The wind in the banana plantages was of halluzinatory sweetness.
She was there. She was far away. She was a flicker of that ritualised remembrance the eye watching her used to encounter on evenings like this.
The eye drilling deep into the breeze forced it to behold its vision. It pierced the horizon, and from the mast of a ship caught in the stillness of an ebb in the flow of time, a sea gull sang the song of a nightingale.
And now she half-danced, half-fled to the seashore. Her body was a cat in the dunes. O those tides of hers! Those lithe screams in her eyes when she began to feel the nearness of a dream she'd choose to rear!
Two bodies entangled in softness, unaware of her silent presence, defied the harshness of the sand. They carved out for themselves an exile in the waves where, like a floating carpet, their perfect loneliness would carry them to continents that belonged not to them but to others and, yet, were inhabited by them alone.
She watched their uninhibited motion, the man's hand resting on the woman's hair and her yielding to the aquamarine longing she unleashed. Their passion was dreamlorn, nearly unfelt. They were silhouettes, and their beautiful souls halted in the outskirts of the known world were puppets in a shadow play.
She wished with all her force for them to exist. She willed their tenderness. She willed their world upon her. Underneath her veil, she held a pink between her teeth.
A mighty sun threw off its load into the sea.
An Eastern moon adorned the sky with her treasures.
Her heart lay open now.
Layer by layer she bared her essence. The farther she let herself be carried away from reality, the plainer, the more stark it became. She bore it.
Anxious to embrace the lovers' loneliness without deserting her own, she was present neither in the man nor in the woman. Yet, though she wished to, she would not cease nor would they nor would love nor the eye that beholds it, in itself and in its negation, the eye beholding them all.
Soft were the caresses of the sand, the caresses of the ocean's bluish-silvery lights, the caresses of the breeze playing on her drifting mind, the caresses of time.
Wistful was the eye that watched her who believed herself to be alone in the ritual of wistful observation of those who believed in their loneliness. Illusion by illusion revealed itself, and she who believed herself to be wise descended into ignorance which she resisted no longer and ascended to wisdom when she understood that she knew nothing.
Life, like the wind in the dunes, lived in her and spoke of love in the language of lostness (true or imaginary, fragmented or whole). Wailing and laughing she listened to its voice: "Love," it repeated, "like yourself, is neither sought nor found. Its is, for it is not."
And so is the wind, its voice and its listener and the eye that beholds itself hidden in another.
Such fine poetic prose, Mahdi; truly compelling and captivating in scope of imagination and inspiration. Thank you for sharing this gift. Love and peace,
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