He wakes up. He looks around. He feels something gritty under his hands. Sand.
Getting to his feet, he looks around. The desert surrounds him. Plain, white sand in every direction.
"What had happened? How had he arrived here?" he thinks.
He starts to desperately search for answers. He picks up the sand and examines it. Every single grain is exactly the same. There are no rocks, no plants. Nothing.
He starts digging. But the fine sand keeps falling in on itself, and he reaches nowhere.
He runs. And runs. And runs.
But finds nothings.
Finally, he gives up, and lies down on the ground, crying. He is all alone. He is nothing, he might as well be a part of the blank, white sand.
As he cries, he notices that his tears are dissolving the sand under his face. A hole begins to appear. He notices a glimmer. Something is there! Something red. His tears of desperation transforming into tears of joy, he begins digging through the dissolved sand. As he digs, he hits something metal. He yells out in joy and digs around it.
Hours later, he has uncovered a car. A truck. A Pathfinder. The keys still inside. A full tank of gas. He jumps inside and turns the key. Brummmm! It's running.
And he drives his car, convinced that now he is saved. Now if he drives far enough, he will find what he has been looking for, he will find his connection to reality.
Within moments, he sees some lights. It's a city! He sees the people bustling, the neon lights flashing. He puts the pedal to the medal.
For the next few years, he lives there. He builds a life, he builds a home, he builds a marriage. For years, he forgets that he came from the blankness of the desert. He forgets that surrounding the city was a sea of nothingness. He sends his car to a junkyard.
One day, he turns the faucet to wash his hands. No water comes out. The lights go out. He tries flicking the switches. Nothing. He looks for his wife. Nowhere. His car: gone.
The house starts to shake. The walls start to fall. He shields his head, confused. But nothing hits him, nothing hurts him. All that falls on him is sand. Sand and sand and more sand. Until all that is left of the city is the same nothingness that surrounded him when he began.
Again, he is alone. Again, he trudges through the desert, through the white sand, hoping to find something, something outside of himself before he goes insane. Something to save him.
Finally, exhausted, he sits down on the ground. And he thinks. He meditates. He stares down at the sand. For years, he sits like this, longing to find some truth in the sand. But he finds nothing. Day after day, he is forced to accept that there is no truth in the sand, that he will never be connected to anything real again, and that everything he ever touched or knew was a mirage, a fake.
And so he stops looking at the sand. He stops caring about it, and instead takes a moment to look at himself, something he realized he never did his whole life.
In a flash, he realizes that he is made of the same sand, the same white nothingness that has surrounded him for so long. He realizes that he is just another grain of whiteness in the sea.
But perhaps there is more? Perhaps he can find more truth if he just... digs. And he begins to dig into his chest, into his brain, into his body. Until he can dig no longer. Until the sand falls away onto the ground and dissolves amongst it. Until he is exposed for what he really is.
Light.
Exposed, the light spreads around him, exposing the world in a flash. He sees cities, but this time they are real. He sees the car that he supposedly sent to the junkyard. He sees the sand build itself into something real.
For the first time in his life, he is able to go out into the world and realize who he really is. As long as he looks past the sand that surrounds him and sees the light radiating from his essence, he knows that he is divine, sacred and real.
