My Friend, My Other Self

Yemeni mp

Ahmed Saif Hashed

My friend and colleague, Mohammed Qasim from Radfan, lived a love story that mirrored mine with Haifa in more than one way. Often, I felt him burning in the quiet torment of patience, enduring the agony of unfulfilled love alone, in solitude. Mohammed bestowed upon silence a dignity and a majesty, as he prayed in the valley of fire and burned, consumed by the flames of his longing love.

How many times I told myself that the love Mohammed bore for the one he loved was enough to be shared among all the women of the earth without ever diminishing. How then could they call such a love incomplete, when it was love in its entirety? Blessed is the one you loved, my friend. Your love was vast, immense indeed. I could feel the blaze within you, the inferno that scorched your soul.

Your patience was no less than that of a prophet. Your endurance along the paths of suffering was never begrudging, never bound by conditions. Your devotion and your prayers were offered solely for the sake of your beloved, without hope of reward and without expectation of recompense in another life.

Silent love, shy and suppressed within us, my friend, is a love of rare chastity, truth, and selflessness. It is a sacrifice borne entirely by one, without the sharing of two. A hardship carried whole and undivided. A love incomplete in halves, yet profound for those who know its suffering and the patience of the one who endures it.

Our love, my friend, was immense and paid for with grave sacrifice. In it we suffered torment that reached the gates of hell. We lived this love and drowned in it to the deepest depths, sailing its seas to the farthest limits of bewilderment and dissolution. Yet we also reclaimed ourselves anew, with greater presence, being, and renewal.

I used to hear our closest friends as they chewed qat and traded jokes and barbed remarks about you and the one you loved. I kept all of that from you because I knew your nature and how devastating you could be to them and to yourself. At the same time I decided to guard the secrecy of my story from everyone. I lived my affair and its bleeding in silence and stricter concealment. At times I felt that being exposed would be like summoning a death sentence for my future, forcing me to abandon college and leave it forever.

I suppressed my sighs and the pains of my torment from everyone and revealed my secret only in moments of lonely wandering, when my reason slipped in sleep after careful restraint and tight secrecy. Silent love, my friend, is nobler, purer, and holier. It blazes within us, and we hide it from prying eyes, confining it in consciousness and, as much as we can, in the unconscious.

Our love, my friend, is like volcanoes glowing beneath the earth’s crust. They melt the bedrock within, even if layers of snow and mountains of ice accumulate on the surface. We stifle our confessions and feelings deep inside, pretending all is well. This, my friend, is something only great souls like us do.

Even if this love is maimed, crucified, and tormented, it took root in us to the point of merging with our awareness, feeling, and memory. It is a love we endured and kept beneath our ribs like a fire that scorches us from within like hell. It is the failure in which we excelled. We perceived what cannot be fully perceived, and we compensated for it with success in other fields, driven by a will and determination not possessed by many whose love was complete.

This love, my friend, though it brought us much torment, also inspired us to confront challenges, to discover ourselves, and to carve paths toward other triumphs. You became a doctor, a professor in the academy, while I forged a different road. We did not surrender to death, nor spend the rest of our lives lamenting and mourning spilled milk, the love that never reached its fullness. Instead, with doubled will, we broke free from the circle of failure and crossed into the future despite the obstacles, the restraints, and the heavy darkness.

We are, my friend, like the man crippled by war who lost both legs, yet wrestled with his affliction and triumphed over it. He achieved in spite of disability what he had never achieved in health, even surpassing what many of his sound and able peers could not. Success, my friend, is to turn our weaknesses into strength, and our incompleteness into a striving toward wholeness.

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Our love grew greater, my friend, when we came to love Yemen. And if the tragedy of one-sided love were to repeat itself, it would be enough that we gave such a vast measure of love, love reached only by those who deny themselves, who know sacrifice and redemption, and who pay no heed to those who mock us with the charge of incompleteness.

We are great, my friend, because we love with chastity, without selfishness to taint it, without blame cast upon the other. We strive to shower the beloved with abundance of love, without condition or demand for return, whether little or much, even if that beloved remains unaware of it, untouched by it, indifferent to it. It is giving without limits, without expectation.

We suffer in its furnace. We burn and sear in its flames, without confessing to the one we love the agony we endure at length, alone, with patience and endurance, suppressing it with an even deeper pain. We tell no soul, we utter not a word of this torment’s grip upon us.

We search for a thousand excuses for the beloved so they may never feel hurt, not even by the brushstroke of an artist. We guard ourselves lest the beloved perceive reproach or blame, and we take the burden upon our own shoulders for whatever came to pass. We do not let regret or questioning reach the one we love.

This is a love too great to be touched by folly, adolescence, selfishness, or gain. It is the love of the great, rising above all pettiness, a love vast and multiplied even if we call it incomplete, even if others accuse it of lacking. It is the kind of love for which one would gladly become a martyr.

Incomplete love is a guide and a path toward perfection. The martyr is the one through whom others see love fulfilled. People would not know light if there were no darkness. Thus the martyr deserves the name, for in sacrificing himself to such love, he fulfills the will of God even at love’s expense.

We loved Yemen until we drowned in her love, and the one who drowns is a martyr. And drowning in love is the most worthy of martyrdom and honor. Perhaps Yemen is weary, perhaps deceived, perhaps ensnared in what she never wished. Perhaps ignorance is the culprit, not she. And for her, we seek a thousand excuses.

So too with our people. We loved them and never betrayed or corrupted them, never abandoned their rights, never sold them for profit. We did not fall into the mire of dependency, nor chase the trivialities that manufacture false stars. And even if our people betrayed us once, or a thousand times, we will never curse them, nor stain their page. Instead, we say that our true enemy is ignorance and nothing else.

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