By Dr. Adnan Bouzan
And now...
I write to you from a grievance that has dwelt within my heart for so long it has become an inseparable companion, and from a longing that has made its home within my soul until it no longer remembers the way to depart. Tears wash the ink from my pen, and so nothing flows across these pages except what sorrow has wrung from the deepest chambers of my heart. My fingers no longer write words to be read, but wounds to be remembered, and sighs that have lingered so long they have become part of my very heartbeat, never leaving me without taking my peace with them.
I no longer know whether I write to ease the burden time has laid upon my heart, or because words are the last companions that remained after everything else had quietly slipped away. Perhaps when every path to confession narrows, one seeks refuge in paper as a drowning soul clings to the final piece of drifting wood—not because it believes salvation is certain, but because hope is all that survives after despair has spoken its last word.
Longing has dwelt within my chest for so long that I have come to think of it as one of my own organs. It is no longer a passing shadow waiting to disappear, but a permanent resident that knows no homeland except my heart and no shelter except my memory. Each time I try to tear its roots from the depths of my soul, they cling more fiercely to the soil of my being, until I imagine that I no longer carry a heart at all, but rather a withered garden whose leaves fall silently, while none but God hears the groaning of its trees.
How strange this absence is...
It asks no permission before entering the soul, nor does it knock upon the doors of the heart before claiming it as its own. It descends as night descends upon a city exhausted by waiting, extinguishing its lanterns one by one before settling into its deepest corners, watching the final remnants of light breathe their last.
Ever since our paths parted, time has ceased to resemble what it once was. The days have become indistinguishable until every dawn appears a pale reflection of a forgotten evening. The seasons have lost their gift of wonder, and though the sun rises each day, life no longer rises with it. It was then I learned that life after loss is not measured in years, but in the countless times the heart struggles to forget—and fails; in the endless attempts to heal—and remains wounded.
Once I believed that forgetting was a mercy bestowed by God upon broken hearts. Later, I discovered that mercy does not open its gates for everyone. Some hearts are destined to preserve pain as faithfully as a mother preserves the names of her children, guarding memories as sacred trusts, though every memory becomes a fresh blade driven into the side of one's life by absence itself.
Do you know...
The cruelest thing about loss is not the departure of those we love, but the way everything remains exactly as it was after they are gone: the chair still resting in its place, the window opening onto the same road, the book lying open on the very same page, the cup of coffee still carrying the fragrance that once gathered souls together, while the hand that used to reach for it has vanished forever. Only then does one realize that inanimate things are often more faithful than people—they simply do not know how to forget.
As for the night...
It has become the shepherd of my solitude, the companion of my silence, and the keeper of my secrets. Every evening it sits beside me, opening the pages of memory one after another, returning to my ears voices that time tried in vain to bury. And just as I begin to believe they have truly returned, silence awakens me to its bitter truth: some voices return only to widen the distances between us, and some faces revisit memory only to awaken what we believed had long since died.
I no longer fear tears, for they are kinder than the silence that weighs upon the heart until it nearly shatters. What I fear now is the day when a person loses even the ability to weep, when sorrow hardens into stone within the soul, and pain becomes so deeply woven into one's being that it is no longer felt—for one has become pain itself.
How unbearable it is to walk among people with a smiling face while carrying a broken soul; to answer their questions, share in their conversations, shake their hands with steady fingers, while inside there stands an entire city reduced to ruins—a city forever frozen at its final farewell, unable to leave, unwilling to believe that the ending truly came.
Longing has taught me that the most crowded cemeteries are not those that hold bodies, but those that bury dreams. How many dreams have died before they were born? How many promises withered before they could blossom? How many roads ended before their travelers reached their destination? So many walk among the living with breathing bodies while their souls were buried years ago in a single unforgettable moment that time itself could never reclaim.
And whenever I believe I have finally come close to healing, some tiny detail emerges—a passing fragrance, a word spoken carelessly, an evening that resembles another long gone—and suddenly the years retreat, as though time had never taken a single step forward, as though my heart still stood before the same door, waiting for someone it knows, with absolute certainty, will never return.
At last I have understood that some absences never end, because they do not dwell in places—they dwell within us. We carry them in our eyes, in the trembling of our voices, in the quiet shaking of our hands, and in our long prayers, when all we ask of God is a peace that has taken far too long to arrive.
If these words should ever reach a heart exhausted by waiting, let it know that it is not alone in this world. There are hearts that spend each morning gathering the scattered fragments of themselves, only for memory to scatter them again each evening. There are souls that mastered the art of smiling until the world believed them happy, while behind their faces they concealed entire oceans of tears that never found their way to the eyes.
As for me...
I ask nothing more of life than a heart at peace with itself, a memory that no longer wounds me whenever I revisit it, and a night in which longing itself finally falls asleep after spending endless years keeping watch over the ruins of my soul.
And if every human being has a homeland to which they return whenever the journey grows too heavy, then the homeland I lost was neither a land, nor a city, nor a house...
It was a heart.
And when it disappeared, I became a stranger in every direction, carrying what remained of my life upon my shoulders, walking on as though I were the last traveler upon a road that has no end.