Waking up in Rabat
Usually when I wake up it takes me a few seconds to open my eyes because I try to remember where I am and what I'm going to find when my eyelids raise the curtain again. Forgetting where in the world I have gone to sleep is very common for me and for people who travel a lot.
This time, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't reconstruct my last hours before I fell asleep, so I didn't know what was waiting for me out there surrounding my body. I had to sharpen my other senses to see if I could get any clues: aching joints, and a lot of heat. Little help. Being in a warm place doesn't even acquire the status of a clue in my nomadic life. Then I decided to open my eyes and saw myself in the middle of the desert lying next to a boy of about 10 years old, blond and dressed in green, with the certainty of not knowing him before, but at the same time knowing who he is. I could have screamed, waking up next to a stranger is enough reason to do so, but I didn't, the boy looked at me with transparent eyes and smiled.
- Feeling better? Let's look for a well.
- There are no wells in the desert," I said, as if that were the normal way to start a conversation.
- What makes the desert beautiful is that well hidden somewhere, just as what makes the stars beautiful is a rose waiting for me somewhere.
What did it all sound like? The headache and the dizziness did not let me think clearly.
- As my friend the fox said - my little companion continued speaking - the essential is invisible to the eye, and it cannot be seen well unless it is with the heart.
Then I fell for it. It was him, the protagonist of one of the first books of my childhood: the Little Prince. How was it possible? I don't know, but he was very real. He was telling me about his rose, and how beautiful it was among all the roses that were not his rose.
- Draw me a rose," she said.
- You mean a lamb," I replied, appealing to my memory.
- No, the lamb was given to me by the aviator, I want you to draw me a rose to remember my rose, beautiful among all roses.
And I traced an unconventional rose for him. As I quietly admired my drawing, I saw a snake appear behind him, I wanted to warn him, but I couldn't, my voice fought against my throat but couldn't get out, and at some point in that battle my eyes lowered the curtain again without me being able to do anything to avoid it.
I woke up in a bed in what looked like a small hospital. It was a fairly large room with a dozen beds, half of them occupied by other sleeping patients. My arm was bandaged and connected to the drip, and my side a window and a sky that betrayed that the sun would soon rise. I looked for the Little Prince at my side, but as I suspected, he was no longer there. A silent nurse entered my field of vision and after checking my vitals smiled at me.
- How are you feeling?
- Where am I? What happened to me?
- You are in Rabat and recovering from a desert snake bite.
His answer blocked the rest of the questions that crowded my mouth and I began to remember: our excursion to the desert, our crossing, the beauty of the dunes, the stillness of the nights, the thousand stars, the chats with our travel companions, the silences with myself, the awakening before dawn, the heat at noon, the thirst... and the yellow snake standing before me. My notebook rested on the bedside table and judging by its condition, it had suffered quite a bit in the last few hours.
I flipped through it with automatic movements and my eyes lost in my notes trying to thread the memories until I stopped dead in my tracks on the last page.
There she was, beautiful and unconventional, looking at me from the center of the page, the rose that my friend the Little Prince asked me to draw for him.
Like the aviator, the Little Prince appeared to me in the middle of the desert, but just as he asked me to draw him a lamb, he asked me for a rose. The awakening in Rabat is plunged in the daze trying to unravel the delirium of reality. In our weaving the rose multiplied to infinity is so that my little friend never forgets the uniqueness of his rose among all the others.
