It’s 50,000 years before Christ. I’m 18. All alone.
Black skin, rough hands, barefoot on red earth. The Australian Outback. A barren desert—scorched and silent enough to swallow a man whole. The sun is merciless. The dust is all-consuming. This is my home. A native, a hunter, a man of my tribe. Or at least, I was. Now, I walk alone.
I have been exiled—or maybe I exiled myself. Our tribe is small, nomadic. We move with the seasons, never settling, never staying. I have never seen another tribe before, only heard stories. The world feels empty. My brother has a wife. My parents have each other. I have no one. It hurts. My family’s love is not enough. A man needs his woman. Adam needs Eve.
There is one single woman in our tribe. The only option. I ask her to leave with me. To go to the end of the world, together. She rejects me. The shame, unbearable. To stay in the tribe would be to relive failure daily. I choose my fate. Free-will. I leave without a fight, walking into the vast horizon, knowing I may never see another human ever again. Freedom or humiliation. I choose freedom, though it doesn’t feel like a choice at all.
I roam alone. Building fires, eating lizards, sleeping under the stars. I move like a ghost, hunting, tracking, surviving. One day, a snake strikes—fangs flashing, death in motion. A marvel. It should have killed me. I should be dead. I catch it’s throat mid-air before it lands a lethal bite. A miracle. But I am alone—so alone that miracles are meaningless. No one saw it. No one to witness. No one will ever know.
I walk the land for what feels like eternity. I sing the old songs, dance the old dances, dream the old dreams. Walking about the sunburnt country. I offer myself to the ancestors, to the stories that came before me. But there is only so much warmth they can give. I sleep cold. The myths do not kiss me. The tales do not hug me. I long for something more than my culture.
I begin weaving my own myths. I carve faces into the rocks, create figures out of my imagination. I invent characters, conversations, connections. I build my own tribe out of thin air. I try to trick my mind into believing I am not alone. But the mind is not so easily deceived. The stories fade. The silence always returns. I long for something more than my self.
I turn to God. Desperate, dependent, depressed. I drop to my knees, face pressed to the dirt, hands reaching for something greater. I pray. I beg. I believe, for a time, that faith will sustain me. That if I surrender enough, if I pray enough, the loneliness will lift. That she will arrive. The one meant for me. The one I ache for in the night.
I pray, and I pray—but she never comes. I am alone in the world. My desire dissolves into empty air. The stars do not answer. The wind does not speak. The Creator does not send what I want. My faith wilts. My prayers fade. I give up. Spirit alone is not enough. I stop asking. I stop believing. I stop waiting. And now, there is nothing left.
I climb to the top of a rock. The weight of my isolation defying gravity. I stare at the horizon, the endless stretch of nothingness. I have walked as far as I can, and seen all there is to see. My people have long forgotten me. My world has long unsatisfied me. I take one last breath and step forward. A final smile of relief. I am done.
My last thought: Why? Why did my life have to play out this way? There is no answer, only the wind rushing past my ears. I jump. Free-falling into the earth that bore me. Instant death, sudden peace. My story ends as it began—alone. But the karma remains. I’ve killed myself. Thou shall not kill. And fifty thousand years later, I find myself still searching for what my soul never found.