By Dr. Adnan Bouzan

It was as if we were running inside a dream that extinguished our feet every time we approached its light.

As if life were nothing but a road lined with closed windows, behind whose glass we stared in silent fear—awaiting something we did not know by name, someone whose face we had never seen. We passed like wanderers through an unfinished poem, writing ourselves in invisible ink, sketching our faces on the fog of time. And every time we neared certainty... time wiped it away with its palm and smiled mockingly.

The days turned grey before our hair did. The moment grew old under the weight of waiting, and childhood hid in the hollows of the heart like a frightened bird startled by the thunder of adulthood. We grew up thinking we were holding the threads of our dream, not realizing that the dream, like smoke, vanishes the moment you try to hold it.

It was as if we had signed a truce with life—without ever signing. We lived as it wished, not as we hoped. We dreamed of a home with a balcony open to a blue sky, but the home became silent walls that would not return our greetings. We longed to laugh, but the laughter shattered in our throats like shards of glass. We wished to love, only to give our love to a heart that could not hear... and to bleed from a heart we could never forget.

Everything seemed simple... even the dream. We only wanted a warm home, a hand to hold us when the soul tired, a song to whisper at sunset—nothing more. But time was stingy, measuring its gifts in millimeters, granting joy in doses dotted like phantom trails on a map of imagination.

And memories... they are the most beautiful honest lie. They console us when the days break, but they cannot return even a single minute of what has passed. They are like carvings in the sand—witnesses, but powerless against the tide.

We, who loved life, who sang to it, who stayed up counting its stars—were suddenly slapped by its other face: the face stained with disappointment, heavy with questions that have no answers. We, who thought the days moved to the rhythm of our hearts, realized they passed according to their own whims, not our patience.

Oh, the strangeness of this existence! As if we were dolls played with by the winds of absence. As if everything was written in invisible ink upon the pages of time, to be read only after the chapter ends.

But... it's all right.
Losses taught us to be stronger than tears, and that wounds are but doors we must walk through to rediscover ourselves.

Perhaps, at the end of this road, when everything quiets down, we’ll find our childhood waiting in the corner of the light, reaching out its hand and saying:

"You were late… but you came back."