The first part of the novel Masks of the Mind To the One Who Never Came

The first part of the novel Masks of the Mind:
To the One Who Never Came
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Introduction
Have you ever sat alone in a dark room, feeling your own self calling out in a voice only you can hear?
Have you remembered a moment when you should have spoken, or stepped forward, but hesitated—until your silence became heavier than action itself?
Do you think you’re safe, reading words confined to paper?
Then be ready.
This is not the story of someone else. It is a mirror—showing you what you’ve long avoided.
Here, your silence will speak. Your hesitation will reveal the wound that should have been named.
Here, you will be questioned about the moments you betrayed yourself, and the shadows you cast to hide your face.
Have you ever asked yourself:
Who are you when the book closes and only you remain?
Who are you in your solitude, in your fragility, in the hollow of your chest where a voice exists that only you can hear?
Masks of the Mind is not a story for entertainment. It is not an escape.
It is a ruthless invitation—to face what you didn’t say when you should have, to reckon with what you didn’t do when you must have acted.
Read, if you dare—but know this: every line is a question aimed at you.
Where were you when you stayed silent?
Who were you when you ran?
This introduction is more than a preface. It is a quiet plea to the reader: enter a text that will hold you accountable for your silence, strip away your masks, and confront you—and the protagonist—with eternal questions:
Who are we in our solitude?
And what do words mean, if they cannot save us from the void?
— Numan Albarbari

Chapter One
The room lay in fragile stillness, broken only by a shy thread of sunlight slipping through the window, while the wind toyed with the edges of the curtains, like the breath of a distant woman who had yet to knock on the doors of his life.
He sat at his desk, fingers trembling as they flipped through his old notebook, then began to write with hesitant ink:
“I write to you again… to the one who never came, yet never left, because she existed only in my imagination.”
He lifted his head slowly. There she was, emerging from between the lines, as he had always secretly imagined her: standing at the edge of the room, tilting slightly, her face catching the hesitant light, suspended between shadow and sun, listening to his whispered longing. In her eyes lay a space of safety, enough to heal all the lost wanderings of his soul.
His voice trembled as he murmured:
“Do you know that you were the first spark for my writing? Not because you appeared in my memory just now, but because you never appeared at all. You were an emptiness that consumed me, a shadow that appeared whenever I closed my eyes. You were a dream that retreated the moment I approached it.”
She remained silent in his imagination, listening without a word.
He drew a deep breath and continued, as if in intimate conversation:
“When I stumbled upon those words one day, I felt you—as if they were written for you. I sifted through my old pages, searching for my story… where it began, and how I found myself alone, resisting life without a hand to lift the weight of the city from my shoulders, without a chest to confide in. Exile had wounded me, the road had exhausted me.”
He took a tentative step toward her in his mind, as if testing his courage to face what he had long fled, then spoke:
“Every morning I wake with a heartbeat that resembles you… I write so that silence will not swallow me, I write about a wound that taught me patience, about hope I lost and that lost me, about a pain that settled in my soul with no name. I speak to myself through writing as I once hoped to speak to you.”
His voice trembled. He reached for his chest, pressing his hand firmly, and whispered:
“I used to write… then I abandoned it. The days dragged me into desolate depths, led me into a solitude that resembled no homeland—only the exile of the heart itself. I was weary… yet I kept moving, because life moves on, and solitude taught me to walk alone.”
A deep silence followed. He bowed his head, as if listening for her answer, but she remained in her eternal quiet. He leaned toward her with a warm murmur:
“I’ve learned, you see, to love what I do in the depths of myself. To write only when I need to speak to my own soul. To make my words a secret conversation—unshared, unread, misunderstood… yet saving me.”
He stepped closer, almost touching her apparition, woven from air and fragments of light, and said with tearful eyes:
“Perhaps you were an illusion… yet the illusion that taught me truth. You were a mysterious image, yet it ordered my chaos. You were absence, yet you gave me writing. And I… I cannot share my thoughts with anyone but you. Simply because you… are no one.”
She seemed ready to speak, and he tried to prepare himself to listen—but something held him back from voicing a word. He drew himself together, gathering the air around him as if to catch a suspended moment of truth. She looked at him then, eyes glimmering with light, and spoke in a shy, soft voice:
“Why choose to speak to a shadow that doesn’t exist? Was there no one among humans who would listen?”
He closed his notebook slowly, staring at the empty space before him. She had vanished, yet a strange warmth lingered in his heart, as if she had smiled at him before leaving.
Words slipped from his lips, unheard by anyone:
“Do you know? I know that you’re still there… in that corner that no one else sees but me. I see you exactly as I first drew you, with that mysterious smile and eyes wide enough to hold all this sorrow, with a gentleness the city could never possess. And for this… I will begin to speak to you.”
His chest trembled. He reached for his notebook, as if searching for something to anchor his reality. His heart beat slowly; the air around him felt dense with the weight of the moment. It seemed that her presence—even if only an echo—made the words shiver in his chest before they could be freed.
“Let me arrange the chapters of my story… perhaps in confessing to you, I’ll find relief from an old anguish. I want to tell you about my beginning, about the child I once was; the one who believed the world was nothing but a box of colors and a blank sheet, that every pain had a story as its bandage, and every night held a star waiting to shine.”
She returned, sitting close as if she had been patiently waiting, her words brief and precise, pulsing with concentrated meaning:
“Then begin… tell me about your beginning, about the child you once were.”
He exhaled, his eyes returning inward, gathering lost memories from a shifting time. Slowly, he reached for his pen and notebook, his heart beating with quiet gravity, embraced by the long silence.
She leaned toward him, smiling faintly, sensing every tremor within him. His silence spoke louder than words, and every subtle movement in his chest told a story of pain and hope.
He paced a short loop around the room, then stopped facing her, as if preserving every breath to make sure she was truly there. He prepared to confess, his eyes glimmering with unshed tears, visions of the past and lost wishes swirling before him like a palette of colors and silent stories.
The silence held him, as if the emptiness of the room allowed voices and things to escape from shadow into light. Her apparition hovered in the air, suspended between reality and memory, prompting him to speak in an inner voice, moving gently, as if words and shadows themselves trembled with him.
Chapter Two
“I used to run in the narrow courtyard of our house, laughing with the rhythm of the rain, as if the clouds had become a swing hung by the sky just for me. I didn’t realize then that a heart could break, or that goodbyes could hurt more than falling.”
She spoke, a soft voice like the echo of his own:
“Then… continue. Let me stay here.”
He stepped toward her tentatively, testing the ground of the room with each careful breath, feeling every whisper that floated from her. His heart beat with a mix of gravity and lightness, and his eyes shimmered with tears that seemed to organize the secrets and sorrows inside him. The room stretched in dense silence, until it felt as though they were the only two beings in a frozen world, where nothing moved except the words waiting inside him to be born.
His chest trembled, both light and heavy at once, as he reached for the pen and notebook, his eyes silently seeking hers:
*”Do you know…? When I return to my childhood in memory, I see the world with eyes that knew only wonder. I believed the rain laughed because it played with us, that the clouds were nothing but white scarves rolling across the sky. I saw my father’s shadow cross the threshold and imagined it as a moving mountain, and I heard my mother’s steps in the kitchen, feeling that the scent of bread and her warmth were one and inseparable.
I would search my siblings’ faces for a secret I didn’t know, a light that made them run and laugh without reason. Sometimes I’d listen to the neighbors through the mud walls, imagining another world parallel to ours—a world like mine, but farther, richer in color. I thought every house had a fig, olive, mulberry, or walnut tree, and every child slept on a pillow guarded by a waiting star.
But a child’s eyes hide questions too large to bear. Why do some people leave suddenly, never to return? Why does my mother sometimes cry at night, thinking we are asleep? I would see her wipe her tears with the hem of her dress and feel that the world was wider than our laughter, yet narrower than her chest in that moment.
Do you know? I lived in a strange balance: half of it was play and running in the mud, and the other half a silent attention to something I could not name. Perhaps it was sorrow, or perhaps an early awareness that things are not always as they seem. And now, I try to read those scenes with new eyes, eyes that understand childhood was not just a playground for laughter—it was also a secret book, planting seeds of questions in the heart that would grow with us.”*
I ran barefoot through the narrow alleys, chasing birds as if they were secrets slipping just out of reach. My laughter bounced off the mud walls, and I imagined the village answering me back. When we played hide-and-seek, I believed the wall I leaned against held my secret, keeping me safe from discovery.
At night, walking the village streets under the silver glow of the moon, I tried to match my steps to someone unseen—someone who walked with me, shadowing every stride. When I stopped, so did he, like a secret friend, an invisible companion who softened the edges of loneliness. That quiet presence felt like a gift, a promise that solitude would never define me.
I remember my first school. The blackboard seemed a gateway to a distant forest, and chalk was a magic wand that pulled words from nothing. I listened to my teacher write, feeling each letter alive, with a voice, a face, a presence of its own. I didn’t understand why some classmates laughed when I erred, but at home, I traced letters in the dirt, and the earth became my private notebook.
Grandmother was like an old book that whispered stories at night. I sat at her feet, listening to tales of men who left and never returned, of women weaving life into patience and cloth. I didn’t always grasp the full meaning, but I could see the glimmer of tears in her eyes and sense the unspeakable behind her words.
The world felt small then, framed by our house walls, the old mulberry tree by the door, and the call to prayer splitting the dawn. Yet I imagined that beyond the distant mountain lay lands far beyond my dreams. I was already searching, even as a child, for a place big enough for my imagination.
Looking back now, I realize the child I was saw more than grown-ups thought. He found joy in simple things, yet glimpsed the shadows that drifted between the lines. I laughed running through the mud, but my chest tightened when a tear fell from my mother’s eye. I had no explanation—only the sense that life was neither all play nor all safety. Childhood, to me, was a book open to two pages: one of light and laughter, the other of mystery, wonder, and quiet unease.
Sometimes I dreamed things I couldn’t fully understand. Dreams came at night like mysterious messengers, trying to tell me something. Once, I walked down a long path lined with glowing pillars, as if crossing a bridge to a city unlike our village. Another time, our little house opened onto a wide square filled with strange faces, and I stood at the forefront, as if I were meant to speak words I didn’t yet know.
I’d wake with my heart racing, trying to make sense of it, but the dream always faded, like distant light waving goodbye. Perhaps these dreams were maps, pointing toward paths I would walk years later, toward voices I would hear in places I couldn’t yet imagine.
I saw a forest of books, weaving between their branches like a bird learning different songs. Words were stars on paper, and though I didn’t know it then, one day these books would become real gateways into other worlds. The village itself sometimes dissolved into a grander dream, its streets widening, leading me into cities lit by moonlight and voices speaking in languages I didn’t understand—but which filled my chest with warmth and longing.
Once I dreamt of sitting in a vast hall before a European-looking teacher, who held a delicate drawing and nodded, as if acknowledging that I had accomplished something worthy. I woke with the echo of his voice in my ears, not knowing that one day, that scene would come true.
Dreams formed an uncharted map for me: bridges stretching over rivers, voices speaking about my steps, and circles of people waiting for me to say something, or to offer a piece of myself. I trembled in those dreams, yet I felt a strange, magnetic pull forward.
And somehow, the dreams always vanished like a sign, whispering: “Don’t be afraid. Your path is ahead. You will find your place among the books, the people, and the city.”
I would wake in the morning carrying that promise. Walking to school on the village’s dusty streets, I felt certain that my small steps were leading somewhere bigger—somewhere where a dream, distant in others’ eyes, already lived quietly in my own heart, whispering: “There, you will find yourself.”
Chapter Three
Do you know…?
When I stepped into adolescence, nothing was like the colorful stories promised. I wasn’t the boy chased by admiring eyes in the school hallways, nor a small knight boasting victories over hearts. I was simply… alone. Searching for myself in notebooks of poetry, in the pages of simple dream-stories, silently asking: “Is there anyone like me?”
At that age, the heart is fragile—like glass stretched over the edge. Every word scratches it; every glance becomes a question without an answer. Slowly, I began to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around dreams, as I imagined. It revolves around quiet battles we fight alone, smiling so no one can see our hurt.
I stared long into the mirror, not to check my face, but to reassure myself that I was still there… behind it, still the same boy hiding sorrow in a tiny notebook, whispering: “One day, I’ll understand all this.”
Do you remember the first betrayal? I do. My heart clung to someone who saw only a passing shadow in me. My mind begged it to retreat—but it wouldn’t. That was the first taste of real disappointment: bitter, lodged in my throat, impossible to wash away with water, impossible to explain with words.
I would retreat to my room, not to rest, but to gather the pieces of myself. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I opened my notebook again. Writing wasn’t life that day—it was a straw keeping me from drowning.
Sometimes, I would see you in my imagination. You came as if answering a wish I never dared speak aloud. You sat in silence, listening while I poured out secrets no one could believe. I imagined you believing in me, completely. For that, I didn’t need anyone else—as long as I had created you the way I wanted: listening without interrupting, understanding without judging.
Do you know…? Every betrayal rebuilt me. Every silence deepened me, every heartbreak taught me order and patience in the chaos of my young heart. The loneliness I had feared as a child became my companion in adolescence. And from it, I learned how to face the storm without running.
I was a quiet child, talking to myself in the corners of the house, hiding behind window curtains or inside the walls of the wardrobe, whenever the others couldn’t understand me. It was as if I had been made, from the start, to carry my disappointments on my small shoulders and tell my stories alone.
Do you know…? My games had no voice. They didn’t whisper to me like children’s games should. They simply didn’t exist. I replaced them with talking to you… with this ghost that visited me.
I grew up.
And with every year, my body moved forward, while my spirit remained suspended there—in the small room, in the wooden bookshelf, in the storybooks I hid beneath my pillow. No one ever asked me, “How do you feel?”
But I wrote the answer in the margins of my school notebooks, with a broken pen…and an even more broken heart.
So now, let me continue, if you’ll let me. I will tell you more chapters from my journey—between losses and promises, between a dream buried in daylight and secretly revived at night…
But for now, let me take your hand, as if you were really here… and walk the path. I write so I don’t forget, so distance cannot extinguish me.
Do you know…? Sometimes, I feel I am not writing to you, but with you… as if you were the ink spilling from my pain, and you don’t even know it.
The words flowed from my heart before the pen could catch them, my eyes fixed on the empty space in front of me—that emptiness filled with a ghost of affection, a shadow of some distant dream. I lifted my head slightly, my voice trembling with a quiet plea:
“I wanted you to witness what no one else saw… I wanted you to be the companion who reads me when I am silent, not when I speak. To be you—only you—who understands what lies between the lines.”
Step by step, I imagined myself reaching toward you, hands outstretched, as if touching a warmth that wasn’t there, or picking up the last thread of hope.
“Do you know how many times I’ve written to you without knowing your name? How many times I’ve addressed you as if you were my mirror, not a stranger?”
His voice trembled, and he closed his eyes for a moment before whispering:
“When my small dreams fell in the middle of the road, it was you who gathered their scattered pieces in my mind. The world was wide, unbearably cold… yet I kept seeing you in the corners: sitting, listening, understanding, smiling. Where does your unseen presence come from?”
He opened his eyes to a pale smile and brushed away a tear stubbornly trying to escape.
“I’m secretive, as you know. I never tell anyone. No one listens. But you… you were always there. You didn’t interrupt, you didn’t judge, you didn’t act. You just listened. And maybe… that’s why I loved you.”
He swallowed slowly, bending his head as if speaking to a secret that must remain unspoken.
“I know you are a phantom… that no one else can hear this conversation… but you, my phantom, saved me. And maybe, if one day I am meant to meet you in reality, I won’t need many words. It will be enough for you to look at me the way you did here… in my imagination.”
Then he turned his gaze to the sky beyond the window and muttered with a low, fragile courage:
“Do you know? I am stronger today… because I loved someone who could not make mistakes, could not disappoint, could not betray… because they didn’t exist at all. From their absence, I learned presence.”
He closed his notebook gently and switched off the light. Yet her image remained there, seated in that corner, listening in silence as she always had in his mind.
Days passed, then weeks, and he would return to his notebook, open it, and reflect on the lines he had written, continuing as if she were still beside him:
“Do you know…? I have grown a little, and hiding behind my notebooks like I used to is no longer possible. Life pushes me onto streets, into the crowd, through tests, friendships, experiences I cannot escape. Yet, everywhere I go, I search for you.
I walk among the people and wonder: ‘Could you be among these faces?’ And then I return, disappointed, like someone searching for a single star in a crowded market.”
Chapter Four
At university, faces laughed, while my heart kept a deep, silent vigil. I would enter lecture halls and sit among my classmates, nodding at their chatter about professors, textbooks, and city life, smiling as if I understood and believed it all. Yet within me, something else was writing to you. I was learning how to appear natural, how to laugh when laughter was expected, how to show interest when the gathering required it—while my solitude seeped from my eyes like a hidden light no one could see.
Friendship came in many forms there: some sprouted quickly, born in hallways or between library shelves, withering in a week or a month. Others resembled roots, clinging to the soil, standing firm against the winds. I accompanied them in laughter and play, yet I felt alien, as if sitting in a basement of silence while they made the clamor of life above me.
“How can you stay so quiet?” they would often ask. I would smile and answer briefly, letting the conversation flow among them again. But the truth was that every sentence in my heart was being written for you, and every moment with them only reminded me that I searched for no one else but you.
In the university garden, faces scattered like colors on a vast canvas, and I would pass among them, exchanging greetings and passing words, while an emptiness in my chest remained untouched by the crowd’s noise or their cascading laughter. Sometimes I would sit at the edge of the circles, nodding as if interested, my eyes searching the distance for a face that had yet to arrive.
In the campus café, we gathered around scattered tables, cups of tea and rising smoke mingling with the voices of debate and laughter. Someone would ask me, “What do you see in the future?” I would reply with a short sentence, hiding behind it the clamor of dreams and fear. They thought me quiet by nature, unaware that in secret I was writing a long letter to you: I am here… and I am still looking for you.
And in the library, among shelves heavy with books, silence ruled the place. I felt closer to myself there, flipping pages while pretending to be immersed in study, while inside, a whisper called me: I wish you were here, sitting beside me, turning each book into a bridge between our hearts.
So, between the garden, the café, and the library, I practiced life on its surface, carrying within me a single secret: I belong to no one but you, and I search for nothing but the face that disappears from me every day.
Sometimes, I would sit with my classmates in the courtyard, trading small talk about professors and exams. One of them would laugh and raise his voice:
“Don’t you think the professor’s lectures are like the wind? They start somewhere, and no one knows where they’ll end!”
Laughter would ripple through the group, and I would smile politely, all the while my mind wandering elsewhere—somewhere no one could see.
Another day, we gathered at the campus café, tables crowded with voices and the clatter of cups. One girl leaned toward me, curious:
“Why don’t you talk much? Are you hiding secrets?”
I smiled. “No secrets. I just prefer listening.”
My friend chimed in, grinning:
“He has his own world in there. If he ever opened the door, we’d get lost in it.”
They laughed together, unaware that the door I guarded so carefully opened only for you.
In the library, I sat with a classmate reviewing lecture notes. He sighed, exasperated:
“This material’s going to be a nightmare on the exam. You ready for it?”
I looked up at him, and said softly,
“I don’t know. Feels like I’m studying with my body and my heart somewhere else.”
He shook his head, confused, and returned to his notes, leaving me in the quiet where I wrote your name between the lines.
Even at student festivals, when the halls were packed with cheering, laughter, and applause, I moved through the crowd quietly. One by one, speakers claimed the stage: a poem, a story, a proud declaration of our generation’s voice. Applause swelled like waves, yet I felt apart from it all, my attention always searching for the face that never arrived.
Between courtyards, cafés, and libraries, I practiced living outwardly, while inwardly carrying one secret: I belonged only to you, and I searched only for your face—the one that vanished from me every day.
I used to race for the front row, claiming two seats, waiting together for the lecture to begin, listening as if every word were meant for us alone. Now, I sit in the back, clapping along with the others, showing enthusiasm like everyone else, while my heart drifts elsewhere—to a text no one ever hears, a passage written in quiet, addressed only to you.
I remember a friend once said, after reciting his poem:
“Why don’t you dare to share something you’ve written?”
I smiled. “My words aren’t for an audience.”
He laughed, thinking I was joking. The truth is, everything I write is a secret voyage I undertake for a presence that exists only in my imagination.
The ambitious poets and speakers surged onto the stage, their verses and speeches carried by the applause and cheers. I appeared part of the crowd, yet I was an island in the middle of their storm. After the event, when someone asked,
“Why don’t you ever try reading your work?”
I only smiled, a faint, knowing curve of the lips.
“Because what I write doesn’t belong on stages.”
When my friend finally stepped up, hesitant at first, gripping the microphone, flipping through his notes, I watched him steady himself. And then, as he spoke, I felt it—each word seemed to aim directly at me, as though the verses themselves were questioning me, probing the secret thoughts I carried beneath my calm, attentive exterior.
She leaned closer for a moment, her voice cutting through the murmurs:
“Where do you get these essays from?”
I felt the crowd’s eyes turn toward me, as if they had glimpsed the meaning behind my quiet.
Where do they come from? They arrive unannounced, unsettling us, balancing our hopes against our failures.
His voice shook the hall, daring my silence, laying bare the hidden corners of my heart.
If I said I didn’t know, would that be my excuse today?
If I admitted I did, would it only deepen my own fractures?
He paused, lifted his gaze to mine, and my pulse quickened.
“Where does it come from? Where do you draw it?”
From a well of intuition, I thought, buried long ago in my own reckoning.
And I heard the words as if they were mine, spilling from the depths of me—not from him.
A hunch I’ve been keeping, threading through the days, seeking the essence of conclusions, of endings.
The audience swayed with the verses, but I alone felt the weight of being judged.
Sometimes, words feel like idle chatter, empty except for their rhythm, peering into absence, measuring what might be against what isn’t.
His voice rose, opening doors to closed secrets.
I, like the restless waves, batter them against the rocks of the evenings.
Neither the rocks crumble, nor does my effort shatter.
And yet, life flows, chapter by chapter, through suffering and endurance.
At the last line, he raised his hand in a slow, deliberate gesture, as if pointing straight at me. Some of the students glanced over, curious. And suddenly, I was front and center of the scene, without moving—declared by words I hadn’t written with my own hand, yet words born of my heart, spoken through my friend.
When he finished, he walked toward me and sat down beside me, a small notebook in his hand. He extended it quietly, almost in a whisper:
“This is for you… I wrote it for you.”
I opened it and read slowly. Each line made my heart tremble, as if the words were speaking to me alone:
“I tease you with longing, or shame may cloak you.
Betrayal has mocked you, fed you…
I loved you in days rich with peril,
Exposed like a grudge, fanned by fate…
And here, dreams move treacherously,
Sometimes alongside us, sometimes against…
Misfortunes sing us aloud in their might,
Dusting every soul touched by misfortune…
And the crowds march on, their fortunes cloaked,
Amid the gardens of death, firm and unyielding…
Yet desire throws them a promise,
A reckoning shared by nations, rising…
We forget our sorrows when they rage,
We rest upon a joy sparked by funerals…”
I lingered on the last page, reading each line like a heartbeat passing through me. I could feel that every word was addressed to me alone, and the crowd, for once, remained outside the circle. My friend, the text, and the poem had become a bridge, quenching my silence and speaking directly to my heart.
They asked, “Beauty?” I replied, softly,
“A gift from the Creator…
Do not grieve if you are not the source of that beauty…”
At the last line, he raised his hand slowly, almost theatrically, pointing as if at me. Some students looked up, curious. And just like that, I became the center of the scene—without moving, without speaking—claimed by words I hadn’t written myself, yet words born from my heart, spoken through my friend.
When he finished, he came over and sat beside me, a small notebook in hand. He offered it quietly:
“This is for you… I wrote it for you.”
I opened it and read slowly. Each line trembled under my gaze, as if the words existed only for me:
“I tease you with longing, or shame may cloak you.
Betrayal has mocked you, fed you…
I loved in days rich with peril,
Exposed like a grudge fanned by fate…
Dreams move treacherously,
Sometimes beside us, sometimes against…
Misfortunes sing aloud,
Dusting every soul touched by trial…
And the crowds march on, their fortunes hidden,
Amid gardens of death, firm and unyielding…
Yet desire throws them a promise,
A reckoning shared, rising…
We forget our sorrows in their height,
We rest upon a joy sparked by funerals…”
I lingered on the last page, each word a heartbeat passing through me. Every syllable felt addressed to me alone. The crowd was out there, somewhere, but inside, my friend, the text, the poem—they had become a bridge, quenching my silence, speaking to my heart.
They asked, “Beauty?”
I whispered back,
“A gift from the Creator…
Do not grieve if you are not the source of it.”
Something was scattered among all beings—
whoever held a form, or carried the overflow of a single trait…
I read quietly, feeling every word pass through me, the meanings taking shape in my silence as if they spoke only to my heart, only to my soul. It was a moment suspended between presence and absence, between the stage and the back row—a reminder that the most powerful words are born in public, but in the end, reach only the one heart meant to understand them.
Chapter Five
Cities are harsh, you know? They teach you how to hide your heart so it won’t be bruised, how to conform just enough to survive, how to carry a false smile every morning like a passport.
And yet, whenever the alleys closed in on me, I returned to you. You were the hidden breath no one else could see.
In the long nights of exile… only then did I allow myself to weep. Not because I was weak, but because I had no shoulder to lean on. You were that absent shoulder—arriving in the form of a shadow, pressing your hand against my heart and whispering without a sound: You will endure.
Do you know?
I no longer write just to keep myself from drowning. I write to remind you that I still believe in you.
You may never come. The waiting may stretch without end. And yet—I do not fear it.
For you have become part of my language, part of how I face the world, part of the silence that keeps me from breaking.
And if we meet one day, you will not be a stranger. I will know you instantly, the way one recognizes their own voice among thousands.
But if we never meet… let it be enough that you were with me—that you wrote through me, that you saved me from the illusion called loneliness.
Do you know?
I am no longer that boy chasing after dreams like someone pursuing a distant mirage.
Now, I treat my dreams the way a farmer tends his land: patiently turning the soil, planting seeds, then waiting to see what the sky will grant.
No grand promises, no certainty—only the quiet faith that patience may one day bear fruit.
I have learned that life is not a polished text, but a draft filled with erasures and corrections—and that its beauty lies in the missing line, the unfinished sentence that keeps us searching for the rest.
And you… you were always that missing piece.

Do you know?
I’ve been let down more times than I can count—at work, in friendship, in fleeting love.
Yet each time, I found myself returning to you, as if coming home to a place that would never betray me.
You were an absent embrace, yet truer than any presence could ever be.
Now, when I sit at my desk, I no longer write with the ache I once carried.
I write in a quiet that feels like prayer, lifting it to you.
As if I speak to myself through you—or to you through myself… there is no difference.
The years have changed me, yes, but you remain the same: a shadow beside me, reminding me I was never made in vain.
Sometimes I smile to myself and wonder, “If you were really here, what would happen?”
Perhaps I wouldn’t say a word.
I would let the silence speak for all the years I have written for you.
Do you know…?
Today I realize I don’t need you to arrive.
You have become part of me—part of how I dream, part of the language I use to face the world’s cruelty.
And from your absence, I have learned presence.
I once thought I wrote to fill the emptiness left by you.
I discovered that I write to fill the emptiness of time itself.
And when time shines, it leaves behind only the dust of memories.
Memories, as you know, are deceptive: they embellish what we long for, conceal what we fear facing.
Yet writing alone holds the moment before it slips away, granting it the power to resist forgetfulness.
Sometimes I ask myself,
“What is the use of all this ink?
Won’t it one day vanish, just as the faces of those we loved dissolve in the haze of absence?”
Then I answer myself: “Perhaps ink is not for immortality, but for resistance—for resisting oblivion, for resisting the void, for resisting the nothingness that swallows us whole whenever we fall silent for too long.”
I write, my dear, not because anyone will read, but because if I don’t, the silence will consume me.
And silence, as you know, is never innocent; sometimes it is more dreadful than a scream.
I’ve learned that a person isn’t measured by what they possess, nor by what they achieve, but by what they leave behind in words.
Words are what remain after we fade—they are the trace that neither death nor absence can erase.
That’s why I write with a new awareness: not merely to live, but to resist the death that is always coming.
He sits in the darkness of the room, the paper in front of him glowing under a faint yellow light, like a mirror reflecting his own face back at him. He lifts his head slightly, closes his eyes, and whispers inwardly:
“If you ask me, where do I stand with love?”
He exhales, pressing his hand to his forehead as if gathering the scattered pieces of his heart, then begins to write slowly, each letter seeming drawn from his own blood:
“I tell you: love is no longer just a beating heart—it has become ink, a script.
You have become my text, and I have become my pen.
And every time I write, we meet again.”
His fingers tremble as he glances at the emptiness before him, searching for her shadow. He murmurs to himself:
“Do you know…? Sometimes I feel that I do not write to keep your memory alive, but to keep myself alive, if only for a moment, in the face of your absence.”
He presses his hand to his chest, as though halting a hidden bleeding, then writes with hesitant strokes:
“Absence is not mere emptiness; it is a silent civilization, building fortresses of silence inside the soul.
I sometimes wonder: do we choose the words, or do the words choose us?”
His gaze drifts to the ceiling, as if listening to some invisible force pulling him, and he moves his pen faster:
“It is a cosmic force, drawing us to write, making us witness ourselves before time devours us.”
He smiled bitterly, whispering to himself:
“Death… my old friend, watches me in silence, reminding me that everything is fragile, and that life is but a temporary game.
Yet, when I write, I find myself creating a world that rejects fragility, that refuses oblivion.”
He paused, reached for a glass of water, and took a sip as if it could temper the intensity of his own words, then continued quietly:
“Ink does not vanish here. Even if the pen leaves my hand, its trace remains etched in another soul, in a heart that reads after me.
This… is why I love writing. Not because it grants me immortality, but because it makes my own mortality bearable, and eases the feeling of nothingness.”
He lowered his head, holding the paper with both hands, and whispered as if addressing her absent presence:
“And you…?
You are the presence that has not yet arrived, yet fills every text.
Every letter I write, every line, weaves your absent embrace, every page narrates your face that I cannot see…
I find you in writing, more than anywhere else.”
His lips curved in a sad smile as he sank into his imagination:
“Do you know? Sometimes I imagine that after we leave, we will leave the world as it is… yet the words we wrote will continue to speak, and they will reach those who deserve to hear them.”
Then he continued with quiet determination:
“And words… these small letters, I cherish them more than all unfulfilled promises, more than every presence that vanished.
They are silent immortality, a testament that we existed, that we loved, that we felt.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, as if his whole life passed before him, seeing himself in every stage:
“Every time I write, I return to see myself as a child afraid of loss, a young man grappling with absence, a man trying to resist oblivion.
And you are there… your shadow, your presence. You have become my law, you have become my written life.”
He threw down the pen suddenly, resting his forehead in his palm, murmuring with a shiver:
“And even if we never meet… it is enough that you exist in every word I write, and in every silence I carry.”
The room seemed to close in on him, as if its walls were conspiring with the silence. He slumped against the wall, scattered sheets before him, the pen no longer obeying his hand. He tried to write a single sentence, yet the words slipped like sand through his fingers. He lowered his head, and suddenly the air grew heavy, the emptiness around him transforming into an echo.
A faint voice emerged from within, not from without. It was not a strange voice, but as if it were the shadow of himself he had long hidden. At first, the whisper hesitated, then it took shape, sitting across from him like a silent presence.
Chapter Six
She asked,
“Which scares you more—the darkness around you, or the one inside your chest?”
He shivered. He tried to answer, but no sound came. She pressed gently,
“Isn’t it time to say what you’ve never dared to speak?”
He closed his eyes, and the words tumbled out, fragile and raw,
“I’m weak… weak enough to fear loving, to fear trying, to fear facing. I run from myself before I even run from others.”
She smiled, a quiet, knowing smile, then whispered,
“Weakness is denying your weakness. Confession—that’s the start of strength.”
Silence fell again. He opened his eyes. The room was empty, as if she had vanished like a fleeting flame. Yet the echo of her words lingered in his chest, persistent, unextinguishable.
He leaned back, sensing the walls breathing around him. Doubt gnawed at him—had she truly been there, or had the voice come from the hollow of his own heart? He searched for her face but found only a faint glimmer in the dark, vanishing before he could grasp it.
A warmth brushed his hand, then vanished, swallowed by emptiness. He raised his hand, suspended in midair, touching nothing but absence. He wondered quietly to himself,
“Was I speaking to myself, or does the soul, when it tightens, summon a being of its own secrets to face the truths it cannot bear alone?”
She lingered in his mind, her words now a distant echo:
“Confession is the beginning of strength…”
He murmured them to himself, spelling out the forgotten chant of some long-lost hymn. For a moment, he felt less alone. Then he realized: solitude had changed its face—it had worn a new mask and left behind a trace that would never fade.
The night stretched on, but his heart stirred with a subtle shift, as if a small gate had opened inside him to something wider, unknown.
Years passed slowly, gathering the scattered fragments of his restless soul. One clear evening, he returned to his desk. He lit the lamp and felt, for a moment, as if he were opening a window onto his own spirit. He wrote:
“Today… I find myself in the crush of life—endless work, faces that change constantly, responsibilities that grow without pause. Yet, despite everything, I have not lost my inner silence, and I have not lost you.”
He looked up at the small mirror on the wall, searching for a trace of her in his own reflection, then continued:
“Sometimes, on buses or walking through the streets, I write in my little notebook: ‘I am here… thinking of you… and you have not come.’”
He imagined the people around him: laughing faces, talking mouths, hurried footsteps. And he remained still, as if behind thick glass. Slowly, with a steady hand, he wrote:
“The world moves, people chase their concerns, laugh, run… but I remain silent, watching it all through a window, just as I did when I was a child.”
My colleagues at work have no idea I live in a world of my own.
Sometimes someone asks, “Why do you always seem so calm?”
I smile politely and return to my notebook, the one no one ever sees.
I place my hand over it, as if holding it close, and write:
“Writing… it is my present, my refuge, my self. Yet life doesn’t stop me from trying. I’ve learned to open my heart, carefully, letting others in—but never too close… because you, like a shadow, exist always between the lines, watching quietly, keeping me from breaking completely, teaching me how to love without losing myself.”
I take a deep breath, turning toward the window where the rain falls, and write with a faint smile:
“Sometimes I write to you about simple things—a passing encounter, a friend’s laugh, a small failure at work… Yet each word carries a depth, as if you really read me and understand the silence between the lines.”
At night, when I return to my room, I set the notebook aside and sink into a silence that weighs the air around me. I stare at the ceiling, searching the blankness for your shadow, and slowly realize: absence has not weakened me. It has taught me to be present, even when no one accompanies me.
I lean back in my chair, fold my hands over my chest, and whisper to myself:
“This is how I live today: I write about yesterday, plan for tomorrow, and carry you with me—not merely as a memory, but as a shadow, a silent companion, a voice inside that guides me and makes every path possible.”
“I write to you now, as I always have: about myself, the world around me, the people I pass each day. I watch them move, laugh, argue, exchange words… yet their eyes are empty, carrying none of the depth that stirs within me.”
I lower my head and let my pen move.
You alone know how I watch them, how I read between words, gestures, silences. No one hears me the way you do, no one reads me like your absence reads me—like a shadow that never leaves.
When the world quiets, when the noise fades from my ears, I feel your presence most sharply. The city pulses with voices, faces cross the streets, yet I long for a tone I’ve never heard, a glance I was certain would understand me before I even spoke.
I press my hand to my notebook and write: I miss you. I miss you every time I try to appear normal among people. I laugh with them, exchange fleeting words, but my heart stays alone, returning to you at the first silence, back to my pages where I find myself again.
I stand, take careful steps to the window, draw the curtain slowly, see my reflection in the glass, and murmur:
I write about my weakness and strength, my fears and small dreams, my awkwardness among others… and you are there, always, in every sentence, in every pause, in every silence that surrounds me.
I close my eyes, letting myself whisper:
I write to you so that loss does not consume me. Your absence has taught me to see the world stripped of pretenses, to endure reality as it is, and to remain standing.
I place the pen on the paper, hesitant, and write: I write to you. I know you will never reply, never know the hold you have over me. Yet I see you in every word, as if you stand beside me, a spirit watching from the corners of the room, between faces, between sounds I cannot bear.
I rub my face with my hands, breathe deeply, and write:
Today, I watched people as if on a stage. Their laughter was rehearsed, their glances carried news coldly, their actions leaned on appearances more than hearts.
I shake my head and return to the notebook:
But when I write to you about them, I realize it is your presence in my mind that gives me the eyes to see behind masks. I feel you here, despite your absence, and I miss you more when the crowd closes in. Every word I hear pulls me back to you, every moment is incomplete without your shadow.
When night falls and stillness settles, I sit on my bed, head in my hands, and sigh: Alone. The weight of solitude grows when I close my eyes. Faces vanish, the room empties—and yet you remain, in the silence, in the spaces, in every corner of my room.
I open my eyes and write with the last of my strength: I write to you. Writing guards me, preserves my memory, protects your absence, which has taught me how to be present despite everything.
Sometimes, when a laugh drifts from someone nearby, or two friends argue across the street, her image sneaks into my mind, and I ask quietly to myself: How would she read this silence? How would she catch what hides behind words?
Every half-movement, every cut-off glance, every pale word pushes me back toward her absence, enclosing me from every side, making me feel alone even in the crowd.
As night deepens, I feel the cold that fills every corner of my room. I listen to whispers no one else can hear. My hand reaches for my notebook, trembling lightly. I open it and write for her, filling the void with words, convincing myself she exists—even if only as a shadow—and realizing that her absence has given me a presence far deeper, a feeling of everything surrounding me.
Days pass slowly, as if they stretch out to test patience. Life moves forward, leaving no room for return or retreat. I walk crowded streets, observing people with eyes trained to notice what others overlook: clipped conversations, hurried steps, deliberate ignorance… And in all of it, I catch details no one else sees—hidden smiles, revealing silences, incomplete gestures.
Tomorrow… will be my last day at work. The final signature in the attendance book. I will close the chapter on sixty years of routine offices and the clamor of colleagues.
On the morning of my final day, I sit in my usual chair, touching my records as if they were fragments of memory itself. Ahmed enters, greeting me with warmth, placing his hand on my shoulder in a gesture of friendship:
“These years have flown like wind, passing quickly, yet the memory stays… Don’t you feel the weight of goodbye?”
His eyes glistened with a trace of nostalgia as he replied,
“Weight? No… it’s a pain I’ve never known before. Every face, every word from you has echoed in my heart.”
He breathed slowly, feeling time slip through his fingers, and murmured to himself,
“How I wish I could leave with them everything I’ve left in this place… myself, each of them, every single day with me.”
Farida approached, hand trembling as she rested it on the door handle, her voice steady but full of reverence:
“I don’t think anyone can fill this room with the same life and energy you brought… everything here will feel emptier, and we’ll lose a shoulder to lean on.”
He nodded slowly, bowed his head in a fleeting silence, and then spoke:
“I know… but we won’t lose everything. You, and every moment with me, will stay in my words, in my heart—just as light and distance remain in the soul.”
Ali, his colleague from administration, stepped forward, hand resting on the edge of the table. His voice carried both joy and the quiet gravity of farewell:
“All your effort will matter… everything you’ve taught us will keep flowing. We’ll carry your message with us, like a sun that has never been extinguished.”
He took a deep breath, imagining the days after tomorrow, feeling the air brush his face like an old comfort seeping through memory. He reached for his notebook and wrote quietly:
“Each of you was a blessing on my path… and every day with me was an echo in my heart.”
They all stood around him, watching as he reclaimed the past in silence, storing each memory in the smallest gestures of his hands. To them, it looked like a living painting of farewell, respect, and love.
A pause lingered, then Ahmed whispered:
“We won’t forget you… and no one will forget all that you’ve taught us.”
He whispered, as if speaking to memory itself:
“I won’t forget either… not a single laugh, not a single simple moment… not a silence that carried happiness in our hearts.”
He felt that this farewell wasn’t an end, but the opening of a new space in his heart, trembling with everything, where the true journey began—from memory, from a void that had claimed the heart.
He breathed deeply and let his gaze sweep across the room, noticing time moving quietly, as if replaying each day with his colleagues. Farida entered, carrying a colorful sheet of paper marked with the teachers’ names, her laugh bright and genuine:
“Remember when we all planned projects together, each in our own way? It was chaos and joy at the same time.”
He smiled, wiping his hands over his face.
“That memory still trembles in my heart… every laugh, every stance, every silence we shared together…”
Ali arrived, holding a folder with old student sketches and designs.
“Do you remember how we tried to keep everything in order? Each day was an adventure, each joy a hymn to patience and love.”
They all sat around a round table, sharing memories in voices full of warmth, nostalgia, and laughter.
Farida recalled the day some student boards had broken, and Muhammad had dashed off to fix them:
“And you… how calmly you handled difficult moments.”
The room was alive with quiet reverence, the past gently filling the present, each memory a small flame that lit their hearts again.
They all laughed together, and suddenly their voices blended with the fragility of presence:
“Do you remember what we used to say about wasted time? That we invent tasks just to keep our hands busy!”
He raised his hand and let his fingers rest on the remaining folders, breathing slowly:
“All of this… records, silences, small words… yet they carry my soul and spirit. Don’t you feel it too?”
Ahmed and Ali answered in unison, their eyes fixed on the folders:
“Yes… everything here has a wind, a voice, a laughter… and we will never forget all this light and air you brought with you.”
He breathed deeply, feeling the warmth of their friendship, sensing everything in the room alive with movement:
“I will say goodbye to each day in these offices, and I will carry your memory like the morning breeze… seeping into my heart, igniting the life that awaits me.”
They came forward to sign the attendance book with him, each passing moment lightening the weight of farewell and gathering all memories into a single instant.
At the end of the day, they stood together in the corridor, calling out with respect:
“We will not forget anyone, and no memory—small or large—will vanish… we will carry them like a sun that never sets.”
He raised his hand, his face glowing with a quiet light, as if storing every memory and spirit within him, imagining his new morning on a wooden bench, waiting for the calm breeze to touch his face.
He wandered the city streets, each step slowing him, teasing his sense of wanting to linger. He lingered at every corner, every small shop sparkling before his eyes like a magic that demanded reflection, as if the street itself knew he carried the weight of a long day and hidden farewells.
He paused in front of a small shop, gazing at its colorful shelves, feeling a slight shiver run down his back. His hand brushed over the remaining notices and little objects, imagining every moment as if hearing the voice of a time gone by.
In the market, the bustle of vendors and buyers surrounded him, a bridge between noise and memory. He saw a boy running with a small cart of fruit, and remembered his own childhood, running through the village alleys with a heart full of freedom, though city life would not let him keep it.
His steps stretched along a narrow sidewalk, his eyes scanning the surroundings. Every vendor raising a voice, every fruit seller smiling at a customer, every color glinting in the slanting sunlight toward sunset… and in his heart, a silent emotion took residence, as if preserving every memory that would vanish from this place after tomorrow.
He paused in front of a small flower shop, lifting his hand to inhale the scent. It washed over him like forgotten mornings, like smiles lost in time. His heart ached in a sweet, familiar way—grief and pleasure intertwined, impossible to separate.
Down the narrow street, a man selling coffee called out, his voice familiar:
“Hey! Last day, huh? How are we supposed to keep things running without you?”
He placed a hand over his chest and spoke softly, almost to himself:
“We’ll manage… but today, I want to linger. Just a few minutes, to say goodbye to everything quietly, lovingly.”
He continued walking. The smell of fresh bread from a nearby bakery drifted to him, stirring memories of mornings begun here and there, filling him with a strange calm—the sense of security this path had always offered.
Chapter Seven
Finally, he reached his home. The key glinted in his hand. He breathed slowly, closing his eyes as if telling himself: Tomorrow, my morning will be different… but these moments on the street will remain a guiding light.
He entered his room cautiously, closing the door behind him, as if afraid to shatter the quiet that had settled into the walls. For a moment, he stood alone, listening to his own trembling breath, feeling the warmth of memories seep into his skin like sunlight spilling over a garden in the early hours.
He moved toward his desk and sat in his wooden chair, inhaling deeply as if drawing in every unspoken word he had ever held back. With delicate fingers, he picked up his pen and gazed at the blank page, a silence waiting to be filled.
He saw her face suspended in the emptiness, almost glowing there. His heart shivered with warmth. Inwardly, he whispered:
Why do I hide all of this from her? Why can’t she hear my words?
And then he began to write—gently, deliberately. The words fell onto the page like water over stone, each sentence a breath released from his chest, each letter a tremor settling tenderly on the paper. He murmured to himself:
You will see everything here… every memory I keep for you, every silence, every fragment of my being.
The room filled with a heavy, almost tangible quiet, as if the past and the present had converged in the walls around him. He lowered his head onto the desk. A strange shiver ran through his hand, reminding him that every word he wrote was both a promise and, in some way, a farewell meant to last forever.
The words poured from him, weighing on his chest with their truth, each letter taking a piece of his life with it. And when exhaustion finally claimed him, he fell into a deep sleep. His words remained on the page, shimmering like stars suspended in a night without end.
In his dream, he saw her between shadow and light, her eyes holding him in a silence that spoke all he could not. He whispered:
“Do you see it all? Do you understand my silence, the promises trapped in ink?”
Sleep crept into him, gentle as a hand guiding him into a quiet garden where her memory bloomed like fragile flowers under the dream’s soft glow. In that suspended half-wake, he realized the pen and paper had never been mere tools—they were bridges between his solitude and her presence; each word a breath echoing into eternity.
Caught between dream and drowsiness, he lingered in the embrace of memory, his heart swaying between absence and being, until the clamor of life and the weight of the day faded.
Now, he was there—in the heart of an unrelenting fog, in a city untethered from the rules of day and night. Its people moved through halves of awareness, their hollow eyes unable to distinguish dream from waking. Amid them, he lived: days spent mending old pages in a cramped study, inhaling the scent of aged paper like his only breath, writing forgotten secrets in the margins, restoring letters eaten by time.
But when the fog thickened and night descended, he transformed. He soared through a kingdom of shadows and dreams. Each night, she came—a woman unlike any other. Her eyes carried the light of another world, her voice trembled with the residue of lost memories. She sat before him, recounting her dream: fractured scenes like a painting split across the wall of time.
He listened fully, not interpreting but seeking symbols, doors into her depths. Since that first encounter, something in him had shifted. He was no longer the same. A new sorrow—or perhaps the release of an old wound—filled his eyes. He did not know whether she had become his sanctuary or another trap waiting to claim him.
Then came the whisper. For the first time, he heard his name called. A quiet voice, as if it had been stalking him for ages through the corners of the city. The circle closed. He no longer knew if this was his dream, hers, or the beginning of everything.
He opened his eyes to the emptiness where her image lingered, her light carrying a hundred frozen moments of her presence. His heart quivered with warmth. And he heard the inner voice whisper:
He took up his pen. He wrote with care, letting the words flow like water over stone, turning into forests of memory populated by the people who had passed through his life. Each sentence was a breath released from his chest, each letter trembling, resting on the page as if touching her with love.
He whispered to himself,
“This dream… it feels like reality, making me live what I have never lived.”
Her image drifted into his mind, inverted and luminous, her eyes flickering like twin points of light trembling in the shadow. She whispered back:
“You will see everything here… every memory, every silence, every existence.”
A profound stillness spread through the room, as if the walls themselves listened to each word, each page trembling beneath his hand. He lifted his head to the notebook, sensing a strange shiver in his fingers—as if every letter carried both a promise and a parting at once.
Words poured onto the paper, sparkling like stars in a night without end, the dream entwined with him, each meaning echoing deeper within his chest. He traced the dream with quiet devotion, like a flower blooming in the night’s calm. He saw himself in it, filling every void in his awareness, reclaiming every price buried by time.
With every sentence, he felt that pen and paper were no mere tools—they were bridges between his reality and her presence. Each word grew a pulse in his chest, every silence carried him to a world only he could comprehend.
Between time and fog, he sensed the meeting of dream and life: that what he had written so far was a story impossible to replicate, a story now lodged between paper, heart, and soul. At dawn, he whispered to her, as though speaking to his own spirit:
“To you… everything I saw, everything I lived, everything I held deep inside… I give in silence and love, like a flower blooming in the night’s quiet.”
The words stretched across the page like stars shining in an endless night, a strange tremor running through his chest as if her presence imprinted itself on every thought and every silence.
Chapter Eight
In the early morning, the garden wore a pale gray, like a mysterious stage where times blended; it was impossible to tell what had passed and what still breathed in the present. Leaves fell without pattern, while others clung stubbornly to their branches, postponing the last act of autumn—just as he postponed the sensation of loss that chased him in every glance.
He sank into the weathered wooden bench, descending into his memory, listening not to the city’s silence but to the voice within. Beside him lay an old dog, half-blind, watching the world with cautious detachment, as if knowing that everything moves on—except silence itself.
He turned to it and whispered, his lips trembling,
“Did you come from a past unseen? Or did you come to remind me that some things endure… even when time turns its face away?”
He let his gaze wander back to the wooden bench, to a small scratch that had remained in the same spot for years, and murmured to himself:
“Am I sitting in the very place of the dream… or have all places blurred into one since it left?”
Her memory swept into his heart like a warm breeze—a presence more real than reality, settling beside him, while the yellowed pages tumbled just as they had the last time she sat here next to him.
A heavy quiet filled the room—dense, weighty, and yet undeniably real. No dog barked, no city noise intruded, only the groan of wooden seats under the weight of bodies long gone. And still, he felt her here… in every corner, in every trembling leaf, in every whisper of the wind.
He reached for his notebook and began to write:
*”I write to you about this silence, to convince myself that your absence has not left me entirely alone, and that your inner presence still allows me to see the world with clear eyes amid the ash. Yesterday I saw a man rush past, as if fleeing himself, or an echo he had not yet heard.
I saw a woman smile at a man—a smile that never reached her eyes, a mask she had grown used to wearing. All these people… their voices are loud, their steps hurried, but they lack one thing: the silence that gives existence meaning. I write to you because only you understand what I mean.”*
His fingers trembled as he continued:
“Your absence sharpens my observation, makes me more patient in this crowd, and allows me to understand myself among faces that see only shadows. And when I close my eyes, I feel you there… sharing my silence, even though you are far away.”
He lifted his head, and a young man sitting on a nearby bench caught his eye, reading a book with a joy he had never seen in anyone’s gaze. On the other side, a woman passed by smiling, yet the warmth of her smile faded before it reached her heart. He thought silently:
“All these people pass, carrying their noise with them. But they only reinforce the certainty that your absence makes my presence sharper, more honest, more unyielding.”
He bowed his head for a long moment, then picked up his pen again, writing in a tremulous hand:
“Your absence teaches me to listen more, to feel the contours of my solitude, to understand how to be present despite emptiness, and to carry hope like a small ember that will never go out.”
The bench beneath him groaned under the weight of memories, and the dog beside him seemed to guard the past in silent vigil. He lifted his gaze to the horizon, a question pressing in his chest that refused to leave:
“Am I the one holding onto memory… or is it memory holding me here, waiting for you in every heartbeat, every echo, every passing shadow?”
He wondered inwardly:
“How am I to sit here without her? Does this bench still hold the echo of the past that refuses to fade, or has it become just cold wood, meaningless and empty?”
He listened to the soft wind stirring the autumn leaves, and the memory of her first laugh surged into his mind—the one that had threaded between branches like a song that never ended. Everything around him felt incomplete, absent, severed. Everything his eyes landed upon reminded him that she had never been truly here. Yet in her absence, she gave him the power to be present, to witness, to write.
His hands trembled as he gripped the notebook, and he wrote:
“I write to you about this place, about its smallest details, about the silence of this strange dog curled at my feet, about the tiny scratch in the wooden bench, about everything left from that last time she sat beside me. I write to confront the emptiness, to preserve what remains of longing, and to keep from drowning in my solitude. I write… because I know that somehow, the words reach you—even if you never know them, even if they remain only an echo in my heart.”
He leaned forward slightly, as if his chest were bowed under the weight of words unspoken, beneath the stones of longing that had struck him with a merciless force.
The garden was silent, and time passed without mercy, yet the echoes of the past did not fade. Every old event, every gaze misunderstood, every unwritten letter… gathered here now, in this different morning.
Suddenly… faint footsteps reached his ears. He lifted his gaze, and a young man appeared before him, as if emerging from the heart of a distant emptiness, or from the depths of a memory still burning inside him. The footsteps were not passing—they seemed to emanate from his own chest, from the depths of a flame he had once kindled with his lost dream.
Then came the voice… familiar enough to hurt, unexpected enough to startle:
“Why did you extinguish the flame we once lit together?”
His chest trembled, his heart clenched, and his perceptions recoiled, as if time had suddenly broken and then stretched to touch everything.
He slowly lifted his eyes, without hope, to see the young man… a clear reflection of his own lost youth; eyes carrying the same blaze he had once carried, when everything had seemed possible, and when dreams were stronger than fear.
His lips quivered, and he whispered inwardly, a voice emerging from his very depths:
“Is it really me?! Am I looking at myself?!”
All he could do was speak aloud, voice shaking with astonishment, hope, and confession:
“Have you come to judge me… or to remind me?”
The young man answered, his tone mingling reproach with longing:
“You were like this… until you decided to stop thinking.”
The man sat in silence for a moment, recalling all that had passed, feeling that every instant had led to this encounter. The air around them was filled with a silence heavy with memories, as if the garden itself were observing this dialogue between two times: the past that carried him, and the present that now returned to him through his younger self.
He looked at the young man, and suddenly realized that he had not lost him… had not lost this part of himself, despite the years, despite the silence, despite the absence.
“We have returned… to the beginning, to where everything can be written anew.”
Words crowded in his throat like the commotion of an unfinished dream. He stepped toward the illusion, retreated two steps into fear, then spoke, voice shattered like the glass of memory:
“You… have returned? Who… are you?!”
As soon as he finished speaking, the scene shifted into fullness.
A spacious room bathed in sunlight from tall windows stretched before them, with an old wooden table at its center. Scattered teacups, open notebooks, and faces of all kinds gathered under one rule: the weight of experience and the abundance of words.
Faris—the colleague who had accompanied the man for several years before retirement—reached for his cup, staring into its warm steam with a contemplative tone:
“Stupidity… sometimes resembles surrender to fate. Man has a mind, yet often leaves it idle, while life goes on as it wills.”
Mahmoud—the former colleague who had always been a man of simple faith—interrupted gently with a patient sigh and a quiet smile:
“No, it is distance from guidance. Whoever walks without a mentor is lost. Yet… people confuse religion with thought too often.”
Yusuf—the former politician who had attended every public meeting and seminar—crossed one leg over the other, a confident smile mixed with a trace of irony on his face:
“Stupidity isn’t only in action. It can reside in words as well. We see eloquent orators fall at the first test of action.”
Akram—the university professor, an encyclopedic reference for most knowledge—lowered his glasses onto the table, his eyes scanning the room slowly. He spoke in a measured, methodical tone:
“A fool possesses the tools of reason but cannot employ them. He sees without insight, hears without listening. He may shine for a moment, yet fails to connect the dots or foresee consequences.”
Huda—the cultured physician who had accompanied him through his first administrative task—shook her head, her eyes gleaming with the passion of understanding:
“This is why I refuse to consider stupidity as fate. It is a disease, treatable like any other, but only through awareness and guidance.”
Laila—the simple widow, mother, and longtime overseer of administrative matters, seeking to keep her son informed—laughed lightly to break the tension:
“And sometimes, stupidity is nothing more than a fleeting moment of naivety… haven’t we all fallen into it at times?”
The man sat in silence, observing every face, every inflection, every movement, and every smile. He revisited his own youth, when he sought understanding and learned from mistakes, when her absence left everything incomplete, as if the world itself passed by him without meaning.
The open notebooks, scattered teacups, the pauses between sentences—all of it returned the sensation of absence, making his heart catch the echo of lost time and voices he had yet to hear, yet somehow knew were waiting to be spoken.
Fatima—the pragmatic teacher—responded sternly, her frown weighing heavy on her lashes:
“No, they are grand dreams ending in bitter disappointment.”
Saad—the businesswoman who had long provided support wherever her children were raised—reached for her notebook with a confident gesture, her eyes gleaming with a mixture of ambition and challenge:
“Wealth may protect us from stupidity… but it cannot save us from naivety, with ourselves or with others.”
Rami—the bold journalist, who never failed to comment on the man’s thoughts moment by moment—smiled with irony as he lit an unfinished cigarette, his eyes scanning the faces as if searching for hidden truth:
“Exactly… and functional stupidity, like Samer, is laziness cloaked in excuses. Practical stupidity, like Hussein, sees the idea clearly but cannot even place a single loaf on the table.”
Nader—the artist, a childhood and youth companion—turned his face toward the window, escaping the weight of the table, his eyes following the daylight slipping through the curtains. Half-sarcastic, half-dreamy, he said:
“And then there’s symbolic stupidity… living in his illusion. He sees life poetically, only to get lost between reality and imagination.”
Mona—the academic researcher, a fellow student—spoke sharply, her eyes fixed as if to seize meaning:
“At its core, stupidity is the inability to distinguish between intelligence and wit, between information and knowledge.”
Salma—the nurse assisting the cultured physician—placed her hands on the table, shoulders leaning slightly forward, and added with pragmatic finality:
“In society, stupidity is cruelty toward the weak… neglect for those without a voice.”
Nawal—the housemistress who sought a role amid the administrative duties—laughed, pointing a finger in the air as if catching a fleeting thought:
“And the fool is also the one who sees everything wrong… then repeats the same mistakes as if they were a hobby!”
Dalal—the persistent journalist tracking every detail—ran her fingers through her hair and looked around the table with eyes carrying defiant awareness:
“Sometimes, stupidity is merely a cover… it beautifies the ugly, hides the truths, making everything seem in its rightful place.”
The man sat silently, observing every word, every gesture, every glance. He felt the weight of experiences each face bore and realized that speaking of stupidity was no mere theory, but a reflection of every life they had lived, every absence and loss, every moment of weakness and failure.
As the discussion continued, he recalled himself in youth, when he struggled to understand life, when he tried to distinguish knowledge from intuition, when absence created a void that could only be filled by writing and by the subtle presence of those he loved.
Faris turned his teacup between his hands, watching the glistening droplets on its surface, and smiled serenely, with a mixture of insight and surrender:
“Perhaps the fool… is each of us in our moment. The fool today may become wise tomorrow, and the wise may fall into unforgivable folly.”
Akram nodded, his eyes roaming the faces as if searching for what lay beyond words, and said methodically:
“The fool is not without a mind… but without a compass. He walks where he shouldn’t, sees the straight path as a detour, and the detour as straight.”
Some laughed, others blushed, while the rest sank into thought. Stupidity appeared not as a mere isolated error, but as a mirror reflecting all human flaws… perhaps the very irony of life itself.
A heavy silence descended upon the room, pressing down on chests and weighing on breaths, until the presence of the assembly seemed to fade without completing the picture.
Only the man’s breath rose, and within him another voice wandered through the corridors of his mind, as if searching for a truth lost through flight:
“Do I see myself before the pieces I scattered along the path?
Every time I said: I will be stronger… did I lose a part of me?”
Had my memory returned to punish me for what I had deliberately forgotten? Who had snatched the pen from my hand? Who convinced me to remain silent? Who erased my words before they could be written?
He sat in the chair, silence pressing in from every side, memories seeping into every corner of his mind. A strange mixture of longing and fear stirred in his chest—a fluttering, heavy with decades of absence and lost chances.
The young man across from him said nothing. He shifted, hands trembling slightly before stretching toward the garden without purpose. His eyes pointed not at anything, but at emptiness itself, as if the void contained all the answers no voice could ever speak.
And his eyes said what his lips could not:
“Look…”
It was no audible voice, only a reverberation inside him, a word born in his mind before it reached his ears.
Suddenly, pale footsteps slid from between the trees—not touching the ground, as if sprouting from it. He wondered in silence: Does he hear them alone, or has the silence between them become a third ear, listening?
The air parted, and the scene slowly revealed itself. First, a woman arrived. Her hair was tangled like thirsty branches; her eyes spoke for words unspoken. They pierced with unvoiced questions:
“Where were you when I fell? Why did you leave the door ajar?”
She said nothing. She did not need to. Her very body screamed reproach, a single gesture reviving years of absence and betrayal in him.
Then came a tall man, walking swiftly as if counting each step. His gray cloak brushed the grass; his silence resonated with the weight of wisdom. In his hand, a thick book dangled with colored tabs—trails of unfinished readings, marks on a path he feared might be erased.
The man in the chair felt a tightening within. Were these strangers? Or had fragments of himself emerged, demanding to be heard? He dared not lift his gaze, sinking inward:
Are they really here? Or did I open the wrong door in my memory?
He glanced at the boy as if seeking guidance. The boy merely smiled, mysterious, knowing more than he revealed.
Suddenly, the garden seemed to turn like a theater stage. Curtains moved slowly. Dim light fell like a thread of memory. The old wooden table drew them together again.
They took their places. He perched at the edge, not like the rest, a guest in the council of his own mind, observing figures made of memories and unspoken feelings.
Faris spoke first. His voice was calm, like a breeze stirring old papers, rearranging them in the air before they could fall:
“Beyond stupidity, there are degrees. Each degree carries its own face.”
Mahmoud leaned back, a gentle certainty in his smile:
“The barren mind… an earth that yields no thought. It makes no mistakes because it knows nothing to err in. Motionless… harmless… like a silent grave.”
Yusuf raised an eyebrow, a sly mix of sarcasm and seriousness in his voice.
“The fool… a childlike mind. Half of what he understands, he forgets; he blends seriousness with jest, danger with triviality. Innocent in his ignorance, he makes people laugh more than he angers them. Sometimes, you wonder—are we laughing at him, or with him?”
Akram adjusted his glasses and looked at Nader as if explaining to an absent class.
“And the lunatic… a fractured mind. Unstable, leaping from one thought to another with no link, chasing shadows. He knows neither when he begins nor when he ends, as if the whole world is chaos tailored to him.”
Silence settled again in the garden, heavy and palpable, pressing on the air and hearts. The man sat at the center of this quiet, chest rising and falling with the weight of missed moments and delayed chances. Pale morning light sifted through tree trunks, casting long shadows—figures emerging not from the world around him, but from within, accompanied by memories and whispered echoes of the past.
Then a resolute smile appeared on a familiar face—Huda. He wasn’t sure if she truly stood before him or had stepped from his old memory to speak with the voice of a doctor reading the soul’s secrets:
“The naive… a pure but fragile mind. Believes everything told to him, like a child believes a story. Not entirely foolish, yet defenseless against cunning. Easily deceived… only to repeat the deception as blind trust. This doesn’t require punishment—only awareness to awaken him.”
He sat in silence, absorbing each word as if they seeped into the deepest corners of his self, rearranging thoughts, waking him from a long slumber stretched across absence, longing, and fear of facing truth.
A soft voice, like a breeze slipping through a closed window, added:
“The slow… sluggish in motion. He receives ideas as mud receives rain, absorbs them slowly, but bears no flower, no fruit. He rarely errs, yet misses the moment to act, as if time passes before him, untouched.”
Then a short, sharp laugh cut through the garden—like a spark striking dry wood. It was Rami, the journalist, leaning in with a mocking grin, eyes hungry for experiment:
“The fool… a mind full of holes. Knows much, yet leaves gaps wide enough for deception to slip through. Clever in one moment, but in the critical instant, he becomes easy prey.”
A cup slammed onto the table, the sound echoing the tension. Suad, the businesswoman, watched him with piercing scrutiny:
“Not pure foolishness… masks. And each of us wears one in moments of weakness, thinking ourselves beyond it.”
Finally, from the shadows, Muna emerged—the university researcher. Her eyes sparkled behind narrow glasses, bridging voice and body. Her tone rose, like the conclusion of all argument:
“The barren mind needs knowledge, the fool needs patience, the lunatic needs guidance, the naive needs alertness, the slow needs urgency, and the gullible needs supervision. Each level demands its own cure.”
The man felt the tree trunks and the overlapping voices inside his head as if a secret tribunal had been set up within him. He murmured to himself, voice trembling:
“Were you aiming at me… or someone else who walked my path with you? Or have you simply delivered your verdicts because I made you believe in my simplicity, as read from my reactions to your deeds?”
From the shadows, a figure stirred, forming slowly into a small crawling child. The man did not look—he did not speak—but the child stood, mysterious in its firmness, as if its mere presence could command the scene.
His heart fluttered with fear and awe. There was something painfully familiar in the child’s features: the wide eyes, the trembling fingers, the slight tilt of the stance. He had seen it before… in old photographs, in neglected mirrors, perhaps even in dreams he had never dared confess.
Suddenly, it became clear: all those voices—the laugh of Nawal, Dalal’s sharpness, the hidden sarcasm, Huda’s gaze, Muna’s analysis—were merely masks. Masks woven by each of them to speak for that child, to reach the first traces of his own face.
He whispered to himself, voice wavering between revelation and disbelief:
“They all speak about you… and yet they have spoken to me. Since that childhood, I have carried their voices behind me. I never ran from them. I wore them, one by one… but I never forgot who I was at the core.”
He bowed his head. The child remained motionless, yet somehow larger than its size, deeper than his silence—a key unlocking doors he had never dared touch.
In that moment, he understood: the heart of the story was not in the faces around him, nor in the voices judging him—it was in that child, in the first seed from which it all began.
A faint laugh drifted through the garden, like the hum of a bee mocking the heavy silence. It was Nawal, the housekeeper, tilting her head, laughing as if she had uncovered a naive veil. Her voice echoed between the walls:
“So folly is not a single person, but a whole canvas of masks… each appearing according to circumstance and moment.”
Before the words could settle, Dalal, the journalist, leaned forward, fingers interlaced, eyes fixed on the silence with the confidence of one who knows the arrow’s path before it is released:
“And when a person sees themselves in any of these masks, they must ask: Am I a victim of folly… or the maker of my own mistakes?”
A faint shiver ran through the garden. The place seemed crowded with invisible mirrors, each reflecting a different face of those present. The man in the chair sensed that these faces did not emerge from around him—they came from within, as if his own body had become a vast hall, hosting them all.
Suddenly, silence split, and a mocking voice emerged from the shadows, brief yet resonant, like a stone thrown into the small pond of his calm:
“Back at it again? Haven’t you learned yet?”
No face appeared, yet the mockery alone sketched it: eyebrows tilted, lips tight from too much laughter at repeated failure. His heart trembled, and he asked himself, in a voice only he could hear:
“Is this the last of you… or the first? Or have I yet to reach the root of the story?”
At the far end of the garden, a child stood slowly. He did not turn. Motionless, as if knowing that the voice needed no body—it resided somewhere mysterious, between his memory and his fear.
The man realized, in that moment, that the circle had closed. All the voices crowding around him were merely layers peeling away to reveal a single face… his own.
From the depths of the shadows, a voice spoke with inevitable authority:
“And here they come:
from your old notebooks, edges yellowed, waiting for you to finish what you began;
from wounds left to fester in silence;
from thoughts forbidden to be written, for ink was sharper than pain;
from moments of hesitation, caught between the ‘yes’ you never said and the ‘no’ you never dared to own.
Each carries a piece of you… a part forgotten, or a part you pretended to forget.”
And then, as if a page had turned in a book, fifteen students sat in a bright-walled classroom. The seats formed a half-circle, facing a podium that waited for the first word. Light streamed from large windows, glinting on their notebooks and pens, illuminating their varied expressions: some eager, some hesitant, as if the room itself shared in their uncertainty.
Chapter Nine
The professor walked in with measured steps, holding his glasses between two fingers. He stopped before them, voice calm but commanding:
“Your task this semester isn’t to deliver memorized reports. It’s living research. Each of you will plan your final thesis as if you were defending it before a panel.”
He paused, letting his eyes sweep over the students’ faces, then added with a quiet, reassuring smile:
“Later, we’ll collect your work to see common threads and subtle differences. This won’t be theory alone. You must bring an example from life—an image, a story, or even a person—but under borrowed names from the animal or plant kingdom. There’s no ‘Ahmed’ or ‘Layla.’ There’s the Eagle, the Lily, the Fox, the Fig Tree.”
A moment of silence fell, then hesitant smiles and soft whispers spread through the room. Some found the assignment playful; for others, it landed heavy, unexpectedly.
Pens began to move, each sketching a mask of its own:
The Tortoise: slow to think, deliberate in argument, yet patience outlasting time itself. Faris, the retired clerk, nodded and murmured,
“Sometimes patience teaches more than speed ever could.”
The Swallow: quick-witted, leaping from idea to idea like fleeting sparks that shine briefly, then vanish. Huda, the cultured doctor, tilted her head and said,
“Genius without guidance becomes chaos… yet even chaos has a light worth catching.”
The Cactus: silent, sparing with words, weighing the world on a hidden scale before speaking. The professor, Akram, nodded in quiet approval:
“Sometimes steadfastness in truth is worth more than a thousand speeches.”
The Jasmine: overflowing with emotion, her words like fragrance, drawing hearts even when minds faltered. Laila, the simple widow, smiled gently:
“Emotion can work miracles—but it needs boundaries, or it will drown its owner.”
One by one, the names appeared, turning the room into a forest of symbols:
The Eagle: sharp-eyed, insightful, but quick to anger—a reflection of Rami, the journalist, exposing reality’s contradictions without pause.
The Fox: cunning, strategic, yet his schemes often lead him into traps of his own making—like Yusuf, the politician, dazzling with words but powerless in action.
The Tree: steady, silent, observing life slowly, like Akram, lost in deep analysis.
The Duck: naïve, believing everything said, like those students who repeat mistakes with innocence.
The Locust: foolish, knowing much yet riddled with gaps, letting deception slip in from every crack.
The Nightingale: a blend of wit and folly, making others laugh more than they resent—like the enthusiastic, impulsive teenagers in the room.
The Barren Earth: infertile, a mind without seeds, incapable of error simply because it has never known where to begin. Silent as a grave, it waits for someone to awaken it.
As the characters sprang to life on paper, the scene became a vast mirror: each student writing themselves, each persona leaping from notebook to memory, dancing between reality and symbolism. The classroom became more than a room—it became a small world, pulsing with spirits, revealing secrets, each student living inside a story yet untold.
It was as if the room wasn’t a room at all, but an open stage. Masks of the mind wandered freely. Faces from the past sat beside faces of the present, in an endless circle where voices intertwined like the colors of a painting drawn by time itself.
The discussion began to flow, weaving in and out, as if the voices themselves were sketching shapes in the air.
Mona, the researcher, leaned on the arm of her chair, her eyes scanning the students as she would a text, and said with quiet seriousness:
“Stupidity isn’t a single person. It’s a moving canvas of personalities, each revealing itself depending on the situation.”
Salma, the nurse, tilted her head slightly, fingers tracing the edge of her notebook, adding with grounded realism:
“And a fool isn’t just someone who misleads themselves. They’re the ones who harden themselves against others, or neglect the weak.”
Nawal, the housewife, laughed softly, her eyes glinting with warm irony:
“Sometimes, a fool hides behind clever masks, pretending to be a teacher while forgetting the lesson entirely.”
Dalal, the journalist, interlaced her fingers on the table, surveying the room as if weighing the echo of each word:
“And sometimes, stupidity is a cover—it beautifies the ugly, hides the truth, just as we do in the media.”
Whispers and smiles rippled through the room. The classroom became a vast mirror, reflecting every mask: the fool, the simpleton, the idiot, the naïve, the gullible, the dull, the barren… and every shade in between.
Farid reached for his tea, smiling:
“Seems the fool lives in each of us at some moment… and the wise in the same one, another moment.”
Akram nodded, eyes shining with reflection:
“Yes… the fool isn’t without mind—he’s without direction. He sees the straight path as a detour, and the detour as the straight road.”
Laughter rippled through the room, but in their eyes lingered a quiet gleam: they understood that stupidity was not merely a personal mistake, but a lesson in human diversity, a reminder of how fragile one can be in facing oneself.
Suddenly, the scene fractured, as if a curtain had fallen, revealing another story.
A question echoed in the child’s chest, one he dared not voice aloud:
“Did they come to take me?
Or to return to me what I had buried on purpose?”
Under the tree, in a shadow that seemed no shadow at all, the display had begun—and no one could step back, not even him.
“Who is this?”
The man’s voice rasped, the words trembling as if he no longer trusted what his eyes beheld. He leaned forward at the edge of the scene, as though trying to outrun reality before it could strike him.
The young man didn’t answer immediately. He turned his gaze toward her, holding it, searching her face for some forgotten past, some promise long delayed.
Then he whispered, his voice cracking between memory and regret:
“She’s the one I wanted to write about… and I didn’t.”
The words hung closer to accusation than to fact.
He continued, his tone swinging between reproach and compassion:
“She was waiting to appear in one of your chapters, yet she remained suspended… caught between a story you began and never finished.”
Inside, the young man screamed, his voice rising from the depths of his chest:
“You knew her!
Everything in you warned of her coming, yet you only approached… then recoiled.
As if you feared writing the truth, afraid it might trap you.”
At that moment, the scene fractured, and the space around him shifted.
The seat was full, yet it felt vast, uncrowded. The man still clutched his notebook, as though writing had become his only tether to existence—his only proof of being.
But the shadows would not remain silent. From beneath the trees, the presence that moments ago had been merely a “mocking voice” now stepped forward—a thin man in a worn suit, eyes narrow and unblinking, like camera lenses recording without mercy.
He laughed softly, a sound that pressed the air with an uncanny weight:
“Finally, you decided to see me.
I know I’ve annoyed you… but believe me, I am the only one who never lied to you.”
The man remained silent, his voice sealed deep inside him.
The young man rose, fire igniting in his eyes, and shouted:
“This is what bound you!
It made you write what pleases others, not what resembles you!”
The shadow replied calmly, coldly, slicing through the silence:
“I am nothing more than your mirror when you turn off the light.
I am the thoughts you refused, because you feared angering anyone.
I am what you never wrote, because you were afraid it would be misunderstood.”
The figure in the cloak stepped lightly closer, moving between shadow and light:
“No—you are the temptation of power, turning truth into a means of escape.”
A woman stepped forward, her eyes brimming with tears, her gestures saying what words could not:
“And I… was their victim.
Every time I felt something toward you, it was he who convinced you to retreat.
Every scene you wrote me into, he erased before you.”
The man took a step back; each footfall echoed softly, as if the room itself exhaled with him. His breath shook, his trembling hand brushed some papers across the table, which scattered to the floor as if trying to flee the weight of truth that burned them.
He spoke at last, in a hesitant voice, each word punctuated with pause:
“But… I was afraid I’d hurt you if I defied him.”
The shadow smiled—a faint, cold smile, like a dim light cast over the man’s heart before his eyes. Its edges moved with a mysterious fluidity.
“You feared only one thing,” it said, “hurting yourself by speaking the truth.”
In that moment, the child stepped forward from the shadows, his steps light as if the ground itself breathed with him. His eyes glowed with sudden courage, lips trembling just before he spoke:
“Do you frighten him because you are real?”
The man shivered, frozen, as if the whole world had shrunk to exist only between him and those shining eyes. The shadow was silent for a moment, then slowly sat on the ground, back relaxed but radiating a quiet dread.
“To frighten him a thousand times is better than to reassure him once with a lie,” it said.
Inside the garden, voices rose—whispers of the present, perched on the edge of shadow. The echo of curiosity and anxiety wound itself around the white walls enclosing the space, until the place seemed to join in the conversation.
The mother spoke, her voice soft but penetrating, emerging from the depths of longing and worry. Her hand moved gently, as if touching every heart in the room:
“You are all my children.
But only one of you… will return at the end of the night to knock on the door.”
A shiver ran through the enclosed garden, yet the shadows stretched over the floor and walls, shifting with the flicker of light spilling through the drawn windows. They seemed like living spirits moving among the people, the chairs, and the books, observing every motion, every heartbeat.
Eyes met across the room, curiosity tangled with unease. Every whisper, every quiver of fingers, every flicker of light in hidden corners sought meaning only one could understand. He alone understood. Time seemed frozen in his chest, and everything around him had become a stage for memories, voices, and shadows he had always tried to escape.
Silence stretched, heavy and complete, pressing in on the walls. Every paper on the table, every finger’s twitch, every eyelid’s tremor echoed in the space. Slowly, the shadows began to move, breathing, weaving over the walls and floor, intertwining with the beams of light from the windows, forming spirits hovering between past and present.
The child sat on the ground but never left the center of vision. His eyes shifted among them all, occasionally flaring like tiny flames that cut through the room’s shadows, revealing hidden truths in hearts. A slight shrug, a small shake of his head—enough to rearrange the movements of the grown-ups, as if his presence imposed a subtle balance on the whole space.
The shadow rose slightly, gliding forward as though the entire room responded to its slow steps. Then, breaking the silence, it spoke:
“Each of you… carries a part of the truth you have hidden from yourself.
Every gesture, every smile, every fear… is a mirror of you.”
The mother’s voice trembled, her words almost breaking between her lips, yet she continued with sharp clarity:
“Sometimes we think we are protecting those we love, but in truth, we suffocate them with our fear… and with our silence.”
The man slowly lifted his head, his eyes intersecting with the shadows, as if trying to capture what lay between light and darkness. His palms shook as they brushed over neglected notebooks on the table, pages catching the sunlight, appearing as eyes wide open to the past. He whispered to himself:
“Is this who I am? Or is it what I’ve feared from the beginning?”
Everyone around him seemed part of a living dream, stretched by the light and shadows of time. Some leaned forward, waiting for a sign; others turned toward each other, trying to read the hidden secrets of the room. Every small sound, every nuance, every laugh or whisper, expanded to form subtle waves of curiosity and anxiety, intertwining with the voices of a time that would never return—reminding him that everything there bore its poetry and spirit.
Suddenly, the shadow moved slowly, as if the entire place followed its rhythm. It approached the man step by step, until it stood before him, its voice calm yet unnervingly present, like the beat of an anxious heart:
“Do you see now? Do you feel all that you tried to ignore? Every shame, every retreat, every fear… it is part of you, a part yet unwritten.”
The man stepped back slightly but remained rooted. His heart fluttered like a butterfly trapped between its wings, each breath mingling with the flickering light, the dancing shadows, and the gaze of those present, until the entire space became a living stage, separated from truth only by a faint light from a distant moon and a suffocating silence. And within him, a voice cried with longing:
“If there is a beginning for everything… then it must end here with confession.”
He remembered walking under the moonlight as a child, feeling that it walked with him, accompanying him like a solitary friend, listening to his silence and guarding his dreams. Every time he closed his eyes in childhood, it remained there, as if diving into his spirit to remind him that nothing is ever truly lost, and that everything he has seen and felt will someday manifest in some form.
As he grew and walked through the bright alleys of Damascus, seeing walls frozen in place and shadows bouncing on the tiles, the moonlight followed behind him, witnessing every worry and every joy, reminding him that childhood does not vanish—it softens, settling quietly in the heart and spirit.
During the days of siege and fear within the prison of the mind, he would lift his head and notice the moon, as if it were the only being aware of his truth, listening to his silence and keeping his secret. And at the same time, it reminded him that the dreams of childhood, its joy, and its solitude never fade—and that he would find a way to realize them, his hopes and emotions entrusted to this silent witness.