An Acient Text

I felt so lost before.  It felt as though I was just drifting through space with nothing to live for.  All that changed though, when I finally met Charles.  It was 8455 AD and I was living on Earth at the time.  Charles met me while I was waitressing at the Sleepy Starship.  Charles said he had gotten off late that night and just wanted something to eat, and the diner was the only thing open in town.  He didn't seem all that amazing to me at first, just another man ordering another cup of coffee when he should have been sleeping, but as I poured, I could tell something important was on his mind.  He didn't look at me, or the coffee pot, or the eggs, who's yolks had split and were all over his plate.  He was looking beyond all of that.

It took three cups, but I finally got the courage to ask him, "Is something wrong?"

He blinked a few times and looked up at me, "Sorry.  No, nothing is wrong."

I started pouring the cup, "You just seem a little distracted."  To be fair, I was a little worried.  I thought he'd drive himself into a ditch with how out-of-it he seemed.

"Oh, in a way I am, I guess.  I'm working on the dig site just north of here,"  We all knew about it.  Some guy had been hunting up there and came across some pre-3000's stuff.  It was in all the papers.  Charles was one of the archeologists called in to work on it.  "There are several amazing pieces, all of them extremely well preserved.  I think we may start to actually know what life was like for them."

The old world had always amazed me.  No one else was in the diner, so I sat down to ask what he'd found, "So, what was it like for them?"

"Oh, I don't think I can really say that just yet, I can just tell you that we might be starting to understand."

"Well, what did you find?"

"That's the thing of it.  We're not completely sure.  We think it's some kind of scripture."

"Scripture?  You mean they had religion back then?  We never thought they did, right?"

"That's right, we always thought they were too undeveloped to believe in a deity, at least not in the same way that we do."

"So, what does the book say."

"We've only been able to decipher some of it, but there seems to be some kind of ritual in it where it actually specifies that the ritual is what's the most important thing in the book."

My head was swimming.  I'd never heard of anything like this, but it sounded too amazing not to look into. 

Of course, you all know the rest.  Eventually that whole book was deciphered, and it just made too much sense to ignore.  I'd say that's the day my life turned around.  I didn't know it yet, but those people, so long ago had found what life was truly about.  I read the whole book, and the ritual several times before we ever tried it out.  I invited everyone I trusted over to my house.  We read through the translation and all did it together.  No one at that first meeting was the same after it.  Some laughed, most cried.  We had finally found what we were looking for.  I didn't feel much of anything until I saw Charles, across the circle from me, tears streaming down his cheeks.  He felt it too.

Charles was an expert on the old language.  He was on the team who translated the scripture.  I once asked him how the ritual was pronounced in the old language.  He smiled a little.  I was always asking him stupid things like this, things that really didn't matter, because, who cares what they called it?  But he answered me, "The Hokie-Pokie."  I'm not sure why, but knowing that sealed it all for me.  I truly had found what it was all about.