17

As I remember those days, those circumstances, and that adieu, I tell myself that life has been wasted, and the heart has beaten endlessly without feeling and without anything tangible to crown it. Had Rabie stayed, would I have experienced those failures? Would I have wandered through this world in search of a substitute for my Rabie, my spring? But Rabie could not be replaced or renewed; he happens only once in a lifetime, and teen love occurs only once, and so does the heart’s spring and a dream for change. I believed in love at that time, in that past, and I believed in the revolution and in change. The dream was limitless and could have covered immeasurable spaces, forests, valleys, the wheat fields in my country, and mountains that rose to the limits of the sky. There were rain and thunder and storms that left behind winter lakes and created nests for birds.

Love fashioned a beautiful world and limitless horizons. The color of his eyes was the space where I would run, as if a gray mare carried me on its wings and never let me down. It filled me with a powerful energy: the energy to love, the energy to tolerate, the energy to dream, and the energy to forgive because I still dreamed about tomorrow. But now that tomorrow had arrived, it stood before me like a distorted dwarf—a torn, disfigured image, filled with dissonant words. I did not feel anymore. Now I planned, I analyzed, and I said, “Today we start digging and maintenance work.” We need to renew the entrance and the courtyard. Then the entrance of the house, the poppy trees, my mother’s cupboard, my uncle’s room, and the bookshelves and his pens. Then we will proceed to my grandmother’s room and the charcoal stove, then my paints, the paintings of my youth, and the memory of Rabie during that spring, that dear one. In the midst of all these things there is the photo of my uncle, the painting of the gray horse and its foal when we crossed the land of the lilies and a lake filled with the sky’s generous outpouring. Now we do not have a drop. We beg for water, but we do not drink.

Here I was, standing before the gray horse and its foal in a watercolor painting that was still in good condition. It had not been erased by time or history or my memory. Here was the photo of my uncle riding the gray mare and its foal running behind them. It was the picture of bravery that remained unfinished, but time would not erase it, and neither would my memory or the grass growing on the walls.