By Dr. Adnan Bouzan
When longing died between departure and exile, it did not die suddenly; it withered the way candles do in the draft of a long wait. Its death was slow and painful, like the extinguishing of hearts left alone at stations no one reaches, and from which no one departs as they once did. There—amid suitcases heavy with questions and faces that learned to smile at farewell without believing in return—the heart turned into a body without a soul: it walks because habit is stronger than desire, and it breathes because death has not yet granted it permission for mercy.
The heart was no longer a heart; it became an abandoned room where images of yesterday pile up and memories rot along the walls, with no window opening onto hope. Everything in it resembled life—except life itself. A pulse without meaning, blood flowing as though performing an old duty whose purpose it has forgotten. Longing—that child we had hidden for so long in our chests—grew tired of crying and fell into an eternal sleep between the first borders of departure and the final steps of exile.
Exile was not a place; it was a state of bewilderment—a language we master without loving, faces that resemble us yet do not know our names, and days that pass leaving nothing but deeper fatigue. In exile, time turns sharp; it cuts you whenever it passes and reminds you that you belong to nothing but your pain. There you learn how to be a stranger even to yourself—how to look into the mirror and fail to recognize your features, as though you were another person inhabiting your body for a while.
As for departure, it was not a step forward but a postponed inner fracture. It is that decision we make knowing it will take from us more than it gives, yet it appears to be the only choice when the earth, for all its vastness, grows tight. Departure does not kill us at once; it teaches us how to live incomplete—how to carry our homelands like open wounds and walk with them through cities without anyone asking about their bleeding.
When longing died, the small details that once gave life its meaning died with it: the evening’s sound in the old neighborhood, the smell of bread, a laugh that arrived before its owner, streets we knew better than our own faces. That strange ability to rejoice without reason and to weep without shame died too. Everything became calculated, cold, stripped of spontaneity, as though the heart had learned discipline after losing its freedom.
The human being turned into a creature that performs its roles with precision: working, speaking, laughing when laughter is required, falling silent when silence is expected. Yet inside lay a vast emptiness, a desert without horizon, inhabited by the echoes of names no longer called and places that exist only in memory. The soul withdrew quietly; it did not scream or protest—it simply left the body to manage on its own.
And yet, in the harshest moments, something resisted complete death: perhaps remnants of longing, or a thin thread of hope that does not break no matter how tightly we pull it. Something that whispers to us that the heart—even as a body without a soul—remains capable of waiting, of mending, of being born anew when it finds a place that resembles it, or a face that says: You are not late… I was here.
Thus, between departure and exile, we die a little every day and live a little without noticing. We walk along the edge of memory, carrying weary hearts that have not entirely abandoned the idea of return—even if that return is only to ourselves.