Kalima

 

A timeless village nestled between a sacred forest and a forgotten river, where reality bends and time flows like memory...I heard the echo of a question I had never dared to ask: What if the heart knows what the mind cannot bear to understand?”

Published: 2025

The Arrival

I came to N’gombe Ilonda not to be found, but to forget. The village was not on any map, and perhaps it never had been. It lay nestled between a forest that whispered in forgotten tongues and a river that flowed both forward and back, depending on who was watching.

I arrived at dusk, when the sky wore its bruises like a memory. The path behind me had vanished, swallowed by the silence of the trees. My feet ached, but the ache felt earned—like penance. I had walked for days, guided only by a story told to me by a dying man whose eyes had already begun to see the other side.

The air in N’gombe Ilonda was thick with something I could not name. Not mist, not smoke—something older. It clung to my skin like forgotten prayers. The villagers watched me from behind half-open doors and curtainless windows. They did not speak. They did not smile. But they nodded, as if they had been expecting me.

I found lodging in a hut made of clay and woven reeds, offered by an old woman who never asked my name. She simply said, “You will remember what you came to forget.” Then she vanished into the folds of night.

That night, I dreamt of a woman standing in moonlight, her eyes like rivers that had seen too much. She did not speak, but I felt her voice in my chest. When I woke, the dream lingered—not as memory, but as presence.

The shrine stood at the centre of the village, crumbling and overgrown. Vines bloomed with silver flowers that opened only under the moon. I was drawn to it, as if something within me recognized its silence.

And then I saw her.

She stood barefoot in the shadow of the shrine; her gaze fixed on the stars. Her presence was not sudden—it was as if she had always been there, waiting for me to arrive at the right moment in time.

I did not speak. Neither did she.

But something shifted in the air between us, like a page turning in a book I had never read but somehow knew by heart.

What was I trying to forget? Not a person, not a place—but a question. One that had followed me like a shadow stitched to my soul: What is the purpose of knowing, if knowing brings no peace?

I had spent years chasing truths in books, in debates, in the quiet corners of thought. I had studied the great philosophers, dissected their words like sacred texts. Yet the more I understood, the less I felt. My mind grew vast, but my heart remained a stranger.

In the city, I was Kalima the thinker. The man who could unravel paradoxes and speak in metaphors. But beneath the intellect was a silence I could not name. A silence that grew louder with every answer I found.

N’gombe Ilonda was not a place I had planned to find. It was whispered to me by a man whose eyes had already begun to see the other side. He said, “There is a village where the soul remembers what the mind forgets.” I did not believe him. But I followed the whisper anyway.

Now, standing in this village that seemed to breathe with its own rhythm, I felt something stir. Not clarity. Not revelation. But a presence. As if the air itself was watching me, waiting for me to ask the right question.

And then there was her.

She did not speak. But her silence was not empty—it was full. Full of things I had never dared to feel. Her gaze did not pierce me; it invited me. To remember. To feel. To become.

There is a kind of silence that does not come from the absence of sound, but from the exhaustion of thought. That was the silence I carried.

continues.....