The Ode to Love and Loss
'About the echo of love, that became an echo of the past.'
Traveling, leaving, reaching toward the endless kingdom of what might be; these were the quiet voices that shaped my teenage years.
I was endlessly curious, a young explorer forever standing on tiptoe, trying to see beyond the horizon. I did not yet understand the quiet beauty of the present moment, nor the sleeping power buried somewhere deep inside me.
The Power of the Present
I was always chasing what lay just beyond the world, always trying to pull back the heavy curtain of the future. I was only a boy then, a boy who had not yet learned how to hold the present gently in his hands, or how to trust the hidden strength of his own soul.
Today, many of those wild desires have come true. And yet, I would trade every victory for the chance to breathe that distant moment once more.
But what was once so effortlessly possible has now become a ghost.
We let the river carry us away, my friend. And now we sit on the shore, looking back, mourning the ships we allowed to sail without us.
Not long ago, after crossing continents, I found myself standing once again in my favorite corner of the world: Raml Station.
The air smelled of autumn, but the streets were suffocatingly crowded. I sat in a small café facing the sea, watching the world and its passersby rush past me. Then the memories came. They flooded my mind and pierced my chest like a sudden blade.
On a day just like this, beneath the same gray autumn sky, I once slipped out of a dull accounting lecture and ran into the maze of streets, hungry for freedom and fantasy.
The sidewalks were almost empty. The clouds hung low and heavy, carrying a rain that had not yet fallen. I was a teenager then, not yet seventeen, riding an almost hollow tram from El-Shatby to Raml Station.
I can still see myself walking down that long, sloping road toward Fouad Street, hurrying to the cinema where my imagination was waiting to hold me.
The Power of Music
In the quiet darkness before the film began, they used to play songs.
Then, out of nowhere, Shirley Bassey’s “If You Go Away” washed over me and left a mark on my mind that time has never managed to erase.
Her wide, velvet voice moved through my bloodstream and into my soul like a beautiful drug. It carried me away to a future where anything could happen, to a place where our bleak reality simply did not exist.
It was an unbearably beautiful melody scattered across my senses: a voice that seemed to rise above the music itself, fading softly, taking flight, clinging with desperate tenderness to the final, fraying threads of love.
As I listened, I did not hear a promise. I did not hear a plea. I did not feel that she was bribing him with a better world so he would stay, or begging him on her knees to save her from collapse.
What I felt was a rebellion.
A beautifully failed rebellion.
Not a rebellion against her lover, and not even against the cruelty of the world, but a rebellion against love itself.
She was mourning the innocent dawn of their love: that fragile beginning when love was still new, when the heart still felt lifted: : 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 the light had changed.
She does not know why it changed. Honestly, no one ever knows why it changes. But it always does.
These blinding, flashing moments pass through our lives and leave us captive to them for the rest of our days. And she is utterly powerless before that change.
For a brief second, she imagines the impossible: that those moments might return: We'll sail on the sun; we'll ride on the rain. We'll talk to the trees and wander the wind.
But the dream is dead.
Even if she tried to break the world and bend it by force toward her desire, she would fail for one painfully simple reason: the man she loves has changed.
What remains is no longer a world one can trust. It is an empty room, an emptied space, and the hollow look of someone whose heart is no longer there.
Love needs two hands to keep it alive.
When love burns inside only one heart, it stops being love. It becomes either a cruel trap, or a dark philosophical lens through which the entire world is seen through pain.
The Paradox of Love and Loss
In the deep quiet of my soul and memory, that song slowly turned into a question.
A question about the very core of this terrifying and beautiful thing we call love.
What is this force that can dissolve our differences, cross our cultures, and unite our feelings and goals? How can it be as vast as the universe, and yet as narrow and suffocating as the eye of a needle? How can it bring out the absolute best in us, while also carrying the power to burn everything to the ground?
I do not pretend to have found the answer.
If anything, growing older has only filled me with more questions.
Perhaps I no longer believe that love is merely a glowing star in the sky of our past. I have come to see it as a delicate bond, a shared journey, an endless dialogue between two souls.
Because of that, love carries a thousand social and psychological layers.
Perhaps it is a journey we take against the harsh currents of barriers and time, a long attempt to build a bridge and keep it from collapsing. And when that bridge falls, the devastation becomes unbearable.
But this bridge, this dialogue, does not always have to be with another person. It can be with a meaning, a deeply held value, a grand purpose, or anything else that calls the soul beyond itself.
But if love is simply a feeling reaching outward to connect, and if feelings are only shifting clouds of emotion and mind, why does the storm pass for one person and remain for the other?
Does this feeling bury itself so deeply into the bones of one soul that it reshapes that person entirely, while leaving the other almost untouched?
What, then, is the reason?
If love is a mental state in which two sides become connected, is connection itself the ultimate goal?
And if connection is the goal, why does loss always find a way in?
Why do we sometimes strive, almost recklessly, to lose the very thing we bled to reach?
My mind circled endlessly between love and loss as I sat in that dim cinema hall, letting the song wash over me while I waited to drown in the beautiful illusions of the screen.
The song captured the essence of love. It laid bare its terrifying beauty.
It did not treat loss as a mere possibility. It presented loss as the inescapable, tragic destiny of loving someone.
It did not offer the fiery, angry passion my teenage heart was searching for that day. Instead, it took me gently by the hand and led me into the quiet rooms of despair.
It planted a realization deep in my chest: that love, while it feels fiercely eternal, is also beautifully transient and temporary.
It offered me no explanation.
And honestly, I have not found the answer yet.
Somehow, my heart leans toward the belief that it all comes back to our complicated relationship with the past.
It is about our relationship with ourselves, with the ghosts of the people we once were, and with our desperate hunger to keep them alive.
It is about our terrifying attempt to discover who we are, and our quiet hatred of the strangers time keeps turning us into.
Fear of Loss
Maybe the whole tragedy is rooted in the fear of loss.
The fear of losing the chance we once held in our hands.
The fear of forgetting the feeling we once lived.
The fear of watching the present moment slip away and become something entirely different.
When I sit quietly and think deeply, I sometimes discover that letting go of love itself, leaving this consuming feeling behind as a stance toward life, might be the answer.
Perhaps drawing inspiration from Shirley Bassey’s quiet acceptance of reality, and holding on to the strange grace of being fully satisfied with the present moment, might bring us closer to what we dream of most: a true connection with ourselves.
And perhaps that is the foundation of every other connection.
Or maybe…
Maybe I am only trying to convince my own heart of this story, as I sit here almost a quarter of a century later, in the very same place on planet Earth, quietly contemplating the boy I once was on a day long gone.
Comments
Post a Comment