When Lovers’ Fates Collide

Yemeni mp 

Ahmed Saif Hashed

Most of my love stories have ended in disappointment. Yet one stands apart, a different kind of love that left me, the lover, defeated. It was the opposite of what I had grown accustomed to. In this story, perhaps I was the culprit. Perhaps I wronged her so deeply that I carved a cemetery into her mind, hollowing a dark cave where my restless ghosts ran wild. I caused her pain and sorrow, never by intent, yet grievously all the same.

She was bright and accomplished, chaste and pure, patient and discreet. Wise and loyal, serene as Buddha and rational as the sages of ancient China. She came from a delicate family and carried with her the balance of a keen mind and a soul brimming with transparency and beauty.

I am not alone in having loved and scourged myself in the purgatory of incomplete love. I am not the only one who sought his twin soul in the losing labyrinths of existence. Time and again, I have found myself entangled in equations of love that are, at best, unfair. Fate has long conspired to keep my loves unfinished, crippled by misfortune, by a will worn thin from repeated losses, by the enormity of one disappointment after another.

I am not the only one who has ceded his existential space to the void, only to have that void devour the place where the missing half should have been. Under its armored treads, my heart was torn apart. My love ended in searing loss, bitter memories, and a tattered remnant of a man mourning what was left of himself.

Just as my story with Haifa unfolded, so too did hers with me. Love took a path opposite to what we both had wished. I blamed our destinies for placing each of our hearts on distant orbits, far apart, never intersecting.

I was absent from her, lost in far-off wanderings, immersed in the wreckage of my ongoing, blind loves. Blind enough to cover my eyes with darkness, to seal my ears with red wax, and to scrawl across the walls of my heart, “Closed by order of the court.” When I finally learned of her love for me, I rebelled. I tried to help her and, in so doing, to heal my own shattered soul from the ruin of blind affection.

I was still haunted by Haifa’s absence, by the dull ache of her emptiness, by the disappointment that shadowed me wherever I turned. I did not grasp her love for me until the final months of my fourth year at the Faculty of Law, the year when a lover tries to redeem the time already lost, reaching for one last chance to seize what remains, a final plea for the reserved heart of a silent lover.

I tried to be sure of her love, lest I find myself deluded by a mirage. I laid out every possibility, determined not to repeat my disappointment. I tested every hypothesis that came to mind. I answered every question. And in the end, I found only one truth: it was love, hers and no other.

I do not know when her affection began, or when I became its object. I do not know when she first thought of us as “we.” I do not know how deeply she loved me. We never spoke of it. We were content with assent and acceptance, leaving the details to a future that departed from us, or that we ourselves abandoned.

All I did, on my side of this bond, resembled a kangaroo’s leap. Yet it landed me in a place surrounded by what was unknown and forbidding. I could not go on into a future I could not see, and I could not return to where I had come from. Two paths, forward or back, closed in on me. I found myself stranded on a rock, wedged in rough terrain that hemmed me in from every side.

We rush toward love even as fortune turns its back on us. We take refuge in those who offer no true shelter. We step forward, and jagged edges of disappointment rise before us, growing until they tower over us. Formidable obstacles drain our spirits long before we arrive. We wedge ourselves into a narrowing passage until it clamps shut around us. Barriers pile up in our faces. Misfortunes trip our weary feet and stumble our faltering steps. We bleed in the long waiting, yet the beloved does not come. We turn to ruins beneath our own heavy feet, unable to move ahead, unable to return, reduced at last to rubble and wreckage.

The vast expanse of the universe before us shrinks into a narrow alley choked with snares. Our grand dreams turn into nightmares that refuse to leave the scattered remnants of our souls. Our hopes fade into the wilderness, dissolving into illusion upon illusion, mirage upon mirage. What once held room for us yesterday now strangles us with heavy fists, crushing our gasping breaths as we search for our other half, or for the lost half of love that has slipped from us forever.

I tried to escape the trap I was wedged into, to fashion the possible out of my impossibility, pleading with it to yield for the sake of the one who loved me. I rebelled against the court’s verdict. I tried to carve windows of love and joy into the wall of my heart for her, yet I was met with bitter failure. I wounded her deeply without realizing how long she would bleed. Her disarming nobility, proud defiance, and dignity rose above her wound, her pain, and her heavy sorrow.

I tried to open the innermost chambers of my heart to her. I spread my carpets for her. I opened my doors and balconies. I called doves to my windows inked with longing. I tried to find a wide path for her chance within my heart. I did not pause. I did not ask for time or grace.

I offered her marriage, and she accepted. I explained my circumstances; she raised no objection and showed no resistance. We postponed the details until the darkening moon overtook us, and we never caught up. Between our beginning and my proposal lay only a narrow span of weeks. Then things changed. The gap between us grew and widened in silence and neglect, and I reproached myself. How hasty I was, a flood sweeping away my patience and carrying me to where I now stand.

The question struck me as regret overtook me: What possessed me to do what I did? Was it compensation for past failures and heartbreak? Was it my loss of chances? Was it my emptiness, my yearning for the one I had loved? Was it my belief that haste would catch her before it was too late, so I would not arrive after the hour and regret the loss? Was it trust, or the deception of the proverb, “The sooner, the better”? Or was it all of these at once?

I was like a man chasing a tiny ball of luck on a rainy day across slippery ground, only to slide down the slope. I was a fool, rushing toward a promised destination without thinking of the stumbles, the means of travel, or the distance from start to finish. I was a fool who put the cart before the horse and lashed the horse with the whip of haste. We lost our balance, everything overturned. My haste ended up dragged by the wheels of regret. I tried to repair the orbit of our opposing fates, but fate came as it willed, not as we desired.

I tried to give her in my heart the chances to make me love her, but certain failure overtook me. She sensed my coolness and hesitation growing. Like a cat, she moved softly, on the tips of her toes. She turned the key in the locked door of exit with such skill that you heard neither turning nor click. She opened the door lightly, no creak or echo, and slipped away like a breeze. She vanished far off into a sunset that does not return.

She swallowed her bleeding wound with patient silence and left without turning back. Instead of my helping her, she was the one who helped me out of what I was in. She lifted me from my confusion in which I was drowning. She saved me from my predicament, a deep pit where each attempt to climb out buried me deeper beneath falling earth, my head heavy with shame.

She spared me much embarrassment, embarrassment that felt like death. She left without a bag, without farewell. She never knocked on my door again. She never cast at me a word of blame, not even a passerby’s question. She left forever, while I remain seeking her pardon and forgiveness.

My love was not mine to command. It was never at the mercy of my will. Love in the grip of destiny is beyond our dominion. We cannot mend the paths of fates that run contrary.

How sorry I am, how deeply sorry, if ever I broke her heart. I have learned and discovered so much: that there is a flaw in the paths of love, in the chemistry of souls, in the fates of people, and perhaps in something greater still. All my apologies to you, kindest of souls.

* * *