By: Dr. Adnan Bouzan

When the pen aches, and the letters bow as the branches of a tree bow beneath a storm that left behind nothing but an echo of silence and wounds, I hear in my chest the impact of an event that has not yet spoken. Oh my pen, do not be alone in the battle of ink; come — let us walk together through the alleys of speech, awaken the words that slept on the pillows of waiting.

I see you today fluttering your quill on a page as cold as the walls of an abandoned house. Your hand grows heavy and leaves a trace like a faint thread of dawn, like the mark of a winged bird that has not yet completed its journey. Pain crystallizes in the paper’s folds, and sorrow reveals its features on the margin of the line, where light meets shadow and a hurt appears that description cannot master. Do you see, my friend, that the ink today hates departure? Or have the letters learned to hide their grief in the pockets of night?

I used to think of you as a refuge, a safe haven when the wave rose and fatigue strangled the breaths of morning. I used to see you healing a wound with a broken word, softening the clouds of memory until they turned to rain. But days, my pen — those that turn a man into a child stammering before the mirror of memory — strip you of your gleam and bestow upon you a weight that cannot be measured by distance. Do not blame me: I am not the one who casts you into the sea of nothingness; I am the voyager who lost his map among the whispers of fear and the screams of hope.

When a letter suffers, it becomes a poem that people’s ears cannot hear; my soul intones it in moments of fracture. The order of words collapses before the gauge of memory and sentences tumble from my mouth, scattered like stones fallen from an ancient arch. Anxiety creeps along the edge of the paper, leaving its prints like indelible shadows. Yet I know — and you know — that silence is sometimes a truer language than speech, and that the pauses of the hand are but preparation for an imminent eruption of letters.

Remember the days when my heart’s echo was heard on the quill’s lip: how we turned pain into a poem and made it a door opening onto cities no foot had yet inhabited. Remember the hours when letters sang on the cradle of night until stars emerged fashioned from delicate ink, and how we used to call sorrow by another name: clarity. Oh my pen, what is it that now burdens your back? Is it the breath of a death we know? Or an encounter unfinished? Or a memory sweeping like a flood within the bones?

Do not despair; every pen weeps, every letter collapses, but in that weeping is a birth. When the pen cries, the city within me quiets, and tales accumulate beneath the wings of night. There, in the cellars of memory, we rearrange the letters as one repaves a street ruined by rains. We restore the spice to the narrative and wash words clean of the dust of oblivion. Do not stop bleeding; bleeding is not death but a rite of genesis.

I know I tire you, that I feed you on the flesh of the wound hoping it will sate the thirst of truth, yet you have always — even in my vows of weakness — been like a sword carved from patience and fidelity. When silence cannot bear the weight of pain, letters insist on being said, even if they become the relics of a language. We will write, my pen; we write because writing is an act of survival, because letters testify that we passed through, that our hearts beat, and that our hands were not buried with the shadows.

I will speak to you frankly now: perhaps what robs you of hope is my fear. My fear that the story may have no gentle ending, that frustration will swallow the line’s finale. But you know, as I know, that an ending is not always victory nor always defeat; it is merely a point in the pattern of the journey. All I can do is fill the dots of endings with beginnings. I will draw a bridge from a wound, a window from a word, and a poem from silence that will call toward the light.

Remember with me: daring to weep on the page is not surrender but acquaintance with the depth of ink. To let the letters sway a little, then rise and greet the reader with a new face. To write despite the darkness, to light on a dim sheet a lamp sufficient to fashion a single name — the name of one human being — and thus being returns to its words.

I will not ask you for silence anymore. I will hold you and rearrange your ink; I will wipe from you the dust of disappointment and restore you to the procession of narrative. For the pen betrays only when we allow it to blurt meaninglessly into the mouths of emptiness. The letters, however, will return to dance to the rhythms of the pulse, painting the lines with the colors of what we hope, fear, and love.

So, my pen, if my paper cries I will cry with it; if my letter stumbles I will hush it like a child; and if silence lengthens I will turn it into a heartbeat. We will write together until the night lifts from our hearts, until the words return from their journey of absence brighter. For if the ink dries, there is a blessing — the residue that teaches us to begin anew. And if the graphite weakens, let our hand be stronger: we will retell the tale and do with it what it deserves — to be told.

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