the Gift

أَعُوذُ بِٱللَّهِ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ ٱلرَّجِيمِ، بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ

i must write for you my Gift, 

for your absence weighs on my soul, 

like the Riemann sum of every pain

that my life has ever known.

there was a time in years past,

where your face i could not envision,

i had to touch your cheek,

to truly be sure you did exist.

but now, after a handful of years,

in the absence of you,

i can see your face, recall your scent,

remember nearly everything 

that you might have said.

this is not simply one person's absence,

or even that of one beloved, 

it's equal to the totality 

of being absent every soul 

that i may have ever touched.

do you know of what i fathom?

how your gaze gave me strength?

how i became a better father,

because first you were our Sunlight's mother?

how long must i miss your kiss,

the opening of blouses,

to reveal my most treasured Haven,

a bosom for my head to rest in,

and my tongue to know bliss?

you became the ideal that you sought,

those words that upon me you spoke,

in the year of my greatest trial,

it was how you sought to ease my road.

i did not think it possible, for it to happen truly,

that our such strangeness 

could ever be so utterly overcome

and with your heart, in this life,

would i come to know again: resonance.

alhamdulillah, though my Rabb in this prose

i mention slightly late,

His place in my tale, and how it wove,

is truly in every place.

not least of all forgetting, how it is He fashioned

one like me, to miss one like her:

two bodies so foreign in origin,

now orbit one another

like two stars, each born in the other's arms.

أَعُوذُ بِٱللَّهِ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ ٱلرَّجِيمِ، بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ

there is no me without you, no dictionary without letters, no pen worth a penny, without its ink to share the meaning in its barrel. i never controlled the ocean or its waves, the ebbs and flows on its surface, that took so long to traverse the middlest of layers, just so they could meet your eyes again, even if images were things too often only our minds would conjure. 

take this to heart, and take this as the record: when ever i fathom or express, i am gladdest that you were the one He chose to make me long after, that you showed me what you did, show me still, in ways subtle and scarce for purposes only wise ones persist, the Beacon of a lifetime, ever worthy a flame to grace a torch with. 

perhaps some time, some way, some image of you, might reach these eyes again, journeys not so distant seeming, as if lifetimes spent reading could suffice to fill the silences i've oft greeted. sigh, stillness oh stillness, familiar friend cast-as-villain, thou art not an enemy, simply my mechanism of patience, bi ithniAllah surviving for long as breath is given.

returned

أَعُوذُ بِٱللَّهِ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ ٱلرَّجِيمِ، بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ

Alhamdulillah got back home after visiting extended family for a few weeks. 

Time off from work was quite welcome, a break from the daily grind to just breathe and not have anywhere to be. The other best part, just being with my Gift and our Sunlight. These two pieces of existence, carry so, so much meaning. 

One has my back to a degree that I would have only a fully resonant beacon could have, but it seems that there is a phase of muwadha and hubb in which the goal of resonance is achieved no matter the idea I had about the journey to get there, as multiple paths converging on the same end. I dunno if this is generalizable, if such a thing holds true in any such instance of two stark opposites meeting after conditions of decades worth of essentially ripening, like a fruit. I have only my own data point to go by, and alhamdulillah to the utmost that I have been able to live long enough to hold such a blessing in my chest. Years back I'd often speak of blessings being innumerable, though back then the absence of beloved and apartness colored every lens i ever had. I can now say with the completest of certainties, every shade of sorrow this soul has ever felt, stands filled. 

As for the other one, my Sunlight...what can be said in words? Place all of creation, all of wealth, all of everything on a side of the scale, and she means more than it. Her eyes...I swear by God, I have never anything in which I have wanted to linger on than them, it is more than reflection, it is...beauty, every ideal i have ever imagined given physical form. I think, with her, I am free. And she is free, within me, forever. Whether she knows it or not, in every time or place or dimension of physics known or unknown, ghaib or thaahir, she will always have wings. I think this is the least of my duas for her that could be made. Much of things I long to write for her, as memoirs, as lessons, as cautionary tales from ever staying in love with anything material (one might fall in love such things, but best to quickly leave it, so we can know the company of Allah, the First Who is worth knowing). InshaAllah I'll compose this post one day, entitled something like "For my Firstborn, my Sunlight". 

Alhamdulillah. However the trials of life have not ended, only changed shape. It isn't myself that I have much concern for anymore, it's most entirely for these beloved for whom I wish to be the safety net of their entire lives. That's a bit of a tall order, having barely been a random slave that tried never to deny what his Rabb showed him from years and years. But yet, I have an inkling. That my Rabb, Who has never parted from me all this time, would extend His company to them, never leaving them either. I have no guarantees, even writing this as they spend a few more weeks with family. Regardless where the future shapes, they are embedded within me forever, touched my life as I touched theirs. And that is a bliss worth chasing for Eternity. 

~~~~~

how goes my Moon and her light, how fare their journeys of this life? things unknown, pondered always, never kept alone.