The Ode to Love and Loss

 'About the echo of love, that became an echo of the past.'

#If_You_Go_Away

Voyaging, departing, probing the realm of possibilities - these notions shaped my teen years. I was eternally curious, a young explorer constantly peering beyond the horizons of the known, yet to grasp the precious worth of the present and the power of potential lying dormant within me.

The Power of The Present

I was in constant search of what lies beyond the world, of what lurks behind the veil of the future. A teenager yet to learn the value of cherishing the present moment, of trusting in his own potential.

Many of those desires have since been fulfilled. Yet, now, I would gladly trade all my gains to return to that distant moment. But what once seemed possible, has become an impossibility. You were swept away by the current, my friend, and you sat looking back, lamenting over missed opportunities.

During a transcontinental visit, I found myself at my favorite place - "Raml Station".

The weather was autumnal, but the crowd was suffocating. I sat at a café by the sea, observing the streets and the passers-by.

Memories started flooding my mind, piercing through my heart like a dagger. On a day like this, under a similar autumnal sky, I left an accounting lecture, escaping into the depths of the streets in search of freedom, of fantasy.

The streets were nearly empty of pedestrians, and the weather was drenched in autumn. The clouds were heavy, pregnant with rain that was yet to fall, I was a teenager then, not yet seventeen, riding an almost empty tram from El-Shatby to Raml Station. I stroll down the long road descending towards Fouad Street, where the cinema awaited me, and imagination was within my grasp.

The Power of Music

Before the show began, they used to play various songs, and among those, Shirley Bassey's "If You Go Away" left an indelible impression on my mind.

Her velvety, wide-ranging voice seeped into my consciousness and soul, like a drug transporting me to a future where everything was possible, and where this bleak reality had no existence. A painful melody scattered in the realm of my senses, a voice more beautiful than the music that softly faded beside it, taking flight, clinging to the last threads of love.

Her lament was not a promise or a plea. I did not feel she was promising him a better world if he stayed, nor begging him to stay so she wouldn't fall apart. What I truly felt was an attempt at failed rebellion, not a rebellion against a lover, or against the world, but a rebellion against love itself.

She mourns the early moments of love:

When our love was new, and our hearts were high,

When the day was young, and the night was long.

And the moon stood still for the night bird's song.

But this has changed. She does not know why it changed. No one knows why it changes. But it always changes. These moments that flash through the course of our lives; they continue to captivate us for the remainder of our days. And she is powerless to rebel against them. She contemplates the possibility of reproducing these moments and sailing in the sun's rays, drifting in the wind's course:

We'll sail on the sun; we'll ride on the rain.

We'll talk to the trees and wander the wind.

But this is no longer possible. Even if she tried to forcefully bend the world to fulfill her desires, she would not succeed, for a simple reason, that her lover himself has changed:

There'll be nothing left in the world to trust.

 Just an empty room full of empty space

 Like the empty look I see on your face

And love requires two parties to be involved. As for the love that consumes only one party, it is either a trap, or a philosophical position that reshapes the world from the perspective of pain.

The Paradox of Love and Loss

The song transformed in the depths of my soul and memory into a question. A question about the essence of this wonderful thing we call love.

This thing capable of transcending our differences and cultures and unifying our feelings and goals, as infinite as the universe and as narrow as a needle's eye, a phenomenon capable of bringing out the best in us, and capable of destroying everything.

I do not claim to have known the answer. But perhaps I have come to be filled with more questions.

Perhaps I no longer think that love is a shining moment in the horizon of the past. But I have come to tend to think that it is a bond, a journey, a dialogue between two parties.

For this reason, it has multiple social and psychological dimensions. Perhaps it is a journey through the currents of barriers and time, aiming to form a bond and maintain it. But the creation of the bond aims at its sustainability and maintenance. Because its loss is devastating. But the bond and dialogue do not necessarily have to be between two parties only, it could be between several parties, between a party and a meaning, between a party and a value or a goal or any other thing.

So, if love is a feeling seeking to gain communication with something, and the feeling is just a mental or emotional state that can change, why does it change at one party and does not change at the other party?

Does this feeling permeate the individual's existence and embed itself in his entity and reshape it at one of the parties, while it does not do the same at the other party?

What is the reason then?

If love is a mental state in which communication occurs between two parties. Is the goal of love communication?

And if its goal is communication, why does the loss happen?

And why do we strive to lose what we communicated with?

Between love and loss, my thoughts revolved as I sat in the dimly lit cinema hall listening to the song and waiting to drown in the beautiful dream world on the screen.

The song captured the essence of love, and revealed its terrifying beauty, and did not present loss as a possible probability, but presented it as the inevitable result of love.

The song did not provide a fiery emotion that suited my teenage feelings at that distant moment, but it took me with it to moments of quiet despair, and to the deep realization that love, as it is eternal, is also transient and temporary.

But it did not give me an explanation. I have not found the answer yet.

Somehow my belief began to lean towards the belief that it all has to do with our relationship with the past, with our relationship with ourselves, with the people we were in the past, and our desire to keep them. In our attempt to discover ourselves, and our hatred for what time makes us.

Fear of Loss

Perhaps the whole matter lies in the fear of loss, the loss of the opportunity that was in our hands, the loss of the feeling that we once lived, the loss of the current moment and the shift from it to something different.

When I ponder deeply, I discover that giving up love itself, and leaving this feeling, as a stance from life, behind us, and drawing inspiration from Shirley Bassey's quiet acceptance of reality and clinging to this inspiring moment of feeling satisfied from our current moment, can achieve what we dream of in communication with ourselves, as a fundamental moment and as a basis for communication with anything else.

Or perhaps I am trying to convince myself of this position, as I sit almost a quarter of a century later in the same space on the planet Earth, contemplating the being I was in a past day.