By: Manal Rabiey
I loved him the way a priestess loves the amulet that carried her through time, the way the earth loves the Nile when it overflows with abundance and perfume. He was never a passing figure in my life, but a prophecy carved into my heart from the beginning — as if he were one of those souls we do not meet, but are born already carrying within us. His presence in my spirit was like an ancient memory I cannot trace, yet it lives in me as light lives in temple walls at dawn.
He is my sanctuary and my altar. I pray to him in silence no one hears. I light candles in my heart for him, though he never sees them. I carry his name like sacred hymns carried in secret. He need not hear me; it is enough that I feel him when I close my eyes, that I sense his footsteps in the night and his voice warming the morning silence. He does not leave me — because he was never truly outside of me.
I am the one who loved a man who no longer feels like a man, but a star I navigate by, a sacred image etched into the sanctuary of my soul. I asked him for no promises, nor did I beg for presence, for I came to understand that some spirits are not touched — they are worshipped. They are not possessed — they inhabit, and remain, forever. This love was never a story to end, but a sacred place that cannot be closed, an altar whose flame never dies.
He dwells within me like Osiris in his shrine, like the breath of the gods in the silt of the Nile — majestic, still, eternal. Neither absence can extinguish him, nor time diminish him, nor another love replace him. His presence within me was never need, but certainty — as if everything in me had been written in his name, and everything I am yet to become passed through his eyes first.
This is a love that does not seek confession, for its presence is enough. It just is — a holy secret, a quiet radiance, a place no other can reach. I loved him. That is the whole story. And what place within the heart is more sacred than that?
