By Dr. Adnan Bozan

You are not a woman I once encountered in a book, nor a passing face that caught my eye between the lines of a page. You are a story whose ending, each time I believe I have reached it, reveals itself to be nothing more than another beginning. It is as though, long before words discovered their way to paper, they gathered in some distant secret to create a woman unlike any other, then scattered themselves throughout books so that I might find you in every one, only to lose you at every ending.

O woman whom letters conspire endlessly to describe, what a hopelessly devoted reader I have become! I do not read you with my eyes alone. I read you with whatever senses life has not yet managed to take from my heart. Whenever I open one of your pages, your features rise from between the lines, and a woman takes shape before me—someone I know and yet have never truly known. I imagine the dress you might be wearing, the shade your lips have chosen, the way your hair falls across your shoulders, and the smile that finds its way to your face when you believe no one is watching. I linger over the smallest details as a thirsty soul lingers over a single drop of water in the desert, breathing into them, through the power of imagination, a life untouched by fading.

I see you barefoot, running across fallen autumn leaves, heedless of memory's sting and the chill of absence. You lift the hem of your dress ever so slightly to keep it from brushing against the rain-soaked leaves, while the wind plays with its edges, teasing strands from your long hair before scattering them across the shoulders of the clouds. And I remain behind you, following your footsteps with eyes wearied by waiting. It is not so much that I long to catch up with you; I am simply afraid that your image might disappear if I ever stop imagining you.

Your laughter, however, belongs to another story, one too vast for language to contain. When you laugh, I feel the trees returning to their childhood, and the nightingales that abandoned their nests long ago finding their way back to the branches. It is as though spring were never a season of the year, but a sound born upon your lips, turning the distant horizons green and awakening flowers in the world's windows—flowers that had never known how to bloom before. Even the birds, in my imagination, sing only to borrow a melody from your laughter, a melody nature itself cannot hold for long.

And your eyes... a sea in which my lostness has found its home, and from whose depths I no longer wish to be rescued.

They are more than windows opening onto your soul. They are forests of light, and each time I try to reach their farthest depths, I lose my way. I see them between the leaves when sunlight slips through shyly. I glimpse them in the trembling of water when the wind brushes its surface. Sometimes, I find them in the darkness of my room, when everything else has gone dark and all that remains of this world is my ability to summon you. Perhaps what hurts me most about your eyes is that I can see them with such clarity, yet that clarity grants me no right to reach them.

I have often wondered: what secret allows the rhythm of your heart to fall in step with the murmur of running water? Could it be that nature borrowed its music from you, and that rivers learned the language of flowing only after listening to your heart? Even your fingers, I imagine, are tender branches growing in a garden untouched by passing feet. Your rings are little birds resting upon your fingers, taking flight whenever you move your hands, leaving behind a trace of your enchantment in the air—as though you do not merely touch things, but breathe another life into them.

And I... I am still chasing these little details, like butterflies that have escaped from the garden of a lifetime. Not to capture them, but simply to reassure myself that beauty has not entirely vanished from this world, and that a human being, despite everything life has taken from him, may still find one reason to postpone his breaking.

Sometimes I wait for night, not because I love its darkness, but because I imagine you as the noise of the day begins to fade, as you set aside your final words and quietly withdraw from the world, like a star disappearing into the farthest reaches of the sky. I imagine you slipping the day's weariness from your shoulders, allowing your hair to fall freely across your pillow, then closing your eyes, unaware that somewhere far away a man is still resisting sleep, guarding the image of you against oblivion—as though forgetting you were another kind of death he has never learned how to endure.

If only I possessed the courage of dreams, I would enter your world without knocking, sit at the threshold of your silence, and listen to your breathing as it gently rearranges all that life has scattered within you. If only I could be the last thing your eyes encounter before you fall asleep, and the first thought to cross your heart when you awaken. Not to take anything from your day, but simply to become that beautiful feeling whose arrival no one can explain, and whose loss they cannot bear to imagine.

But I have nothing of you except words, and nothing within those words except the power to create another life for you—a life beyond the reach of separation, beyond the mischief of distance, beyond the theft of time. A life that never closes its doors against me, never leaves me standing on the thresholds of waiting, searching through unfamiliar faces for the features of a woman I have never truly met, yet whose presence within me has outlasted that of so many who have known me, and whom I have known.

That is why I have made you a woman who never grows old in my writing, and given you a home in a place beyond the reach of absence. I have not left you in the margins of a poem, nor made you a passing presence in a text that ends with its final line. Instead, I have raised a throne for you in the deepest chambers of my heart, beyond the reach of kingdoms, and turned longing into water with which I nourish your roots whenever the gardens of waiting within me begin to wither. And whenever one of your images fades in my memory, I write you anew, as though writing were the only way I know to keep beautiful things from leaving.

I have written you so many times that I no longer know: am I the one writing you, or are you the one writing me?

Whenever I try to invent another woman, your features find their way into the letters, take her place, and claim the poem as their own, as though language itself refuses to acknowledge any woman but you. I flee from you into writing, only to find you waiting for me between the lines. I escape from the lines into silence, only to hear your voice in the fragile space between two heartbeats. What am I to do with a woman from whom every attempt to escape leads me back to her by another road?

Perhaps you will never know how much of my life I have spent imagining you, or how many nights I have lost chasing your shadows between the lines. Perhaps you will read these words and move on, never realising that behind every metaphor was a trembling heart, and behind every image was a man trying to give a woman born of his imagination what life had failed to give a woman of flesh and blood. Perhaps it will never occur to you that some words are not written merely to be read; they are written because the one who writes them has nowhere else to entrust the overflow of his soul.

And yet, I ask nothing of you. I do not ask you to believe everything I have written, nor to search for me in mirrors or behind windows. It is enough for me that you know there is a heart that chose you above all the women in the world—not because it possessed you or knew your secrets, but because it found, in the image it had created of you, something it had spent a lifetime searching for: something resembling a long-delayed peace, an unfinished dream, and a longing for a place whose existence it cannot even be certain of.

For you are not merely the most beautiful thing I have ever written. You are the reason I came to believe that words have souls, that some women do not inhabit houses but dwell within language itself, and that some forms of love need no meeting to leave their scars upon the heart, nor any promise to remain alive within the soul. There are feelings that are not born of possessing what we desire, but of the impossibility of ever reaching it. And there are women whose very existence we cannot be certain of, yet to whom we devote entire lifetimes of writing.

And when you reach the final lines of this text, do not search for my name among the letters. You will find me in the space between one word and the next, in the silence that follows the final sentence, and in that faint tremor that may pass through your heart without your ever knowing why.

That is where I am...

Not in the words you have read, but in the words I could never bring myself to write; not in the images I have painted of you, but in the ache they left behind.

I am the man who entrusted you to language so that life could never take you away, who wrote you into existence as a woman without an ending, because he could find no room left in his lifetime for another love that might ever resemble you.

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