By Dr. Adnan Bouzan

I was no one…
A shadow loitering on the pavements of days, searching for a body that had forgotten its features at the first shattering of light. I had no name, nor did I demand one. A name is too heavy for those who have slipped out of the dictionaries of presence and become pale lines in the margins of existence.

In that moment when the autumn sun dragged its crimson cloak across the disappointment of the earth, I stood at the edge of light, waving to my shadow that never came. The sun passed through me like an arrow through a cloud, leaving behind only a warm scar, like a sunset too shy to weep.

I am the memory of no one…
A voice damp with the dew of unsaid words, an echo escaping from a mouth that never mastered confession. All I am: the shiver of a poem seeking a home, and a vague longing to dissolve—not into the sea, but into the eye of forgetfulness.

I once had a name,
A face like rain whispering on a windowpane,
And a tongue that wrote poems as if it were gasping.
But language betrayed me.
I no longer found it in my mouth,
As if nothingness had gently erased me from the story’s face.

I became a blue stone.
No one asks the seagulls for its name when they pass over it each evening, washing its silence with their wings, then flying away.
For their sake, I wished for broken waves and a gray sky too weary to carry the weight of blue, so hope would not awaken me from my old slumber.

I am a line that fell from an unwritten book,
A name exiled from stories—
Unfit for heroes or even for chapters,
Only for the margins no one glances at,
Where dreams collapse quietly in the middle of a page with no reader.

Sometimes…
I feel like a fleeting flash in the dream of someone who never knew me,
Who saw my pale face and said: “That is not me.”
And he too was no one.
As if we met in loss,
And shook hands without names.

All those I loved…
Hung their names on my doors and left.
I was left without a door, without a wall, without a shadow.
I stopped searching for them.
I was pure silence, wishing to dwell in the eyes of a lover worn out by longing,
Or remain as a scent clinging to the shirt of a mother who had forgotten how to wait.

Write me as a passing cloud…
That crossed the page without awakening a story,
Without leaving the wind a cry to carry.

O autumn sun…
Don’t apologize.
I no longer need your warmth.
I’ve become beautiful in my forgetting.
When no one knew me… I knew myself.

I am no one…
But I was something beautiful that passed lightly—
As if I never was,
And as if I was everything.

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