يمنات
Yemenat
Ahmed Saif Hashed
I used to hide the eruption of my burning love and the pains swollen with anguish that pressed deep within my dark depths and secret tunnels. I suppressed them harshly, sealing every outlet as though afraid that even a whisper of love might escape me in the haze of sleep. I stepped out from my inner labyrinth, trying to wear a mask of ordinariness, while in truth my soul was crucified between misery and torment.
I kept my secret until it reached its peak and its furthest cycle. I swallowed my bitterness in silence. I boiled in a cauldron of fire, hiding the flames that coursed through my veins. I muffled the sound of my inner revolt, contained the smoke with care, and left only a channel into bottles of wine, where I could drink alone in secrecy with my incomplete love, suppressed and gagged by my silence.
I was careful that no one should know the depth of my longing, the storm in my chest, the uprising I smothered with tyranny. I concealed what stirred within me from even myself. I forbade silence to hear my silence. I suppressed jealousy, confession, and all that prowled in the depths of my being.
If you, Haifa, were absent from college even for a single day, I would sink into regret for a wasted day. I would fall to the pit of my hell. Your absence would scorch and sear me. My youth would fade and wither. I felt myself dwindling like a candle. I wandered aimlessly in the wilderness of my loss and died of longing until the moment I saw you again and was reborn at first sight.
I trembled, faltered, and panicked when I tried to ask about your well-being or speak to you of something trivial in a passing encounter. I shook like a thief caught in the act. In your presence my nerves collapsed into a thousand failures, as though an unseen spirit perched heavily upon my head.
Why did your sadness never ask you why this young man before you was so anxious, unsettled, and afraid? What secret was he hiding? Was it love? What was the reason for such confusion? Your love, Haifa, was overwhelming. Calm my fear. Soothe my panic. Smile so that I might be at ease. Were you blind? Or was your blindness so severe that you could not see a man trembling before you like a tree in a storm, as though a gale sought to uproot him from the ground?
Many times, in the dark folds of night, I tried to summon your spirit between wakefulness and sleep to confide to you the passion and yearning that consumed me. With all my senses I tried to send you a fragment of my sorrow and the burning love within me. Yet I found myself weary upon my bed, my senses broken, my body spent. I had no night journey, no ascension, no lamp of Aladdin to light my way.
I was jealous of you, Haifa. I hid from others a fire that devoured me with madness. I bound that fire in chains of iron, muzzled my frenzy deep within me. But no matter how wild my jealousy, it could never quench your light, impose a veil on your sunrise, or drape the blackness of death across the radiant face of the full moon.
I was destroyed by those who claimed I was married with children. Lies and falsehoods. Was it distortion, deceit, or the spite of women? Was it out of concern, or something else? I do not know. But I have never known concern that buries me alive, poisons my days, and destroys the future I had once seen blooming with the colors of flowers.
I am crushed beneath my burdens, heavier than mountains, carried with the patience of a camel. I come from a land where love is a crime, where confession is punishable by death, where severity and harshness prevail, and where every man must serve as a warning to others.
I come from a land that sees love as its first enemy, where the mufti calls love the tenderness of war, issuing decrees without question, declaring knowledge to be a false messiah and thought itself a crime of blasphemy.
I come from a land addicted to hypocrisy and deceit, where herds gather to resist the light. The masks of falsehood grow nauseated by their own concealment. They rally their forces and protest when the ugliness of reality rises to the surface. They decay in ostentatious corruption, their faces reaching the height of hideousness, faces that turn feral against the truth, steeped in darkness and corruption.
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