By: Dr. Adnan Bouzan

I spent my life in vain, not because life betrayed me, but because I always believed the promises that warmed me for a moment and left me as ashes for an eternity. I walked the streets as if searching for a door I knew for certain did not exist, yet I knocked on it with the stubbornness of a child who insists that even the wind has memory. I grew up with cities collapsing within me, and dreams that shed their white garments to wear black. Every time I tried to tell myself that absence was merely a shadow, I discovered that it was another homeland dwelling in my chest. And solitude is not the emptiness people imagine, but a suffocating fullness of something unspoken, as if the heart longs to scream but has long been disciplined into silence.

I grew weary of blaming myself and of the endless questions: Why was I late to myself? Why did I not carry my tender heart and flee with it to a place this world does not know? Why did I leave my dreams at the doorstep of days, only for the cold to consume them? I told myself over and over: I will return… I will return. But the roads kept changing, faces faded, and the windows that once lit my path became dim, like eyes in which hope had extinguished.

Even the mirror, once my honest refuge, no longer recognized me. I became a stranger even to myself, as if my life were a long passage of mere transit. I cloaked myself in pride so no one could see the scars of my heart, and I wore a quiet smile so the world would not know I wept inside. Whenever I tried to write my sorrow on paper, I felt that language was too narrow to contain me, and words were mere vessels too small for an endless sea.

How cruel it is to learn to be strong, not because you are strong, but because pain leaves you no other choice. And how cruel it is for life to pass like a plate of oblivion, from which we consume our years, believing we celebrate what we love, only to find ourselves strangers to everything, even to ourselves. Sometimes I feel I have never truly lived, but merely watched my life through glass: I see myself walking, laughing, speaking, meeting, bidding farewell, writing, traveling… while my heart wandered a different path, seeking a hand that never came, and a chest that could protect me from this world that devours feelings as fire devours paper.

In the heavy moments of night, when silence falls on my shoulders like a dark stone, I understand that I have lost nothing as deeply as I have lost myself, trying to be what others wanted me to be. I was a traveler toward nothingness, believing I sought a homeland. And now, after all these years, I have come to know that departure requires no train, only a heart exhausted from waiting; and that pain is never cured, only tamed. The most beautiful thing in a human being is the effort to continue, despite all the fractures no one else sees.

Thus, I spent my life between a dream I never reached, a longing that never left me, and a pain that inhabited me as a second soul. And today, I am not regretful, only sorrowful… sorrowful because I traveled toward the stars while the world shouted at me to look beneath my feet… but I did not, and I still do not, and I still — despite everything — believe that at the end of this wandering, there is a small window that opens to a light that knows my name