re:mind

— and I, the hesitant reader, breathless before the unwritten. In your gaze I find chapters unwinding, not in order, not in peace. There are margins burned black with longing, footnotes of memory trailing into absence. You do not speak, and yet I am filled with your silence more than I have ever been filled with sound.

I think of what Marina Tsvetaeva once wrote: “I know the truth—give up all other truths! No need for people anywhere on earth. And these starry nights… no need for them either. There is only you.”

That is the madness you have made of me. To unlearn the world for a truth found in the curve of your silence.

There is a kind of cruelty in beauty, isn’t there? A sweetness too close to grief. Your hands once touched me like petals, and yet I carry the bruises of your absence like medals pinned under the skin. Love—true love—is never pristine. It bears the mark of being lived, broken open like a fruit too ripe, spilling into everything.

I remember when you first looked at me. Not like others look, but as if seeing was a wound. You left your gaze on me like a coat I could not take off. And now, even when you're not here, I wear it still.

Jean Genet wrote: “There is a certain glory in pain, a mysterious splendor that love reveals when it walks with its shadow.”

I know that splendor. I kiss it every night, when I dream of you returning—and fear that you might.

You made me understand that silence can scream. That the space between words is a kingdom of its own. That absence is not emptiness, but form—sharp, defined, heavy. And you are in every corner of it.

So I wait. Not for your voice, but for the rustle of pages—your eyes turning toward me again. The great novel you are, unfinished, dangerous, divine.

Mohammed El-Kurd, “This Is Why We Dance” from Rifqa