I Was Here Before I Was Born : Son of The Priest

For most people, life begins at birth. For me, that was the moment I forgot. Beginning before my first breath, I remember waiting. Not in darkness, but in silence. A silence so vast that it felt alive. There was no ground beneath me and no sky above me, yet I was not falling. I was simply there, suspended in a space that felt older than time itself. And I was not alone. Shapes moved slowly around me. They were not bodies the way humans understand bodies. They were more like shadows made of light, drifting in a calm and endless ocean of quiet. They spoke without voices, and somehow I understood them. They were waiting too. Waiting for something none of us could fully see, yet something we all knew was coming. Then the silence shifted. Not loudly. Not suddenly. But the way the wind changes direction before a storm arrives. A presence moved through the vast stillness. Everything paused. Even the drifting shadows seemed to bow without bending. And then I heard it. A voice — deep, calm, ancient. It did not come from one direction. It came from everywhere at once. “Your journey begins.” The other shadows began to move away one by one, dissolving into streams of light that vanished into the distance. Then the voice spoke again. This time it spoke directly to me. “Son of the Priest, it is time.” I wanted to ask a question. But before the thought was complete, the silence shattered. And I began to fall. I entered the world screaming. The cold air burned my lungs as if my body had never known breath before. Hands lifted me. Voices surrounded me. Someone cried. Someone laughed. A woman’s trembling voice whispered through tears. “My son…” That was the first time I heard the sound of human love. But something inside me already knew something else. I had been somewhere before. Six years later, I told my mother the truth. It was late afternoon. The wind moved gently through the mango trees behind our house, and the sky glowed orange as the sun leaned toward the horizon. My mother was washing clothes in a metal basin. I sat beside her, watching the wind move through the leaves. For a long time I said nothing. Then I asked a question. “Mother?” She kept scrubbing the cloth. “Yes, Elion?” “Where was I before I was born?” She laughed softly. “Nowhere, my son. You were not anywhere. You were only a thought in God’s mind.” I shook my head slowly. “No.” She stopped washing and looked at me. “No?” “I was somewhere.” She smiled the way adults do when they think children are imagining stories. “And where was that?” I pointed toward the sky. “There.” Her smile faded slightly. “What do you mean?” “I was waiting.” The wind passed through the trees again, rustling the leaves like whispers. My mother stared at me. “Waiting for what?” “For my turn.” The water in the basin slowly stopped moving. She set the cloth down. “Elion, what are you talking about?” I tried to explain it the way I remembered. “There were many of us,” I said. “We did not have bodies. But we could see each other. And we could speak without words.” My mother’s eyes narrowed with confusion. “Who told you this?” “No one.” “Then how do you know?” I looked at her, surprised that she didn’t understand. “Because I was there.” The wind stopped. For a moment the entire yard felt strangely quiet. My mother’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Elion, children do not remember before they are born.” I shook my head again. “But I do.” She searched my face, trying to decide whether I was joking. “What else do you remember?” I hesitated. Then I said the thing that would change everything. “There was a voice.” My mother’s hands slowly stilled. “What voice?” “It called me.” “What did it say?” I looked up at the sky again. Even now, I could almost hear it. “It said…” I paused. Then I repeated the words exactly as they had been spoken. “Son of the Priest, it is time.” My mother froze. The cloth slipped from her hands and fell back into the water. For a long moment she said nothing. Then she whispered something I would not understand until many years later. “That is impossible.” But in the weeks that followed, the village began whispering something far more dangerous. They said I knew things a child should not know. They said my questions were strange. And slowly, quietly, another rumour began to spread. A rumour that would follow me for the rest of my life. Some people began to say that my father was not the man who raised me. They said my father was a priest. And that I was the secret no one was supposed to discover. But the truth was stranger than any rumor. Because the voice I heard before I was born, was not the voice of a man.