Stones and Names

It is said that the black stone in Mecca is not just a stone. It is a shard of a vanished world, an echo of a cry before words, a sacred turmoil of being, older than prayer, older than the earth. What if it had been different? What if the name that echoes from Mecca had been something else, if the steps that are lost around the Kaaba were not the shadow of our own steps, but of older shadows, from a time lost in the desert’s wasteland? Today, between two moments of agony, the hot coffee burns your lips, and in an old cup, you see a broken symbol, perhaps a sign of hands that carved gods in cold stone, like death. Stop. Close your eyes, let your mind fall. What is a name, if not a lie that gains flesh, an illusion that becomes blood, a story we live until we believe it true? Mecca, Medina, Makkeshwara— they are words as heavy as stones, becoming, over time, our breath, like the steam that disappears in the cold morning air, like a sigh of a body that no longer knows what it means to live. What if the truth is that they are only circles, that everything revolves around the same essence? What if everything we do, everything we are, is only the trace of the same steps scattering on roads of asphalt and dust? We pray, but for what? With the same words that mean nothing but end up being all we have. People seek the divine in old temples, in stones that want to become sacred, but perhaps the truth is here, in your steps on the earth full of holes, in every moment in which we breathe, in every breath that seeks the sky, in every fall, in every rise. For perhaps the altar is not in cold stone, but in every street you walk, in every thought that consumes you, in every silence that embraces you, in a world that never stops loving and condemning you at the same time.