By Dr. Adnan Bouzan
I do not know when I first began to feel this alone.
Perhaps my loneliness did not begin on the day people walked away from me, but on the day I discovered that those I had believed were close to me were close only in body; their souls had left long ago. They left me standing before familiar faces, searching within them for some small window of safety, only to find passing glances, postponed promises, and doors quietly closing in my face with a silence that resembled an apology, but carried none.
I am tired.
I do not say it as someone says it after a difficult day, when life has merely worn them down. I say it as a drowning man speaks his final words while watching the sea rise above his head.
I am tired of a life that, every time I believed it might grant me a small space in which to catch my breath, only tightened its grip around my throat. Tired of days that offer just enough to keep me standing, but never enough to make me feel alive.
And I am tired of poverty—that heavy guest who never knocks, but enters through the cracks, sits beside you, shares your little piece of bread, and then takes something else from you, something you do not realize you have lost until it is too late.
Poverty is not merely an emptiness in your pocket. Sometimes it is a wound in your dignity, a hesitation before the simplest things, a long calculation before asking for what others reach for without a second thought.
It is standing before something simple that you desire, then stepping away because you know your hand cannot reach it.
It is returning to your room with a feeling that resembles defeat—not because you have lost some great battle, but because life has made you incapable of possessing things that should never have required such a struggle.
But I have discovered that there is a poverty far deeper than the poverty of money.
To need someone and find no one.
To have your chest heavy with sorrow and not find a single shoulder upon which to rest your head.
To fall ill and have no one ask about you.
To break apart and hear no voice saying, “Do not be afraid. I am here.”
And when something beautiful happens to you, even something small, to instinctively look around for someone to tell, only to suddenly remember that there is no one close enough to your heart to whom you can say:
“Look… something beautiful happened to me today.”
Even beautiful things have begun to frighten me, because they never seem complete.
They arrive, and for a moment I am happy.
Then sorrow comes quietly from behind them and asks me:
Who will you share this happiness with?
So I fall silent.
And return to my loneliness.
How many nights have I sat alone, staring at the ceiling for hours, wondering how a person can cross so many years, know so many faces, pass through so many cities and roads, and still end up this utterly alone?
As though his life had passed through people without leaving a trace in them, and as though people had passed through his life leaving behind nothing but scars.
I used to believe that when a person falls, a hand will reach out to them.
I used to believe that somewhere in this world, every human being has at least one person who can say:
“Do not be afraid. I am with you.”
But I learned too late that some falls happen in complete silence, and that a person can collapse in front of the entire world, and no one will turn to look.
I have fallen many times, and no hand reached for me.
I have grown tired many times, and no one asked how deep my exhaustion had become.
I cried in places no one knew existed, and no one ever heard the sound of my tears.
I needed someone, and found only closed doors.
And when I fell silent, everyone assumed I was fine.
Perhaps this is the cruelest form of loneliness: to suffer for so long that people grow accustomed to your silence, then forget that silence is not always a sign of peace; sometimes, hidden within it, there is a human being slowly collapsing, desperately trying to conceal his ruins from the world.
I never asked much of life.
I did not ask for a palace, a fortune, or a life of luxury. I wanted something far simpler than all of that: a life in which I would not feel like I was no longer needed. I wanted one heart I could return to whenever the world became too heavy. Someone who would not first ask me what I owned, but would ask me how I was. Someone beside whom I could sit at the end of a long day without having to explain why I was tired; someone who would only have to look into my eyes to understand.
I wanted someone to say to me, one evening:
“Sit down… you have been tired long enough. I am here.”
But even that little seemed like too much for this life to give.
I have carried my pain for so long that sorrow has become part of my face. It learned the way to my features before I ever learned the way to it, and loneliness began sitting beside me as though it owned the place. I wake up with it beside me, drink my coffee with it, walk the streets in its company, and return to my bed with it as the last thing to accompany me into sleep.
Even my bed is no longer a place of rest; it has become a small graveyard for the thoughts I spend the day trying to escape.
There, at night, I cannot lie to myself.
All the faces return.
Those who made promises and then disappeared. Those to whom I said things I have never said to anyone else. Those I believed would be my support, only to discover that they were the first to walk away when I needed them most.
I remember so many names, so many voices, so many conversations, and then I ask myself the same question:
Where are they now?
There is no answer.
No one.
As though I had lived among them for so long, but had never truly lived with them.
As though I had a place in their lives only for as long as I had something to give, and when I had nothing left to offer, there was no longer a place for me among them.
That is why poverty alone no longer hurts me; what hurts more is having to face it alone. If there were only one person beside me, perhaps I could endure half of this life.
A person can sleep hungry if there is a loving heart nearby saying, “It’s all right. Tomorrow will come.” He can endure loss if he finds a hand holding his. He can cross the darkest roads if he hears one voice saying, “I am with you.”
But when need, loneliness, betrayal, and fear all descend upon you at once, and you are still expected to remain strong, it is like asking a wounded heart to carry the whole world upon its shoulders.
And I am no longer as strong as people think I am.
I am tired of wearing strength like a mask.
Tired of saying, “I’m fine,” while something inside me screams that I am not.
Tired of that smile I place upon my face so no one will discover the ruins I carry behind it. Tired of the short answers, of hiding my pain, of turning my suffering into a joke so that no one comes close enough to ask the question I fear most:
“What is wrong with you?”
What is wrong with me?
I carry years I do not know where to put.
I carry dreams that died before they ever saw the light.
I carry doors I knocked on until my hands grew tired, yet not one of them opened.
I carry people I loved more than I should have, people who never knew how desperately I needed them.
And I carry long nights in which I wished for nothing extraordinary—only one voice, just one, to tell me:
“You are not alone.”
But I was alone.
And I still am.
And yet, I do not know where that small thing inside me comes from—the thing that refuses to die. Perhaps it is the last fragment of myself that remains. Perhaps it is a solitary candle the storm somehow left burning at the far end of the room. Weak, trembling, almost extinguished, yet still resisting the darkness.
Perhaps that is why I still write.
Because writing is the only place that has never closed its door in my face.
When I cannot find a human being who will listen to me, I write.
When the world becomes too heavy for me, I write.
When words become too heavy to leave my mouth, I place them on paper and leave them there, as though I were lifting a stone from my chest and setting it down before me.
I do not write to beg for pity.
Nor do I write to claim that my sorrow is greater than anyone else’s.
I only want, if only once, to admit that I am a human being worn down by the road.
A man exhausted by poverty, weighed down by disappointments, a man from whose soul loneliness has taken something, yet who still, despite everything, searches for one small window through which the light might enter.
I am poor, yes, but I am not poor in dreams.
I am alone, yes, but I still hope to find someone who will sit beside me without asking what I possess.
I am broken, yes, but every night I still gather the fragments of my heart, place them beside my pillow, close my eyes, and try to believe that morning will not simply be another version of yesterday.
Perhaps no one will come.
Perhaps this room will remain a witness to long nights that no one ever knew existed.
Perhaps I will continue walking through this world like a stranger wandering through a city whose streets he does not know, unaware of where the roads end or where he might finally rest.
But I know one thing:
I have lived through much of my pain in silence.
I have carried so many of my burdens alone.
I swallowed my tears so that I would not appear weak before a world that was never merciful enough.
And now, all I want is not great wealth, nor fame, nor applause, nor for the world to know my name.
I want only one thing.
For one day to come...
For me to return somewhere, anywhere, and find someone waiting for me.
Someone who wants nothing from me.
Someone who does not ask what I possess.
Someone who does not ask what I can give.
Someone who simply looks at my tired face, into eyes that have carried more of the night than they ever should have, and says:
“You have been gone so long... Come. I have been waiting for you.”
Perhaps then, and only then, I will understand that all those years were not complete loneliness.
And perhaps then, for the first time, I will lay my head down in peace and cry—not because I am sad, but because I have finally found someone who says to me:
“I am here.”