THE HOWL OF SOLITUDE

CONTENTS

The Mad Lover

A Difference in Timing

The Howl of Solitude

The Turning Point

A Letter to Dostoevsky

 

THE MAD LOVER

An Epistolary Piece Inspired by a True Story

And now...

I, the doomed, the destitute, the dead, the guilty one, am writing in these very moments, in this hour of anguish at the end of my short, painful life - in a moment I never imagined I would live to see. I write to you, my beloved. I write as I feel myself drowning, sinking deeper and deeper. It seems to me that every sea has always been the colour of drowning; I simply never noticed that colour until now. Only now do I feel time passing before my eyes, reducing my whole life to a fleeting mirage, while my strength drains away in the long wait.

The matter is settled now. The judge has spoken, and with the very first words of his sentence I felt my final breath leave me. When he pronounced the death sentence, the ground seemed to quake beneath my feet. I wished the earth that had swallowed you, my love, would open beneath me too, draw me down into its depths, and drag me under by both feet. Now, as they haul me towards my room - my solitary cell - I feel like a sacrificial creature being led to the block, my hands bound in chains that coil around my wrists like a monstrous serpent.

And now I sit alone, surrounded by the silence of these walls. The accursed tap keeps dripping. Each drop rings in my ears like a measure of deadly poison, and with every trickle of water I feel my neck being struck, blow after blow. I look at the walls around me. A dense dust seems to settle over their darkness. I cannot tell whether the gloom is merely the shadow cast upon them or the darkness of grief and remorse radiating from my own eyes. The letters and words have outrun me. I am terribly thirsty - not for water, but for the chance to speak to you, to tell you everything. My pen rushed ahead, then came to rest between my fingers like a crouching lion, poised above these pages, ready to tear through the body of words and pounce upon their meanings, to give shape to all that went unsaid - all that has passed, and all that is still to come.

It is over now, dearest of my heart, beloved of my soul. I imagine you resting peacefully in your grave, your eyes closed in the deep, quiet sleep that will never end. Now that everything between us has been settled, I picture you standing triumphant before me, swaying with that playful grace and coquettish charm that stole my senses and tore my heart from my chest. I imagine you saying: At last, now I have had my due. Now I have taken my revenge on you. I can see the satisfaction in your eyes.

Do not be astonished, my love, and do not ask how I can see all this when you are dead and lying in your grave. Have I not always seen you without seeing you, and known you before I ever knew you? I have always felt your presence drawing near, even when you were far away. The handsome contours of your face followed me wherever I went. I knew them by heart. They were the first thing I saw each morning, resting above my pillow. There, on my pillow, your beautiful face would appear, your gentle eyes wishing me good morning. At night you would bid me farewell with a smile that I imagined - that I chose to believe - was a kiss sent from your eyes. How often I longed to press my lips to yours in a kiss so long it would never end: an eternal, everlasting kiss.

But that dream was never meant to come true. Not one of the hopes I cherished, not one of the things I longed for, would ever be placed within my reach. My dear, I always believed there was still time to mend what lay between us. I kept telling myself that things would change, that they would somehow turn in favour of what I wanted, in favour of what I imagined existed between us.

I know exactly what you would say: that there was nothing between us but collegiality; that I was merely a colleague, a man you perhaps thought decent, or more likely naïve, and at times forward, even rude. That there was never anything more. Yet you could have been the kinder one, the one with the greater power - yes, the greater power - to set me right, to mend my scattered self and gather the fragments of a soul shackled by time, poverty, and circumstance. But you did not. You would not even grant me that small kindness. You grew ever more sparing with me, and I learned to be grateful for the tiniest scrap of your attention.

Whenever I stood beside you and tried to draw closer, I felt my pride fighting against me, as though two men lived inside me, locked in a struggle that caused me real pain. You could at least have said good morning, if only out of compassion, as you used to do each day. You could have yielded a little, as I was always trying to do. You could have kept saying those two words, and I would have gone on waiting for the dawn, watching for each thread of morning light, just to hear them from you.

Do you remember the first time we met, my love? It was love in the time of Corona. I sent you my first message on your Facebook page after volunteering to prepare your first research paper - summarising it, gathering it, word by word and letter by letter - so that you could submit it to your university. The pandemic was raging, and there seemed to be no way to succeed, no way out, except through the research I prepared for you, all for the sake of your eyes, so that success might always be yours.

The first time I met you, you were with your mother and sister. I handed you the paper, and with it I handed you my heart. I did not know then that my feelings were being taken from me without my noticing. You stole my heart and silenced my pulse. No - you crushed that heart in your hands. What did you do to me? What did you do to me? Even now, only hours before my execution, I keep asking myself what you did to me, and how far your love drove me - driving me down into the sea of no return, inch by inch, until I was drowning, suffocating, unable to draw breath.

Do you remember what I used to say to you? Do you remember when I wanted to give you a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera? You laughed, and your smile lit up your face until it seemed a shaft of sunlight had fallen across it. You said, "We are living in the time of Corona, not cholera. Cholera's age ended long ago."

That was when I felt another epidemic had entered my frail, wasted body: a different kind of disease, one that made me wither away with love and longing for you, until my frame grew thin and my strength ebbed. It slipped into me like a virus, but it was a different sort of infection - a delicious one - coursing through my veins whenever I saw you. Your luminous face would appear, silver-bright as a full moon, as you crossed the street with one of your close friends, walking with a light, graceful sway before me like a figure from a dream or a glimmer of light. You never noticed me, but my heart ran after you like a faithful guard, following you wherever you went, wherever you disappeared.

At that very moment I felt that the planet beneath our feet was nothing but a rescue ship carrying you to me, every night and every day that I saw you. The earth itself seemed no more than the covers of a book, turning to reveal the radiant page of your face. My beautiful angel, I kept telling myself: you are mine, mine alone. From the very first moment, I felt you had been placed in this life so that I might see you, so that my heart and my feelings might become attached to you. I could not imagine myself without you. Without you I was incomplete, like a worshipper who had renounced the world but had no prayer, still hoping in your love and praying that my hopes would not be disappointed.

I wanted you for myself, whatever the circumstances, whatever the cost. After each time I saw you, even from a distance, I would close the world behind you and shut my eyes, so that your image would be the last thing I saw before closing them and waiting for the sun of another day. What I felt was not love - it was something far beyond love, far beyond every feeling, every limit, every thought.

Now that I have lost you for ever, and my eyes can no longer find you, what use are my eyes? I am without a soul, without feeling. Never before have I needed anyone as desperately as I need you now. You were the wonder in everything before me, the one beautiful thing in all that was bleak, the life-giving force in roots that had withered - or have withered now. I miss you more than I ever imagined it possible to miss anyone. I would be lying if I claimed that I had already said enough.

These are terrible moments, moments no human being can imagine enduring, not even in a passing nightmare. And when the words are meant for you, my heart's own beloved, with whom else could I speak so freely, so openly, if not with you? My love for you holds you close as the sea holds a tiny pebble in its current.

My beloved, I killed you. I cut you down with these two hands. I wish they had been paralysed, that sickness had seized them. But you left me no other choice. I know I am a criminal, and here I am receiving the punishment I deserve for the ugliness of what I did. Yet you shut every door and window in my face. You left me no opening, not even the faintest glimmer of light, not the smallest spark of hope. The distance between us, the gulf that separated us, was no less sharp than the blade I plunged into your chest - the blade that pierced my heart before it pierced yours.

I know how vile I am: a selfish criminal, possessive and hungry to own what I desire. But despite all that, I loved you. You were the only thread that still tied me to the world. I tried everything, even the impossible, to come closer to you, to make you mine - mine alone. But there was no way. Why did you never sense what I felt? Why did your heart not stir, if only out of pity for me?

I wish I had died before I did. Yet even now, though I am little more than a corpse in this vast world, I love you. I love you, and I shall go on loving you. I always knew that being close to you was the very definition of impossibility, that my love for you was impossible, utterly impossible. And even if I had somehow achieved what I wished for, I am almost certain you could never have endured life with me for a single week. I am silent almost all the time: withdrawn, gloomy, irritable, selfish, dark-minded, narcissistic, psychopathic. That is how my mother used to describe me when I picked fights with her to get what I wanted - and hit her. Do not be astonished. That is exactly what happened. Believe me, your delicate body could never have borne the ascetic, austere life I led.

And yet I loved you fiercely. I wandered through alleys and streets alone, thinking of you. I spent my days shut away in my room, and my nights and holidays thinking of no one but you. There was no rival for you in my heart. I would ask myself: could you have endured it? Could you have lived with me far from your family, your friends, and everyone you knew, when I could not imagine sharing my life with people in any way other than the solitary existence to which I was accustomed?

Would you believe me if I told you that I killed you not only because I could not bear the thought of you belonging to someone else, but for another reason - perhaps one even stronger? I did not want you to be unhappy. I could not imagine ever seeing you unhappy. In my mind, you had to escape that accursed circle: the circle of a life in which you had been imprisoned without choosing it, and in which my love had imprisoned you more tightly still. I convinced myself that you had to get out of that cursed circle.

But now, without you, I am lonely as a solitary cigarette left in a packet. Only the furnace - I mean the executioner's blade - can release me from this loneliness. Perhaps you are calling me mad, diseased, deranged, or an idiot. Perhaps you would spit in my face if you could. My love, can you see me now? I sit alone in this black night, between these melancholy, silent walls, their surfaces coated with the dust of my grief and misery. I feel half naked, or wholly naked, as though one half of me is burning beneath the sun while the other waits for the instant it will fall beneath the executioner's blade. I am a feather tossed about by this dark, bottomless night, and I cannot stop thinking of you.

My beloved, if a million people love you, I am one of them. If only one person loves you, that one is me. And if no one loves you, then know that I am dead. I am already dead. I was executed long before the execution I am waiting for now; what remains is merely the outward formality of death. I died the moment my hands dared to cut your beautiful throat. My true execution took place when you left this world because of me - when I sat mourning beside your body and washed my face with your pure, fragrant blood.

Know this, my love: you belong to me, even though I know with absolute certainty that I shall never see you again. I have always feared the things that touched my heart. Whenever your love came close to overpowering me, I tried again and again to flee from it, but I could not escape.

How I longed, while you were alive, for you to write me even a single line, or just one word. Being denied that dream became the secret of my terrible torment. Whenever I saw you and approached merely to greet you, you seemed unlike any other woman I had ever seen. That was why I hesitated to come near you, to extend my hand and let it touch your delicate fingers. I hesitated to offer you my hand - that familiar hand, dirty and stained, unsteady and uncertain, caught between heat and cold at once.

Do you know, my love, that I always felt that if you ever came as close to me as I longed for, you would be dragged down into the abyss? Do you understand what it means to live with such a feeling? The best escape I could imagine from the torment of loving you was to take another road, one that would not lead me to you, one that would not oblige me to walk beside you: a road that would end where I am now. The road of loneliness, then nothingness, then final extinction.

I always felt that my love for you had defeated me, and that no one cared enough to help me carry its weight. I was forever afraid of the thought that you were not mine and never would be. The spectre of that fear followed me wherever I went. What could I do, when fear had begun to beat inside my body in place of the heart that had melted away with love, passion, and longing for you? You were more inside me than I was myself.

You were with me all twenty-four hours of every day, without ever being physically beside me. You slept with me, ate with me, drank with me. If only you knew how faithful I was to you - not merely in body, but in mind and heart. Ever since I knew you, nothing in life could tempt me. I was immune to temptation, immune even to the pull of my friends and everything around me. I always felt I had dissolved into another being - into you - without fearing exhaustion or losing myself.

My sorrow and despair had reached such depths that I wanted you to understand how immense my love was. Nothing in life had humiliated me more than my repeated, desperate attempts to hold on to you. I feel a profound humiliation before this love, a burden I can no longer bear alone. I have reached a place few people ever reach: love or death. Perhaps I am psychologically ill, perhaps mentally unbalanced. I do not deny it. But despite everything, I love you alone. Nothing but you. Nothing else.

I remember something a friend once said to me. He asked mockingly, with a sneer: "Is this the limit of your hopes and ambitions? Is she your greatest concern in the whole universe? If you manage to get close to her and marry her, will you feel as though you have won the Nobel Prize? Don't you realise that if you marry her, she will probably turn into a fat woman, round as a barrel, and end up nothing more than a machine moving about in front of you, or a breeding machine for producing children? Ask me - I am married, and I have been through it. You poor, naïve fool!"

His words pierced my ears. I tried to persuade myself that he was right, but it was no use. Perhaps I did not want you to become the ugly figure he had described. I did not want your beautiful image in my eyes to change, not for a single moment. So I decided that I had to get rid of you - and of myself as well.

At that moment I remembered a neighbour who lived on our street. Once I had seen her cursing and shouting at her husband with such fury that she seemed like a giant long imprisoned in a narrow bottle, suddenly bursting free in rebellion against years of confinement. Her husband, in turn, beat her savagely. None of the passers-by intervened, nor did any of the neighbours. They thought he had every right to do it, that he had to discipline her, especially because she had insulted him. No one intervened. I did not intervene either. No one asked why she had acted that way, why she had erupted before him like a bomb about to explode. I did not ask myself, either.

Worse still, everyone heaped blame, reproach, social condemnation, and insults upon her - myself included - when they learned that she had divorced him after struggling to escape the marriage. She had left him their two children after he forced her to give them up, claiming that no one would support her and that she would never be able to care for them. Everyone showered her with abuse and false accusations. They said she must have been involved with another man, and that was why she wanted to rid herself of the husband fate had imposed upon her, the man the law had condemned her to live with.

Not one of them bothered to ask what had driven her to that point. It was as though they refused to admit that her former husband had wronged her, even though they knew his foul temper and corrupt behaviour. Yet in their eyes he was a man - or rather, a male - and therefore beyond reproach. Had he married another woman, she would have been expected to accept it, or at least endure it. He would still have been spared blame, hatred, or contempt. Even if he divorced her of his own accord, he would surely have his rights and reasons. She, on the other hand, would have none.

That was what I used to say, too. That was how I always found excuses and justifications for beating my mother and my sisters. Why not? I was the man of the house. Everyone told me so and gave me that right, especially after my father died when I was a small child. Everyone encouraged me in that counterfeit authority, whether deliberately or without knowing it. Ah! It was as though they had planted a poisonous seed in a devil's soil, where nothing could grow but death - the death I am now approaching.

And now, at this very moment, I ask myself: what if the opposite had happened? What if you had killed me, ended my life by one means or another, for whatever reason? Would those people around us have shown you the sympathy I hear and see them lavish upon me now? Would they have sympathised with you if you had ended my life, as they do with me? Would they have said that I had exploited you and taken advantage of your feelings?

How many incidents have taken place because men exploited the feelings of women and girls, as though women were simply creatures of emotion. Yet no one blames those men. The blame always falls on the bird, never the hunter. Their inverted logic forces them to blame the victim, the prey, rather than the beast. Why? Because he is a man, a male; she must be the one at fault. She encouraged him!

I doubt you would have received the sympathy I am receiving now. I know better than anyone that I do not deserve it. If only they knew how deeply I despise myself, how stupid I feel. But in my death I have found one consolation - the only consolation for what I did to you is that, although you never returned my love, they ended up blaming you! What fools, what ignorant, contemptible idiots. I want to spit in every one of their faces, one after another. I am here, and only a few hours stand between me and the executioner's blade. When a person comes close to death, he ought to tell the truth at least once in his life.

My beloved, if you had been as calculating and exploitative as they accuse you of being, you would certainly have encouraged my infatuation and made use of my desire for you to the very end. You would never have pushed me away or treated me with the severity you did. Other women did not do that; they knew how to profit from and exploit the love others felt for them. But you did not. You were purer than fresh, clear water, more transparent and radiant than sunlight at noon - the very day I slaughtered you, when my filthy hands grew claws and fangs sharper than a sword, piercing your poor heart.

If only that heart had been deceitful, cunning, twisted, and sly. Perhaps then it might have managed to preserve its life a little longer. And yet, despite all this, you were not spared their blame, nor was your family spared the spite and filth of their tongues, or their ignorance and stupidity.

I am the criminal. I am the one who deserves no sympathy, under any circumstances. I want to spit in all their faces and tell them: How vile, how stupid, how foolish you are! You brought me to where I am through your ignorance, and through everything you planted in me and raised me to believe.

I ask myself now: does divine justice have secrets, rituals, and mysteries that we human beings cannot comprehend? Sometimes I try to console myself with that thought. Yet I keep asking: why, God, did You allow all this to happen? At the very moment I planned my heinous crime, my vile deed, I felt that two forces were meeting at a crossroads: the rampant machismo, brutality, and masculinised psychopathy in which I had been raised, and what I imagined to be Your divine gifts, Your laws and sacred ordinances - my supposed right, as a male and a man, to guardianship and discipline, to a higher rank and greater authority.

I believed that simply because I was a man and she was a woman, she had no right to reject me, despise me, or look down on me. How could she, when I had grown accustomed to possessing everything and anything? I was not only male; I was also the man of the house, the master wherever I went.

Or was what happened, perhaps, an act of mercy on Your part towards her - a mercy whose meaning we humans cannot grasp? Perhaps, Almighty, Wise, All-Powerful, All-Knowing God, You wanted to spare her the evil of a contemptible male creature like me, to spare her the torments of this world. That is what I wanted for her, too. But where does that leave me, Your lowly servant?

I know that Your mercy encompasses all things, that Your compassion exceeds every limit. I have no doubt of that. And yet I could not stop pleading with You, could not stop wandering through the depths of my bewilderment. I came before You on my knees, humbled and submissive, lifting my face towards You and wrapped in fear of You, begging You to take the cruelty of her love away from me. But You did not answer. Why did You not?

Now, as I await the execution I have reached without a moment's regret, I ask You again, O God: why did You let this happen? Why did You not extinguish the flames of my heart, burning with a love that brought me nothing but futility and despair? Did You want this to happen? Do You have some wisdom in all this? What wisdom could there be in what occurred? Could You not have changed the course of events for the better, since You are surely capable of all things and know all things?

Or are our minds simply too limited to understand the purposes of Your divine will? Did You take revenge on me for my mother's anger by leaving me to kill the only woman I ever loved, so that I might meet this fate? What wisdom is there in that? Could Your vengeance be fulfilled only by her death, so that justice might be done? Or is my mind too small to understand the hidden truth of divine affairs and divine justice?

I ask myself now: do You hate me that much, O God? Did You bring all this about because You hate me so deeply? Is that why You did not answer me, why You ignored my pleas and left me to wander astray until I met my inevitable fate? Did Your divine wisdom and heavenly justice require that she leave this life in such a way, and that I become the instrument of Your vengeance, with the noose tightening around my neck?

My God, allow me to say that I do not understand You. I never have. Perhaps my mind is too limited, my thoughts too helpless to grasp the contents of Your divine mysteries. But I am astonished. There is no logic in what happened, or in what is happening now. Perhaps logic itself is a form of madness, a degree of folly and idiocy. Perhaps that is exactly what it is. We human beings cannot set our logic beside Your wisdom. Perhaps thought is a plague, a kind of germ. Perhaps we must always remember that the secrets of Your hidden wisdom and Your divine justice stand apart from our ways of thinking.

Still, I cannot stop wondering. I feel disappointed, and ashamed of myself, now that I have understood that life is nothing but a masquerade ball - and I arrived wearing my real face. Once again I feel like the last cigarette in a packet. Only the furnace - the extinguishing of my life, I mean death - can release me from my loneliness.

Love, my beloved, is to make you the knife with which I dig into myself. Now that I have been freed from everything, even from myself, I realise for the first time that I was forced to live among a crowd of hypocrites, liars, and deluded people just like me. I have no strength left to bear it. The world inside my head was larger than the world that contained my head.

I am now entirely convinced, my love, that I was never fit for any human relationship. Whenever I had to deal with people - anyone at all except you - I comforted myself with the thought that I would soon return to my room, where I would see no one, speak to no one, and listen to no one but you.

My beloved, before I bid you my final farewell, I throw myself at your feet in tears, begging you to forgive the crime I committed against you. I hope you will understand that I did not merely love you; I loved the very existence I felt I could attain only through you, and through you alone.

Now, less than two hours before my execution, I have realised that after all that has passed in our short - terribly short - lives, both of us were at war: at war with life, at war with ourselves, at war with our circumstances, and at war with the fools who created those circumstances. I shall leave you this final letter, for ever, my beloved. Before they execute me, I shall ask them one last favour: to place this letter on your grave and write upon it, "Some loves are fatal." And I want them to bury my body beside your grave, so I may feel close to you even in death.

I no longer feel like a street in autumn, swept clean only to be littered again with yellow, withered leaves and fallen branches. Perhaps the first sign of understanding is when a person begins to long for death. Farewell for ever. My heart was made of glass. Your delicate hands shattered it, but they bled too, and went on bleeding until death - the death of that glass heart.

My beloved, in this final confession, I admit before you and in your presence that at the beginning - perhaps even a few days before I planned to kill you - I felt nothing but malice and hostility towards you. You have gone because of my despicable deed, leaving behind a storm of rumours and questions: how, when, why, where, and since when? How could it have happened with the sharp knife that split my heart at the very moment I split your chest? Where? In front of the university. When? In broad daylight, before passers-by, without fear or shame!

And if these words in particular make you furious with me, you who are reading my letter, let me tell you this: they were the ones who planned it, the ones who plotted it, the ones who carried it out by putting the weapon of the crime in my hands. I was merely the façade, the executor, the instrument. That is why daylight was nothing but a dark veil and a thick curtain to me, black despite its brightness, dark despite the sun's light.

They were all of them: society, with its false customs and traditions; its patriarchal culture; the rigid, sanctified ideas and beliefs in which I was raised, which grew up alongside me like a beast crouching inside me, its savagery unknown even to myself. They wrote murder, and then more murder, across the blackboard of my life. They placed between you and me, and between me and my love for you, a gigantic monster I could neither overcome nor withstand, let alone fight. It was a dark, bottomless monster that tore my heart from my ribs because it was swollen with sanctity and sacred convictions. It was either you or me - or death. And death became the ally of us both, you and me.

My beloved, I feel now that you belong to me alone, even though I know I shall never see you or feel your presence again. You are not before my eyes, and yet you are all I see.

Signed: The Mad Lover
Time: Midnight
Date: Two hours before the sentence is carried out

 

A DIFFERENCE IN TIMING

And now...

My dear, precious one,

Consider this a letter from beneath the water. I wanted to tell you that I feel I am drowning - drowning, drowning. Perhaps I was born at the wrong time, in the wrong place, among the wrong people. The mistake may have been geographical, historical, or simply a matter of timing. You did not cause it, yet it was you who bore its consequences. The error belonged to the time, the place, and the people around you; you alone tasted its bitterness. You paid for it because you thought differently, because your mind did not follow the herd. You were different. You said no - in one way or another, openly or quietly - and that difference, that distinction, demanded its price from you in advance. In the end, the same mistake spilled over into my life, too.

Believe me, my daughter - or perhaps I should say my dear daughter, my friend. Though you are not my daughter in the biological sense, nor my friend in the ordinary, familiar sense, we never met, not even once. We had no acquaintance, not even from afar. And yet I knew you more deeply than I knew anyone else. Or perhaps I should say that I loved you more than I loved anyone else.

Someone might say that everyone knew you. Everyone shouted and made noise in your defence; at times they spoke up, at others they whispered, while poisonous words hissed from the mouths of doubters and sceptics for all to hear. But my knowledge of you was something else. It was not the kind of knowledge everyone claimed to have, nor could it ever be. There was distance, and there was closeness; there was distance, and yet a strange nearness. This is my first letter to you, and although it is the first, it feels as though countless other letters have passed between us already - coded messages sealed with the same thought, the same feeling, the same conviction, even though we never communicated.

I do not know where to begin, or how to begin. I still cannot tell you where my letter should start. Yet a feeling lives inside me, bright and certain as sunlight: something binds you and me. You never knew me, and I never saw you - not even once in my life - until after the terrible thing happened. Had we met, I am certain we would have recognised that bond. Even now, despite the distance between us, I am convinced that one day you must know this: someone is still here, defending you, and will defend you for ever.

You have become immortal, my dear. Your dreams have come down from the realm of imagination into reality; what was once a dream has become something enduring, almost eternal. You have become a symbol, a name spoken everywhere, a presence that people rush to claim and celebrate. But when did this happen? How did it happen? The answer comes painfully: after your murder, after your death. They saw you only then. They heard your name only then. If I may put it this way, the words drip with sorrow, and every sentence seems to emerge from a grieving mouth through tears. The news of your death arrived beneath a black, dreadful night, while eyes glittered with tears. Listen to me, my dear, even there in your grave, where your remains rest. Do not feel alone. I believe this letter will reach you.

Do not be surprised. I have always preferred to address those who are far away, those who cannot hear me, perhaps cannot even see me. It is a private conviction of mine, a belief I keep hidden: sometimes distance preserves affection and honours a promise better than proximity does. Closeness can breed familiarity, stubbornness, and estrangement; distance, by contrast, may preserve the bonds of love and tenderness. That is why I often speak to the dead, my dear. I write to memories and to those who are far beyond my reach. I am certain that I shall never meet the people I address, never mingle with them or become part of their lives. Do not be astonished by my words. They are simply the purest expression of what gathers in my chest, what wanders through my thoughts and gives them shape.

Allow me now, after leaving this world full of evil, to defend you and seek justice for you myself. Of course, I know I am playing the lawyer, taking it upon myself to defend you and reclaim your rights. There are honest, remarkable men of the law who know its statutes and articles, its openings and loopholes, far better than I do. They understand what I cannot begin to grasp. I am only a writer addressing you now, writing this letter because I feel it must reach you - and it will. My dear, it will. They do not know that this writer is closer to you than they are. Perhaps they see the matter in legal terms; I see it, if I may speak metaphorically, as something spiritual. Sometimes thoughts draw close to one another; souls approach, merge, and recognise one another. Eyes may meet without ever seeing each other. Two selves may become intertwined without hands or bodies touching, without even a distant acquaintance or a single tangible connection. Yet this does not make the bond any less real.

Perhaps you never imagined that this could happen between us, you and me. I thank fate for this strange gift: it kept you and me apart, yet brought you closer to my soul than anyone I have ever known. You might ask why I praise fate for keeping us from meeting, when I did not even know you at the time. I admit that I am not good at answering such questions. I am not good at being close to people, dealing with them, or mingling with them. That is simply how I am.

And yet, as the great writer Dostoevsky says, I love humanity. There is something in me that surprises me: the more I love humanity as a whole, the more my hatred of individual human beings grows. I know this from experience. At times, when my enthusiasm and dreams take hold of me, I feel ready to sacrifice myself for humanity, to serve it even if I must suffer or be crucified for its sake. But only if I believe, at that particular moment, that the sacrifice is necessary for humanity as a whole - never for one individual, never on a merely personal scale. To be perfectly honest, my dear, I hate people as much as I love humanity.

If I were required to live with one person for twenty-four hours - or even forty-eight - I could never endure it. The moment I felt that another human being had formed a close bond with me, that their personality was pressing against mine and infringing upon my freedom, I would begin to resent them. I would soon find myself hating that person. Someone who eats too slowly at the table would seem unbearably dull to me. Someone with a cold who keeps blowing their nose would become intolerable. I am afraid I turn into an enemy of people as soon as I get close to them.

But I have noticed something: the more I dislike people as individuals, the more passionately I love humanity as a whole. That is why I thank fate for never bringing you and me together, my dear. How difficult it would have been to imagine you as merely another human being, someone I might one day grow tired of or dislike. Perhaps fate wanted you to remain, for me alone, a star in the sky of my life for ever.

And perhaps that accursed knife, which fell upon your chest and cut your throat, was the very thing that ensured I would never see you as I see everyone else. It severed every thread of possibility between us. You will remain an everlasting star, my beloved, shining in a distant sky - someone people can look at but never touch, a person too precious for any hand to reach. You are too refined for that.

Can you hear my voice, arriving from the present and the past, my life of lives? You had the depth of the sea, and I trust you had ambitions for building your life and your future. I believe you would have thought as I do. Did I not tell you that perhaps there was a thread of thought connecting us - in our love of femininity and elegance, and in our regard for our own worth?

Others may have seen you as someone who stepped beyond the boundaries of their laws and the narrow circle of their thinking. But you did not waver. You continued along your own path, just as I have always tried to do. Others still see me swimming against their current, refusing to sway or change colour with them. I do not look at their wives, nor do I measure myself by their lives. I have a goal before me, something I strive to reach. I know that there is something in my own self, in my identity and femininity, that deserves recognition and expression. Why should there not be? I have found a woman within myself, and that alone deserves respect and consideration.

I do not want to be bound by a covenant they call sacred, only to remain imprisoned by someone who claims the right to own me until death - whether that death is spiritual or literal. That is what they want. It is not what I want for myself. And I believe, my dear, that you wanted the same for yourself. I agree with you. That is precisely what I feared: the golden, spiral shell that creates a magical, influential world, a strong inner world hidden from other people's eyes. It is called introversion.

My dear, sometimes all my strength lies in an almost absolute withdrawal from others. Even when I observe people from a tiny, narrow window, or from a distance, I feel that I am strong, that I have built an impregnable force behind that window. The farther I keep from them, the closer I come to achieving my goals and my happiness, to laying the foundations of the strength I need to reach everything I have long sought and still seek. The more I withdraw, the closer I come. I wonder: were you like that, too, my dear? I have a feeling that perhaps you were - or at least that you would have been closer than anyone to being so.

Despite the appearances you showed on social media, something tells me that there was far more inside you than those images and public displays. You were not merely what people saw. There was something deeper, more ambitious, more exacting and more far-reaching than the conventional goal repeated over and over again: to appear, to shine, to perform - and then what? To become just another woman, another girl, in a procession that has been repeating itself for hundreds of years?

I know there was another self inside you, quiet and waiting, a part of you that had not yet emerged. Perhaps it waited in your depths for the right opportunity. What others saw as escape may have been only an outward appearance - perhaps an attempt to flee a painful reality, a feeling of being lost or adrift, which drove you towards a world in which you could disappear. Perhaps, at times, you longed to forget. Perhaps that other self, resting deep within you, sometimes felt disappointed. But I sensed that it was there from the moment I first saw your features: a pure, innocent, idealistic, unconventional self, suggested by the beauty and gentleness of your face.

I felt that you had refused to submit to the beautiful-faced, savage patriarchy of your society, just as I have always believed we must refuse it. We do not live two lives, my dear. We have one miserable life, only one chance, and then everything ends. Each of us knows this, yet people keep forgetting it because the truth is too heavy to bear: annihilation, nothingness, no return. They invent metaphysical tricks to deceive themselves. But you and I, though we lived among them, never knew each other, and yet neither of us accepted that supposed other world. Neither of us accepted the deception of their piled-up spiritual fantasies, their sacred beliefs and inherited convictions - ideas placed in their minds from early childhood, repeated until they became unquestionable.

You were greater than that. Your mind was more mature, your thinking more advanced. You rose above their way of thinking and distanced yourself from their metaphysical ideas. Perhaps I was more mature, perhaps you were. I do not know. But there was a difference in timing between us.

Why does the urge to weep seize me now? Tears fall down my cheeks for you, or perhaps for the difference in timing that separated us. Ah, the timing! How much does timing matter in everything - in the whole universe, and in our lives? A difference in timing can play an enormous role. What was not a moment then may become a moment now; the entire universe may turn upon a fraction of time, upon the timing of something that happened, or failed to happen, at a particular instant.

My dear, I am certain you would never have continued down the path you may have been about to take. I was so afraid for you, afraid that the rough hand growing out of that difficult road would stain your noble ideas and the very character that lived within you. But I am sure you would not have followed it to the end. You told me so through an act of kindness that revealed the humanity inside you. You told me about the man who had been stealing from the shop where you worked. He was poor and in need. You caught him, you knew what he had done, and yet you restrained your hands. You did not hurt him. You needed the money he had taken from you, and still you refused to harm him. Perhaps you, too, were too gentle to hurt a poor, desperate man. You would not punish him. Your noble, mature, rational thoughts would not allow it.

That story told me something about you. You rejected the irrational, illusory patriarchal culture of society, its metaphysical dogmas and supposedly sacred beliefs. You chose reason and science. I believe and think as you did. I saw myself in you, and you became an important part of my life. You were a woman in your own right. You did not think like most of your peers, many of whom had surrendered to inherited beliefs and sanctities. They wore them above their heads as though they were ornaments, without ever allowing them to settle inside their minds. They used them as a shield against the attacks of this rotten patriarchal society.

But you rejected those obsolete idols from within. I try to do the same, as far as I can. Unlike others, I reject their false sanctities and choose the thought and ideology that you chose for yourself, my dear. Ah, how cruelly fate has taken you from our hands, while we were all asleep.

I am certain you would never have continued along the road I have described. You would never have gone on exploring its depths, for to do so in such a rotten patriarchal society - a society steeped in hypocrisy, inherited dogma, and hollow applause - would have demanded that you submit to its old ideas. Even if you did nothing wrong, even if you merely chose a different path, you would have been expected to perform a lie. Social hypocrisy would require you to say, as everyone else says, "She is mistaken. What she is doing is forbidden. She must repent one day." Though you might never have intended to do the thing they accused you of, you would still have been forced to say it, to believe it, to embrace it if necessary, simply to appear respectable in the eyes of your society.

You would have been expected to display admiration for inherited religious beliefs and sacred traditions, even when you knew they were wrong, because otherwise the society around you would have turned against you. You would have faced sharp attacks and lost your audience. That is why people pretend to do what they do not do, and do what they do not believe. Even men are sometimes forced to perform the same hypocrisy. But women always pay the greater price.

You would have borne the largest share of the loss, the insults, the blows, the attacks - wounds that might have reached your chest like the very stabs that reached you, my dear. In societies overflowing with stupidity, hypocrisy, fear, and intellectual decay, you were never a hypocrite. You were never deceitful or manipulative, no matter how hard their tongues tried to stain you with their filthy patriarchal culture. Their words reeked of betrayal, delusion, and intimidation, but they could never make you like them. They could never reach you.

You could not have endured the stench of hypocrisy that poured from their mouths. That is why you spoke openly, declaring the nobility of your ideas, the refinement of your reasoning, and the beauty of your humanity. In that, my dear, you were braver than I was. What I admire most in you, and what makes my respect for you grow, are those very noble ideas for which they blamed and criticised you. You refused to bow in reverence to this patriarchal society, a society that keeps sinking lower and lower.

They spoke about you from behind because they were behind you in truth. They had no choice but to talk behind your back; they could not catch up with the reach of your thought or the clarity of your mind. The ugliest thing they saw in your ideas was what was most noble and refined in them. Your humanity was purer and more beautiful than any other way of thinking. Do you see, my dear, how far their thought has fallen? Their inherited beliefs and sanctified traditions have turned them into predatory beasts. Their supposedly sacred spiritual doctrines have become contaminated by the filth of a herd mentality. I doubt they will ever awaken; they move like a sleeping herd, like a flock of beasts.

Perhaps fate snatched you away suddenly, without warning. I sometimes wonder whether you had chosen death of your own will, whether you had sensed its approach, smelled it from afar, and seen its red warning signs. Perhaps you ignored them. Perhaps you wanted to escape a society that would never accept your ideas, a society that rejected you. But this remains only a suspicion, an idea without evidence. I cannot know. Life is precious, despite everything, despite the rejection you may have felt from society. And yet it is an absurd life. What greater absurdity could there be?

Would it have taken only a few more minutes for those people to understand your thoughts and stop blaming you? What a rabble, what a wretched crowd. If only fate had granted you a few more seconds, perhaps things might have changed. But absurdity is always there. You will remain an everlasting star, illuminating the universe, my dear. Even if you were not physically present, you would still be present. So many people exist without ever truly being present, like zeros to the left of a number. But you are a jewel set in the brow of life: forever absent, forever present.

Signed: A Sorrowful Writer
Time: Midnight, after everything, at the hour of longing
Date: The first day of every month

 

THE HOWL OF SOLITUDE

An Epistolary Piece

And now...

Dear Tikiya,

I had to tell you what has been circling through my mind, what keeps returning to my thoughts. You should know, my dear Tikiya, that now - especially now - I can no longer find a way to express what I feel. I know that a person with a wide range of feeling and a deep soul must suffer, but the pain inside me has become savage and strange. I do not know how to explain what is happening to me, Tikiya. There are so many small details of everyday life that I feel I alone can sense in this world: thousands of things and images that I cannot put into words, that might sound foolish if I tried to describe them. Yet no one could understand how deeply these feelings wound me, how fiercely they torment me. No one on earth can imagine the weight of sorrow I carry in my chest. Everything has become capable of poisoning my heart.

No human being will understand me. No creature but you, Tikiya. People have always accused me of cruelty and selfishness simply because I am moody, because I sometimes withdraw from them without warning. When I isolate myself, it is because I find most people cold and dull. They are not like you, Tikiya. All my life, I have been unable to hate anything as much as I hate coldness. And although I am the one most often accused of being cold and hard, even the smallest painful sight can stir an immense sadness in me - a tiny detail that no one else would even notice can make me cry. Every scene of injustice, destruction, and ruin can unleash unbearable sorrow deep inside me. How, after all that, can anyone dare accuse me of being cold or cruel?

Every way I once used to express my pain has become worn out to me, however eloquent or carefully constructed it may appear to others. Never have I felt so lonely, so troubled, so estranged from other people - or from myself - as I do now. No one feels close to me. No one understands me but you, Tikiya.

I have begun keeping myself busy every hour of the day, working even on official holidays, for no reason other than that I have grown afraid of being alone in my room with all these frightening thoughts and heavy feelings. The only thing that stopped me from suddenly ending my life was the thought of you, Tikiya. That is why I now come to this place every day and every night, ever since I first heard of you, so that I may see you and enjoy being near you, my dear Tikiya.

I would walk along the edge of this remote place, by the shore near the island, humming a song by Fairuz - a refrain about sending greetings to a beloved. I would look to the left and to the right, hoping to see you, or at least catch a glimpse of your shadow. It was as though I were calling to you with the melody, telling you that I was thinking of you. A little later, I would glimpse you moving along the riverbank beside the island from which you had come.

There you were: Tikiya. How wonderful you are! Would you like to know who Tikiya is, my friends? Very well, I shall tell you. Tikiya is the lone wolf. That is what they call him: Tikiya, the lone wolf. He is a wolf who fled - or wandered far away from - the pack to which he belonged, and lived alone for many years. Someone had seen him crossing over to this island, which lies close to the shore, many years ago. This went against everything known about wolves, who usually live in packs. A pack is essential to them: they depend on one another and cooperate to carry out the tasks required for their survival. Yet Tikiya, the lone wolf, was no ordinary wolf. Years ago, he had decided to leave his pack and live by himself here on the island, defying everything wolves were accustomed to and disregarding all their laws and habits.

I was an animal researcher, and I had come alone to this island's shore to conduct my studies. When I heard about Tikiya, I could not sleep. I decided that I had to find him and see him for myself. At first, everyone thought he was a stray dog that had wandered down from the distant mountains. Most were almost certain he was a dog. But after many studies and close observation of Tikiya and his behaviour, they became convinced that he was a wolf.

That only deepened their bewilderment, because it contradicted everything they believed about wolves. You might find a dog alone, perhaps even a cat or a hyena. But to see a wolf living apart from its pack was astonishing. Wolves are social creatures; they like living among their families and their pack. They form a particular structure to defend themselves against attacks and to hunt. So I kept asking myself: what had made Tikiya different? What had made him leave his own pack and travel so far away? Who are you, Tikiya? Where did you come from, and why? What happened? Questions turned and tangled in my head and in my heart.

Every day I would sit on the riverbank and wait for Tikiya, the lone wolf, to appear. I read a great deal about the most important characteristics of wolves, and I cannot deny how astonished I was to learn so much about their secrets - secrets we human beings may never fully know.

I had always imagined the wolf as nothing more than a fierce, evil predator, a frightening creature that cared about nothing and no one. That was what we had been taught in childhood stories, and what my grandmother used to tell me in her version of Little Red Riding Hood: how savage he was, how cruel and utterly without morals.

But the truth turned out to be something else. Yes, the wolf is a predator, but he also possesses qualities rarely found even in human beings. One of the wolf's most remarkable traits is his nobility. He is noble beyond measure, with a powerful sense of dignity and pride. A wolf will never eat carrion or rotten meat, even if he is starving to death. However fierce his hunger, he will eat only fresh meat.

Wolves also possess a loyalty and faithfulness rarely found among people. A wolf does not mate with any female other than his one companion, his mate, his partner. He remains faithful to her and never betrays her. When a wolf loses his mate, his only female companion, the loss is followed by prolonged, piercing howls and immense grief that may last for years. In many cases, the grief is even accompanied by suicide. The female wolf - sometimes called al-Sarhana - behaves in the same way when she loses her wolf companion.

I also learned that wolves have extraordinary intelligence in attack and planning, sometimes surpassing human intelligence. Some of the most important and dangerous intelligence operations carried out by a single individual have even been described as "lone-wolf" operations. And wolves do not mate with just anyone, nor with members of their own family - not with a brother, mother, or father. A wolf does not mate with its own family. Some human beings may do such things, but a wolf does not. Wolves are also deeply devoted and tender towards their parents as they grow old.

How extraordinary you are, Tikiya! My fascination with you and my longing to see you grew with everything I learned. I wished so much to meet you, to come closer. If you possessed all these wonderful qualities, why had you gone away? Why had you chosen to live alone? What had happened? Was there some terrible incident, some great upheaval? Why had you broken every rule and crossed every barrier, travelling all this way to leave everyone behind, abandon the pack, and defy the social habits of wolves? Tikiya, could you be like me?

You resemble me so much, Tikiya. They say wolves possess feelings much like those of human beings - perhaps even deeper. What happened to you? What was the reason? How strange the ways of fate.

One day, as I walked through the forest, I carried my camera and research notebook as I did every morning, hoping to see Tikiya and photograph him. I kept imagining our first meeting. How would it happen? Would Tikiya accept my presence as I watched him? Would he reject me, or allow me to come close?

At last, one morning, I saw him in the forest near the shore. I looked at him, and he suddenly turned when he sensed that I was close. He was accustomed to being alone. For the first time, I heard his howl at close range. At first it was broken, deep, rising from somewhere far inside him, as though he had so much to say, so much more to express than he could bear. He sent me a long, sad look, and I answered with another. It was as though I heard him whisper in my ear; I whispered back, though the words were spoken only inside me.

At first I was afraid to approach. I thought he did not want me near him. But as the days passed, I noticed that he had grown used to my presence. He allowed me to come closer. There was always a deep sadness in his eyes, and the glimmer of tears seemed ready to fall, like the first drops of rain or the early morning dew that wets the petals of flowers, leaving its traces in a soft gleam upon them, as though kissing each blossom.

He seemed to want to tell me something, and I wanted to tell him the same thing. Wolves are intelligent, Tikiya. You sensed me, and I sensed you. We were both running - or had run - from something: something obscure, frightening, strange, or sad. But it was something. I wondered whether withdrawing from what hurts us might be the very thing that hurts us most.

One day I approached and whispered to him: "I am alone, too, like you, Tikiya. I love being alone. Or perhaps it is simply the best choice I have found. No - it is a choice I never truly chose. It is as though you are faced with two cups, and the sweeter of the two tastes bitter. You pay the price in advance, you struggle until you finally take that cup, and then you drink from it because there is no alternative, no other choice, Tikiya. But the price is worth it. To be free and alone is not easy; it is not a simple thing. Yet what it gives you is no small gain. Whatever the reasons, seeing things from a distance, from above, is something else entirely. It is different."

I, too, left the pack and broke all the rules, just as you did, Tikiya. I never belonged to my family in a merely biological sense. I struggled for a long time until I became solitary, like you, lone wolf. Even when I am among them, my presence is separate, individual - a biological connection, perhaps, but a solitary existence all the same.

Tikiya listened to me in silence and nodded, as though he understood and shared what I felt and said. When I stroked his head and soft fur with both hands, his howl pierced my heart before it reached my ears. How deep your sadness is, Tikiya!

Once, smiling as I watched him walking alone through the forest, I said: "Do you know, Tikiya, that there is a wolf crouching somewhere inside me - perhaps a she-wolf?" Tikiya kept looking at me, almost as if he understood the tone of my voice and the way I looked at him whenever I came close.

I told him that I had once taken one of those psychological tests that circulate on social media, on YouTube and elsewhere. The test claimed that by answering a few questions, a person could discover which animal influenced them, and which animal lived within them, deep in their nature. At first, I expected the answer to be a cat. I love cats, Tikiya. Perhaps I was influenced by my poor little cat, who used to play with me when I was a child, sleep at my feet, and eat and drink beside me. I loved that cat so much. But it died, as everything must one day die.

My cat was hit by a car. It lay outside the house, suffering and giving out muffled little cries, but it kept its pain hidden so that I would not feel sad or distressed. It stayed that way until it died. It was no ordinary cat.

The strange thing, Tikiya, was that when I took the test, I was astonished to discover that the animal living inside me was a wolf. At first I was puzzled. I felt annoyed and angry, and I could hardly believe it. Then I told myself it was only a psychological quiz, nothing more, and not necessarily true or scientifically sound. It was just for fun. At that time, I knew no more about wolves than what my grandmother had told me when I was a little girl in the story of Little Red Riding Hood. I had seen the wolf as nothing but an evil creature, a predator that respected no one and cared only for itself.

Now, after learning your true qualities, Tikiya, after discovering what wolves are really like - their nobility, loyalty, and self-respect, qualities that set them apart from other animals - I understand why people sometimes praise someone by calling them a wolf. I understand now why the psychological test gave me that result. You inspire my admiration and respect, Tikiya. I am proud to be like you.

Perhaps all this happened so that I might meet you, Tikiya. I kept hearing your howls, overlapping with my words like a crossword puzzle or a jigsaw whose pieces fit together, each completing the other. Tikiya, come closer. I am not afraid of loneliness. My fears may reach far beyond loneliness, and yet I do not fear being alone.

Even if we supposed that one day you might devour me - although I know you would never do such a thing, Tikiya, for you are too noble - what harm would there be in it? If it is bound to happen, perhaps in an hour, perhaps in a year, or in more or fewer years, then what does it matter? What matters is this: "If death is inevitable, it is shameful to live as a coward." And whoever does not die by the sword will die by another means.

I see nothing to fear in that. Only someone as noble as you, Tikiya, could understand me. I would rather die standing than live kneeling, submissive on my knees. In the end, I would have done something - something worthy, something that demanded both will and resolve. Isn't that so, Tikiya?

One day, Tikiya left. I was astonished by his disappearance. A woman who lived near the shore said she had seen him crossing the island towards the far side, disappearing into the distance. Tikiya had gone, leaving the place behind. Once again, I saw a wolf sitting in the very spot where he used to rest: a new visitor, a female wolf. Perhaps she would spend years there alone, just as Tikiya had done.

The woman who had seen Tikiya leave told me that she had heard some of the local people - those who had been afraid to approach him - say that he had come there alone because he was searching for a mate. Perhaps he had not found her yet. But she had arrived too late, after Tikiya's departure. Perhaps he would never see her. And so departure remains: departure, and nothing but departure.

I took this letter and hung it from the trunk of an old, ancient tree, tying it there with a thin thread. Then I turned away. After walking only a few steps, my feet struck an old, broken wooden mailbox lying on the ground near the tree. I stopped and stared at it, thinking to myself that perhaps one day it might carry my letter to you, Tikiya.

Signed: A Friend to the Howl of Solitude
Time: By night, beneath the silver moon; by day, beneath the golden rays of the sun; in sunny summers, snowy winters, natural springs, and autumns of faded leaves - sometimes crimson.
Date: Every day, every month, every year

 

THE TURNING POINT

A Short Story in the Epistolary Tradition

Nawal had never wanted to be like the other women her age, or like her peers in any way. She had always wanted to sing outside the flock, to think beyond the box. She admitted to herself again and again that this way of living might already have cost her many friends, and would probably cost her even more. Yet something unsettling inside her kept growing with time. It warned her, alarmed her, frightened her, and tempted her all at once. It seemed to light a path she had walked before, but this time she felt she must tread it carefully - more carefully than ever.

Why not? She had watched the people around her fall away, leaf by leaf, from the pages of her life, like leaves from an autumn tree. And as they fell, so did their ideas - or rather, their delusions, their nonsense, the foolish falsehoods they had always believed and trusted. I say believed because belief, as she saw it, was surrender without evidence, without reason, without anything at all: simply yielding to an idea and following it because of a feeling or an impression. At first that feeling might seem strong, almost certain, but soon it collapses into an ocean of illusion, swallowed by the whales of deception, held fast until it drowns among the claws of evil, breathing out its final breath.

There was no evidence that could lead her to some absolute truth. How could she surrender to a truth that did not exist? That would be like seeing the sun in the dead of night, or waiting for a child to be born from a barren womb. She did not want to become either of those things.

One cold winter night, as raindrops tapped at her window like a postman delivering a letter, she sat in her room. Awe filled one corner; silence settled reverently over the rest. In that stillness, she seemed to pray that her pen would finally speak what lay in her heart, what moved through her mind.

"The stars shine with what they are, not with what we give them. And you are the star unlike all other stars..."

That was how she began the first line of her letter. She did not know how to begin, what to write, how to explain herself, or what to say. And even if she found the words, when should she say them? Now? No, not yet. It was too soon. Then, suddenly, with a firm resolve: No. Now. I shall begin now.

She took the pen in her hand. Letters flowed, then words followed, slipping from her lips, thirsty for everything that was in him and everything that might be. The sweetness and transparency of the words ran across the page, quenching the dryness of her heart and watering it until a green shoot of tenderness, peace, and happiness began to grow there.

Yes, you. You are the one I have been searching for. Why did you take all these years to arrive? Where have you come from? And why have you come now, of all times?

The questions poured out, sorrow dripping from her pen and running down the face of the letter, drowning it in the moan of tears.

Had we been promised to one another? And if we had, was it fair of you to come only now?

She breathed in the fragrance of her words, which had filled the page. More than half the paper remained as white as snow, waiting for the warmth of her words and the heat of her phrases to melt it in the longing of their meeting. Then the words embraced her. In that embrace, letter joined letter, and she said to him: "I run from myself to you. Hold me. Take me into your arms, draw me close, and let me gaze into your eyes..."

But what was she seeing?

His shadow seemed to draw near from above the lines, whispering in her ear: "What do you see?"

She moved closer for a moment, then stepped back two paces, still gazing at his eyes with a trembling, reverent uncertainty. At last she answered, her lips quivering with pain: "I see betrayal in your eyes. I see them waving to me from afar, as though they are bidding me farewell - or preparing to do so before long."

Then her thoughts drifted towards that distant place which suddenly seemed so near. She whispered to herself, trembling: "Tomorrow may be close. Perhaps he will leave me. Perhaps he will do it. He surely will. He will not keep loving me."

Tomorrow, or the day after, he will disappoint me. He will kill me with his indifference. He will grow tired of me. Yes, his eyes have told me so. The language of the eyes is always truthful. I sensed the smell of coldness in his gaze, a cold hand appearing in the distance, hidden behind a curtain of warm affection. And then I will not find him.

She began to cry, and wept bitterly for a long time. Then she wrenched her hand away from his, abruptly and tensely, and said with determination: "No. I will not wait until you do it. I will leave you first. I will not let you break me or disappoint me. No, never. I will not allow it."

Her voice shook with sobs; every broken syllable was torn by the cold knife of grief. "I will not let you disappoint me. I will not believe you. I want a tender, loving beloved. Do you understand? Tender. I want him - the one with a great heart, the one whose gentle hand comes near me only to stroke my hair, the way I gently stroke my little cat's fur."

A hand that reaches out only to give, to offer tenderness, to pat my shoulder and my back with gentle fingertips. Fingers that play with the long strands of hair falling over my shoulders, moving them from side to side with the breeze. A hand that wraps my heart in its warmth, touches it gently to reassure it, cares for it, feeds it with love and longing, as one would care for a small child. I want someone who will look after my heart, keep it warm, show it tenderness, and hold it close.

Then she fell silent.

He took her hand and drew it back towards his chest. He whispered in her small ear, slowly and tenderly tracing her fingers with long, gentle touches: "Who told you I am not that man? Who told you I am not the one you are searching for?"

She studied him in a state of anxious reverence. Her voice trembled, uncertain: "I need someone to take my hand, hold me close, and tell me: Enough sorrow. Your sadness exhausts me."

"Ah..." she sighed, groaning beneath the pain of a soul torn apart like a piece of cloth worn thin by the years.

"Ah, ah... The pain in my heart has crossed every boundary."

He moved closer still, until their breaths mingled. She could hear the whistle of his breathing as it pierced her ear and slipped inside, or tried to slip inside, her heart. But she stared into his eyes for a long time and said, as though telling him something he had never expected to hear: "But betrayal is masculine. Lies are masculine. Stupidity is masculine."

He smiled with arrogance and replied: "But deceit is feminine. Ugliness is feminine. Foolishness is feminine, too."

She met his gaze with stubbornness, steadiness, and conviction. "And I have realised that ugliness is masculine." He tried to calm her, his voice tender but full of anguish: "But I believe nature is feminine - and happiness is feminine."

She drifted far away in thought. Gradually, the pen slipped from her hand like drops of rain descending shyly from the sky. She rose and moved slowly around the room, circling the page, looking at the pen with a mixture of suspicion and defiance. Then she heard the words of another woman, spoken one evening in a laugh that carried more contempt than confidence:

"Do you really think you will find the happiness you dream of with a man? You are deluding yourself. You are digging in illusion and searching through mirages. My dear, men's hearts are locked boxes. Only they can open them, whenever they wish."

The woman moved closer and whispered like a snake hissing: "They alone decide when to open their hearts and reveal their secrets, and they alone decide how and when to shut them again."

Then she sat back on the sofa, utterly indifferent. "That is how they always are. A woman has nothing to do but endure and be patient. One day her man may return drunk on the wine of a new love, or staggering beneath some thrilling desire, or lost in another pleasure."

She looked at her as though she were comforting herself more than the other woman, leaned her head back, and sighed: "Ah, but a woman must endure. Yes, endure. She must hold him in her arms as though he were a nursing baby, and put up with the kicks he gives her in the face, or the punches he throws right and left with his furious fists when he demands his food or when it is time to feed him. Never mind, never mind. That is what a little child does when he is upset or angry. A mother has no choice but to satisfy her child's wishes, even if she has spoiled him."

Nawal swallowed her anger and exchanged a look with the woman. "And where is the woman in his life? I do not want a man like that, so arrogant and self-important. I want..."

Before she could finish, the other woman silenced her, interrupting with a desperate, challenging certainty: "You will not find him, my dear."

"You will not find him. He is the one who wants, and he is the one who gets what he wants. If persuasion does not work, then intimidation will."

With a bitter murmur, her voice dripping with regret and despair, the woman continued: "The battle always ends in his favour - or, more accurately, in favour of his own interests. His personal interests."

Nawal sprang to her feet in fierce protest. The words tasted like wormwood and bitter cactus on her tongue. She kept repeating them: "His interests... his advantage... intimidation..." A strange terror cried out inside her.

Then she hurried back to the paper, seized the pen, and with the sharp flashes of a storm breaking across the sky of her anger, she wrote in a torrent of words. The letters rose in rebellion beneath her hand:

"It will never be so. Never. Whatever happens, I will not give up. He exists. He exists... He exists. He lives inside my soul. I see him; I breathe him. I feel his presence, the warmth of his breath scorching me."

Perhaps he is not like you. Perhaps he hides among you. Perhaps he appears in your good intentions, only to vanish again among the folds of your malicious ones. Sometimes you see him as clearly as the break of dawn, when your faces brighten and he emerges with a light that fills your souls with clarity, radiance, and purity. At other times he disappears when he collides with the rock of your greed and drowns in the sea of materialism into which you have fallen. Yet he soon returns, rising again when a cry for truth sounds inside your chests, restraining you from greed. Then the tears of conscience, burdened by sin and the ache of remorse, begin to fall. He appears once more, and a bright dawn breaks - one that heals your pain, lays a tender hand upon your hearts, soothes them, and lets the seeds of hope grow there again.

The pen fell from her hand once more. Despair returned, and she put on its dark garment again. A pale cloud of tension and sorrow settled over her face as she remembered the words of a man in his forties who lived behind them, in the neighbouring building.

She sighed, her voice trembling with pain held deep inside, and leaned back in her chair. "What a harsh man he is. Arrogant, cold-hearted. I have never encountered such mean behaviour in my life."

With aching bitterness, she continued: "I thought he was different from what he turned out to be. Whenever he saw me, he deliberately hurt my feelings. He would smile with a smug, brazen arrogance and a foolish, shameless confidence, then come close and offer his loathsome greeting. Ah! Every time I saw him, I felt poison running through my veins. What a frivolous man - unmarried, wandering through life with nothing to occupy him but sitting with women and playing with their hearts."

She spoke with bitterness: "And then what? He comes to ask for my hand in marriage! To announce that he has repented at my hands?" She struck the table with her palm as though sounding an alarm. "A liar! A liar! You are not that man. You are not him."

Then she laughed - a bitter, mocking laugh. "And everyone believed his fake repentance. They believed he wanted to purify himself before me, that he was confessing his sins in the confessional so that I would grant him a certificate of absolution! What fools they are!"

A question filled with certainty came to her: Or are they liars just like him? Yes, yes. They live by deception. They honour lies and even sanctify them without realising it, without being aware of what they are doing. She smiled bitterly as she remembered that he had tried to take advantage of her when she rejected him, but had failed. If only they knew. If only they understood.

One morning, as she was crossing the street and looking left and right to avoid the cars, a heavy gust of wind swept in from the side. He appeared beside her, casting his pale shadow, its face full of the wrinkles his sins and mistakes had carved into it. He greeted her, then came towards her like a speeding truck about to crush her, catching her off guard with a question:

"Have you found him?"

She turned towards him, searching his eyes for the meaning of his words. All she found was smoke: a cloud of spite and gloating rising from his gaze. She asked him to clarify: "Found whom?"

He answered in a voice tinged with mockery, sarcasm, and a taunting sort of humour: "The one you've been waiting for. Has he not come yet to take you by the hand and lead you where you want to go, to the place you dream of?"

She gave a burst of laughter, sharp and loud, ringing in her ears like the thunder of a freezing winter night. He drew closer and whispered, his question dripping with contempt: "Do you really think he will come?"

She did not turn towards him. She did not even hear him. She left him there and walked on.

She walked on, lost in the vision that had taken possession of her, that had become her entire world. She could see nothing but him, wherever she looked, wherever she turned. She had fallen in love with that apparition; she melted into it, lived inside it, and it lived inside her. Reality and imagination blended until each became the other's disguise. Imagination seemed to swim inside a reality that was itself impossible. She no longer knew which of the two she should believe, or which she should trust. Each seized her in turn, pulling her down into the deep waters of her thoughts, dreams, and convictions. Before either could reach her, she was swept away towards the other.

She no longer knew whether she was waiting for the moment when she would be tormented like everyone else, or whether she would go on waiting and waiting, dreading and anticipating that moment without ever allowing it to happen. The torment of waiting is a thousand times worse than the torment itself.

Would the giant spirit of that apparition rise from the sea of love and conquer her with its tenderness and affection, its gentle strength? Would it let her rest in its arms, calm her soul on the shores of its hands, and surround her with the shelter of its manhood, so that she might drink from the cup of its sweetness, willingly and at peace?

Her hands trembled as she sat down. Words poured from her pen, and her breath came in hurried gasps, as though she were running a long race against time itself - against the hours, the days, the months, the years. Each seemed to urge her on: Do not hesitate. Do not delay your decisions. Decide your fate now, at this very moment. Enough waiting. Your destiny will either carry you towards a blessing or towards destruction.

She had never wanted to descend into the slave market. She had never wished to sell her dream to whoever offered the highest price. She would not give that apparition to someone wearing a false mask, someone who might soon turn into a foolish stranger - close to her in distance, yet far from her in truth.

She folded the page as one folds away a record. Her papers leapt swiftly, like a wild rabbit afraid the hunter might spot it or turn towards it, and disappeared inside the envelope. Though it was small, the envelope appeared before her eyes like a vast, awe-inspiring world, filled with everything the soul could bear and everything it could not, with all that hearts could contain and all that they could never hold.

Suddenly she found herself standing before the mailbox. She had no idea how she had raced down every flight of stairs in the building. The lift was out of order, yet she had reached the street with the speed of lightning - faster than any lift could have carried her. How had it happened? She did not know. She could neither think nor hear anything around her. Before her eyes there was only the glimmer of that little letter, shining like a new sword thirsty to cut and sever: to sever every lie, to put an end to doubt with certainty. A decisive moment in the middle of a dark truth beneath a cloudy sky.

A moment that would tear through the dust of silence and make every voice heard. Her letter would arrive. Surely it would. The one worthy of receiving it would take it in his hands. He knew it would reach him one day; he was waiting for it, and he would receive it. She would not believe their discouraging words. She would not trade truth for lies. She would rise whenever she fell, and climb whenever she was brought low. They called truth a lie when everyone else believed the lie. But she would not.

Every wound has its cure, and every bird has its own air. This was the turning point: the circular road, the labyrinth that could never simply disappear or dissolve like a lump of sugar in a glass of water.

"It must be something that has not yet come into being, my dear. I wanted to tell you in this letter what I did not dare to say while looking into your eyes. We have not parted, but perhaps we will never meet. Still, you will remain in my life - or perhaps you must remain there - as something that has not yet come into being."

Signed: Waiting for Something Not Yet in Existence
Time: A cold winter night, beside the warmth of the heater
Date: The night, at its very end

 

A LETTER TO DOSTOEVSKY

My dear Dostoevsky,

How difficult it is to have you beside me when I need you. How difficult it is that I long to speak with you, to talk to you and hear your thoughts, to ask for your opinion.

Oh, my dear Dostoevsky, how much I need you. I know that hundreds of years separate us, but you will hear me even from your grave. How painful it is when a person cannot find a refuge to turn to. I want to take shelter inside you. I want to weep on your shoulder, dear Dostoevsky.

I often imagine you sitting beside me, right in front of me, placing your hand upon my head to quiet every anxious thought, every worry, every tension, every fear of this cold, brutal world. I long for warmth in your words, Dostoevsky. I can almost see you resting your hand on my head while I pour out my troubles to you. You are a writer; you are a writer who can advise me. How much I need you. I need your counsel and your opinion on so many things.

You will hear me, Dostoevsky, even from your grave. Do you know why? Because I am a writer, and you are Dostoevsky - a writer. I do not even dream of becoming a single drop in the vast sea of your literature and novels, yet I feel that you are beside me. You reassure me as though your hand were resting on my head. And so I feel at ease, and my fears begin to quiet.

Dostoevsky, beside me... The letters have come to an end.

Written by: Manal Khalil