By: Manal Rabiey
I approached you as the Nile approaches its bank at dawn; brimming with water, desire, and warmth. I carried in my chest all the longing that had escaped from other hearts, and all the yearning they were too shy to confess. I stretched out my arms to you not as someone who begs, but as someone who knows that within an embrace lies deliverance, and within the warmth of bodies a moment of release from the loneliness of the universe. In the very moment the world shrank away from you, I widened myself for you, wanting you with every trace of honesty, warmth, and nostalgia inside me, praying the earth would open a gate of mercy between us.
I saw a coldness in your eyes, a coldness unlike winter but like houses gone dark after their people have left. And still I reached for you; I wanted to warm you with whatever warmth remained in my chest, to make my body a blanket for you when all others had fled. Yet you met this vastness with a wall of refusal, like a city closing its gates just before I arrived. I saw you trembling in your silence, yet you insisted on retreating, deceiving my heart with a smile as cold as a thread of air.
And still I did not regret. I still believe the embrace that never happened remains alive in the soul, and that the warmth you never felt became a hidden prayer guarding you at night. Every evening I lift my hands in supplication and place your name among the letters, as though completing my embrace of you through the sky. I still want you, but I have learned to hold you in silence when your door is closed, to finish my embrace with prayer rather than hands—for some embraces are destined to be planted in the spirit, not the body.
