauty redeem each other.