By: Dr. Adnan Bozan 

Sorrow is not merely a feeling that floats on the surface; it is a vast ocean with no visible end, no audible shore. It is the sound of the wind as it sweeps through empty streets, the shadow of a cloud that never rains, the pain for which there is no cure except an absent one who has delayed their return. It is the weight of time pressing upon the heart, a wavering pulse caught between hope and despair, between expectation and disappointment.

You linger in your absence, as if the minutes have turned into rocks, slowly breaking against the chest of the night. As if time itself has learned from your absence how to grow heavier, how to stretch, how to become an expansive space of waiting that cannot be condensed into words. Every moment without you is a sorrow that seeps into the corners of the soul, carving cracks of pain into the walls and leaving behind a silence so heavy that only the voice of memory can break it.

You speak to me of longing, as if longing were merely a word to be uttered, as if it were nothing more than a fleeting message in the long night. But longing, my absent one, is not mere words or promises—it is the fire that burns within the heart and refuses to be extinguished. It is the endless roads that lead only to your return, the eyes that drift into emptiness searching for your shadow among the missing. How can you speak to me of longing when you are the one who placed me in the embrace of waiting, and then left?

When you are gone, the days lose their features, everything fades as if life itself has been drained of its colors, as if the entire universe has come to a halt in the moment of your departure. Laughter becomes a half-smile, music turns into a distant echo without melody, and old letters become postponed sorrows that never end. In your absence, even the moon looks pale, as if its light has borrowed the hue of yearning.

I trace the emptiness of your place, search for your voice in the echoes, sketch your image in the air so that time does not erase it. I keep asking the night about you, I keep asking the silence about you, but neither answers. Only sorrow raises its head and smirks sarcastically, as if to say, "I am here, and I will not leave—until she returns."

But will you return? Or has this sorrow chosen you as a home from which there is no escape? Or is absence the only truth, and waiting nothing more than an illusion?

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