Coincidence

I had found myself in a daze, time had slipped beyond my grasp. I was unsure how long I had been in these woods, these familiar woods. The snowy mountains towered around me, yet the sun warmed the rocks and soil beneath my hammock. The smell of opium hung thick in the air; a blanket of perfumed smoke. Had I been here for days, or weeks, or months? I could not muster the care to wonder.

Moses had found me when I needed him most. Looking up at his tall slender figure, I attempted to deduce whether or not he was the prophet Moses. He looked exactly the way I would have expected the prophet Moses to have looked. A tall, skinny, Iranian man. His tangled mat of hair graces his skinny waist, and his formidable beard must have been more than a foot long. I later learned that he had not bathed in over ten years. Moses found me, he slipped his hand into mine. He spoke in Farsi, sweet and dark. I let him into my hammock, and he sucked me into his hole. A hole where the tea was bitter with poppy seeds, and the beautiful blur of Farsi whirling thorough my ears. 

Eventually, my vision cleared. It had indeed been weeks. I had to leave, to not come back. I had let myself get lost in this alternate world; a world where my troubles were left behind as soon as I found myself in these woods. The paradox of extreme introspection, juxtaposed with the complete ignorance of my own life. I had no connection to these people. I had no phone, no way of using the Internet, no method of bridging my life with that of Moses again. 

Home was about a 16 hours drive from those woods where I had left Moses about a month prior. My life had returned to the typical monotony familiar to me. But, walking down a street one day, in a city of approximately 20 million people, I literally ran into him. I saw Moses. His lanky legs, his dready hair, his deep dark eyes and prominent nose. And once again, I found myself sucked into his hole. 

What a coincidence.

P.s.

I later found that these men were all involved in the Iranian mafia. They were traveling with fake passports; transporting benzene oil from Iran to Pakistan, and bringing opium from Pakistan back to Iran.