Whispers of the Acacia

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

— James Joyce

Through the alleys of a botanical garden, in a city whose name exists in no atlas, he entered as one enters a foreign memory: cautiously, yet with the trembling thrill of recognition. The air was dense, heavy, saturated with the crackle of unseen wings and the breath of the earth. The acacia — a tree from whose wood, so myths whisper, the ark of immortality was crafted — bent its branches like the guardian of gates that cannot be opened by hands.

Here the dogs were different: stray hounds with violet eyes in which shimmered a starless night. They did not prowl, they did not hunt — they followed him, step by step, like judges without verdicts, shadows whose silence was heavier than any word. Their gaze neither condemned nor absolved; it merely held him within the garden’s space, a reminder that the path had been chosen and that return was no longer possible.

And on the damp earth, where the roots of the acacia touched the breath of underground waters, ladybugs gathered in crimson dances. They did not crawl — they wrote. They traced signs, etched patterns like forgotten alphabets and maps of invisible constellations. He watched as these tiny beings formed spirals and circles, as if time itself were leaving notes upon the ground so as not to lose its own way.

He was young when he crossed the garden’s threshold, and time flowed around him like a river that knows no banks. Here, hours crumbled like sand, minutes looped back to their beginnings, and days fell into eternity only to rise again in a different order. The acacia beheld his face when it still shone with the breath of youth, and the same acacia, with the same tilt of its branches, gazed upon him when his steps grew heavy and his breath whispered like autumn wind.

The garden did not release him. He left it on the same evening — but as an old man. And not a single passerby in that city, the one absent from every atlas, was surprised. For in the garden, time was not a line, but an ornament, woven from the ladybugs’ signs, the violet eyes of dogs, and the breath of the acacia.