When I was a child, I saw a wounded pregnant woman being rushed to the hospital after being injured in her village. It was during the war between the government army and a rebel group. As I saw her helplessly bleeding, I felt powerless to save her, let alone stop time. Until today I do not know whether she made it or where she could be if she did.
I wish I had an opportunity to thank her for the impact she had on who I am today. Wait! Let’s be clear: I do not believe that time is linear nor can I pretend to have cracked the time equation. But the series of events that followed subjectively seemed connected as I immediately became interested in becoming a doctor. Whether my interest in becoming a medical doctor was a byproduct of the inputs I got through my senses that evening or not, all I know is that I lived in a utopia for almost a year laughing at scientific jokes with my peers in a hospital from the future. I was living my dream inside of my head, going to school excitedly, visiting hospitals after school just to feed my curiosity, and applying what I saw doctors doing on lizards in my bushy neighborhood.
I had a habit of consuming a snack around noon, which was nearly enough until dinner time. I never anticipated that skipping my snack on November 13th, 2001 was going to affect the following parts of my life. After I arrived home at around 3:00 PM, my parents were furious because school was supposed to have ended at noon, which means I should’ve been at home by 1PM. I wish I had spoken out about what was going through my mind. I simply angrily went to the lonely spot I had chosen from the bush to communicate with my inner self before I saw a bee passing by, from flower to flower until it reached a hive 80 feet from me. I had seen my uncle get honey from a beehive before using smoke as defense. I made a fire right under the tree that was hosting the hive, covering myself with anything I had next to me. I started climbing the tree and using a piece of wood with my left hand to fetch honey, gravity was in my favor. Focused on the big piece of honey on the ground, I started climbing down and I got stung on the back of my neck in the process.
Roughly 80 minutes later, I was no longer feeling the pain. My mind had gone AWOL before I realized that I was gonna instead become a pilot. Being stung brought a dilemma to my mind: Was the bee protecting the hive or attacking me? Was the bee that passed by me earlier on a mission to lure me out towards the hive so that I could get my fair share of what they are capable of? All I know is that I was furious toward the bee that I had seen earlier. I wanted to know what it knew and how it came to know what it knew. I became obsessed with bees from that day onwards. The bush became my best friend. I read different issues of magazines and books to learn more about bees and other animals. I realized that the “social” bee that stung me might have already died. But something was still missing: What was going through its mind, provided that it even had one?
By closing my eyes, I pictured using my own mind what it could have been being a bee. I saw myself inside a moving object called myself, with a windshield that allowed me to see trees and flowers, bigger than I ever imagined. I saw lizards on the ground. I saw some flowers with openings big enough to allow me to get inside and feed my curiosity. I started entering flowers, one after another, hoping that one would have a tunnel that would bring me to an underground world. After visiting around 15 flowers, I saw a giant human being, sitting by himself on a rock. He was big enough to scare me and I started running off. He followed me as I was running helplessly until I saw other bees with the same size but different facial features. It was my species. I followed them until they were many, going in one direction that led to a tree. It looked like I had found my country. I was happy to see other bees, bigger and smaller, working on this big project that I had no idea how to interpret.
I was flying around the tree excitedly, greeting my neighbors, and singing a song that all of us bees knew perfectly. That happiness was crushed in a matter of seconds with a big fog that made many of us physically exhausted: some coughed, some passed out, and no one was willing to leave the project. I tried looking down through the smoke and saw a giant climbing the tree, and I was sure that it was the giant I had seen earlier. I was angry, sad, scared, and full of guilt for bringing the giant to that place. I tried flying off, but I couldn’t. I could barely breathe. I tried to hide under the building that we were constructing but it broke. I was screaming “Vreshgorbweee” in my bee language as we were falling down, and at almost exactly the same time I hit the ground I heard a voice screaming “Othnieeeel!”. It was my mom who was looking for me, and she asked: “why are you screaming?” Honestly, I didn’t know I was screaming. By far, that was the best trip I had had since I was born.
That night, I barely ate. My mind had a new obsession: Air trips. Until today I don’t know whether the bee I had seen earlier made it, but I can be sure that the bee that stung me didn’t survive long. If they were the same, well, it follows that I stung myself. That interconnection between “myselves” slowly led to this website, where we hope to travel through adventures that remain analogue to the history of the human mind.
For now, yI’el!
