By: Manal Rabiey
I am the woman who knows that within every man there is a shadow waiting for her, a half of her soul lost in the labyrinths of the cosmos, a half that resembles me in the unseen as water resembles its own spring. I am not searching for an ordinary man, but for the one who, when he touches my hand, opens in my heart an ancient Pharaonic river, and from my ribs rise the goddesses of love, fertility and fidelity, until the whole earth returns a garden overflowing with wheat, lotus, and dew. With him I become a celestial child learning the alphabet of light, discovering that my weakness is a crown and that I am every woman ever born upon this earth, and that with him I am reborn at every moment.
Within every woman there is only one man who, when he gazes into her eyes, restores her forgotten names, her voices in the myths, and turns her femininity into an answered prayer, her yearning for the primal clay into a river that becomes a sky. With him her secrets bloom as the lotus blooms at Ra’s sunrise, and from her heart emerges the most beautiful woman ever created, a woman like the earth washed by its first rain, its grains shining like stars.
Yet the meeting of these two halves is not promised to all; it is a destiny granted like a ray from the Eternal. Only a few are touched by it; the others learn to coexist, hiding beneath their faces the masks of life while their hearts travel silently toward the absent half, raising for him a Sufi prayer each morning and evening, so that souls may meet as they once met in the beginning, in a single sanctuary of unfading light and love, while hope remains a small flame lighting their paths.
