A Wandering Text

A wandering text.. a message reached him through his phone:

Sulaymaniyah is still beautiful, and it is waiting for you.. I know you are being lazy about traveling, but our meeting in Baghdad and the happiness it left behind urges me to invite you. Don’t you agree that some people we meet by chance or on a certain occasion leave a glow of love in our souls? I invite you to discover the beauty in my city.

He read the message once, twice, a third time, and hesitated before answering. It stirred feelings of joy he had been missing.

He wrote on a blank paper before him: A star shines in a bewildered sky, a dawn breaks on my balcony, thank you to the one who gifted me half a moon in the night and hid what remains in my moaning.

He felt the room rise with him, floating in a vast space, as if the moment carried him to a train full of dreams, rebelling against every image of mundane days.

He returned to his phone and wrote a message to Hana:

— Am I dreaming? Your message is as delightful as the spray of rain touching the face, as if you are giving me a moment of warmth so I might gift you an age of radiance.

Am I dreaming.. Some of us can achieve some of our dreams, while others stumble, their dreams loose in a vast space.. Dreams are like sea pearls — we sail towards them, our eyes shining when we catch them, or return from the journey without luster, yet we set sail again.

Since the beginning, humanity has chased its dreams. The ancients believed dreams revealed the unseen — questions, theories, and interpretations that occupied scholars and exegetes, with no single answer.

Many creators were led by their dreams to their masterpieces. The musician Arthur Simon composed his famous song “The Lost Chord” in a dream, and when he woke he remembered the first phrases and recorded them — but the rest of the song was lost forever.

Countless stories of dreams: some fulfilled, some lost, from Gilgamesh’s dream of immortality to our own large and small dreams in a world that changes every moment.

We will meet in Sulaymaniyah.. I am coming, Hana.

He seemed like someone who had caught a light in the darkness of a moonless night, his imagination performing its ablutions in the stillness of this night and the secrets of a journey with the explosion of light at dawn. A day began, completing the river’s ebb and flow, paintings formed of color and water and sand, and a woman bathing in light, undressed in the coquetry of love, the body in spiritual radiance.

What do you want from me, Hana? Was I hasty in my reply? I know Sulaymaniyah is beautiful, and that place is its other face. I know that nature is a sanctuary that grants us love colored with waiting, that it grants us a silent dialogue that betrays what lies outside the frame. You want to say something, like a man swimming in a sea of words — he catches one and the rest slip from his hands, he mutters but loses the meaning.

He reached for the recorder near him and turned the music dial. His soul sailed to distant places, whose nights were love and lover and song.. For in the night, pain awakens, and the body plays music that torments the soul, and the first cry of life rises after the body’s darkness — so begins the first day and the first lesson: life is light, but it begins with a cry.

He felt he was enjoying the music, and that more expectations and scrutiny of Hana’s message would spoil its beauty. He possessed nothing now but time, and it was running out. And beneath the soul’s recesses there are always secrets — it was not his job to search people’s hearts.