Given that ambiguity, I’ve interpreted it as: — a tale of exile, memory, and the desert.
I did not drink.
I saw the moon split into two rivers. One river flowed milk. The other flowed blood. Between them stood a figure cloaked in sand. It had no face, only a thousand shifting masks. It spoke with the voice of every person I had lost.
That was the asy alhjran — the hardest migration. Not the journey of the body. The journey where you outlive everyone you loved." rwayt asy alhjran
I wept. I begged for water. The figure reached into its chest and pulled out a dry well. 'This,' it said, 'is the well of memory. Drink, and forget. Do not drink, and carry the thirst forever.'
"So we migrated — not toward hope, but away from death. We called it al-hijran , the bitter leaving.
The children gathered close.
For forty nights we walked. The camels groaned. The milk dried. My mother buried my youngest sister under a cairn of black stones. She said nothing. She just marked the rock with a line: 'Here lies a child who never saw water.'
"Long ago," Idris began, "I was not old. I was a rider, swift and sharp as a spear. My tribe was struck by drought. The wells wept dust. The elders said, 'Go north, to the green valleys.' But the north belonged to enemies.
One evening, as the sun bled amber into the dunes, Idris sat by a dying fire and said, "I will tell you of the rwayt asy alhjran. The vision that comes only when the heart has lost its compass." Given that ambiguity, I’ve interpreted it as: —
It said: 'You think migration is movement. No. Migration is standing still while everything you love walks away from you.'
On the forty-first night, I collapsed. Fever ate my sight. And in that blindness, I saw rwayt asy — the impossible vision.