And when someone asked him, years later, “Who are you?” He would smile and say, “I am the one who found the whisper and became the middle.”
He laughed — a dry, broken sound. “That’s not a place.”
He whispered to himself now: “Ly alhamsh — lab alwst wana.” The whisper is mine. The heart of the middle is mine. And I am.
One night, Nael answered aloud: “Where is the middle?” ly alhamsh- lab alwst wana
In the old quarter of a city that had forgotten its own name, there was a small room suspended between two floors — not quite ground, not quite sky. It belonged to a man named Nael, who had stopped counting years and instead counted silences.
But one dawn, as the city’s first call to prayer bled through the walls, Nael felt it: lab alwst — the core of the middle. It wasn't a location. It was a presence. A point where the whisper and he were not two things.
For years, he’d heard it just at the edge of sleep. A voice like dried leaves brushing stone. It said only one thing, each time differently, but always the same meaning: “Come to the middle.” And when someone asked him, years later, “Who are you
Not his whisper. Someone else’s.
The whisper replied, “Between your ribs and your silence.”
In that core, the whisper became his own voice. And his voice became the silence from which all sounds emerge. And I am
After that, the room emptied. Nael walked downstairs, into the city’s noise. The merchants, the engines, the children — none of it was loud anymore. It was all just variations of the one whisper, dancing around the still center he now carried inside.
“It’s the only place,” the whisper said. “Everything else is noise.”
Lab alwst.
Weeks passed. Visitors thought he had gone mad.