They Will Have Peace
Amir woke up one Sunday morning on a deserted island—without clothes and clueless as to how he got there. The last thing he remembered was the constant buzzing of his phone on the nightstand beside his bed, and the soft yellow light of a nearby street lamp creeping in through his half-closed window blinds. He had left his phone on vibrate so that it would be just barely loud enough to hear if he received a call; his elderly mother of ninety and three years lived alone, and so he was in constant fear of her experiencing a medical emergency without anyone being the wiser. Determined to be the wiser, he set up a medical alert device to be worn around her neck which would notify emergency services if she fell and was unresponsive; he had also put up neon colored post-its with his number all over the apartment so that she would always remember his number when she needed to call.
What Amir hadn’t anticipated late Saturday evening was an unrelenting series of news notifications due to the panicked anticipation of the president-elect’s first day in office the following Monday. Of course he could have simply turned off all alerts except those of his mother, but it didn’t seem so simple to his half-asleep mind and limbs, and as a result he couldn’t find the proper settings to adjust.
Having given up the fight, Amir laid there, a symphony of vibrations inches away from his face. His agitated mind relaxed, and suddenly an image filled his mind— it was of a deserted island—then the sound of waves overtook the noise of his phone. Eyes closed, Amir chalked up the sensations to his years of meditation practice, but when, in what seemed like an eternity later, he lifted his eyelids, he was there—sans clothes, sans phone, sans mom, sans anyone or anything.
As he stood up, he wished for clothes and barely a second later he spotted a light-weight, royal green-colored robe folded across a jagged rock on the sandy shore. Puzzled, he gently picked it up and draped it around his shoulders—it fit perfectly. Turning and facing the thick, dense forest standing proudly opposite the ocean, he suddenly felt hungry. Surely, this was a challenge insurmountable; he was no hunter and the only gathering he had done lately was at the market. But as he laughed to himself at the thought of how he would look sprinting through the forest with a long, pointed spear in his hand, an ornate metal tray topped with plates of dates, figs, nuts and seeds appeared on a tree stump ten feet in the distance. Approaching the food, one concern remained in Amir’s mind: that of his mom, alone and uncared for. Staring down at the tray, firmly in the grips of despair, he heard some movement coming from a particularly thick grouping of vines and bushes up ahead. Before any fear could touch his heart, his mother emerged from the forest, glowing with youth and good health, happier than he had seen her in many years.
“Salaam alaikum,” she said.
“Walaikum asalaam,” he answered, his body coursing with warmth and peace.
