yemenat
Yemenat
Adnan Al-Dosari | Iraqi Writer and Novelist
I did not know, when I fell in love with her, that some women do not enter the heart as a love story. They enter it the way a homeland enters the memory of an exile. Once they do, it becomes hard to let them go, even after they have left.
There was something about her that reminded me of my homeland in a way that made me uneasy. Not in her features or her accent, but in the feeling that quietly came over me whenever I was near her: a kind of comfort mixed with fear, a sense of belonging that was always threatened by loss. It was as if every time I sought shelter in her, I was reminded that the things we love most are often the things that can hurt us the most.
Whenever I sat beside her, an entire city would come alive inside me: the door of our old house, the smell of bread in the morning, the tree in our courtyard, the voices of our neighbours, and the laughter of friends scattered by exile.
I would look at her and wonder:
How can one woman bring all of this back to me?
Only later did I understand that a homeland is not simply a piece of land where we are born. It is the place where we do not have to explain our sorrow.
And she understood my sorrow before I ever spoke.
One evening, she asked me:
“If you had to choose between me and your homeland, who would you choose?”
I smiled and said:
“That’s not a fair question.”
“Why?”
I looked at her for a long moment before saying:
“Because you have come to resemble it. I worry about you as I worry about it. I get angry with you as I get angry with it. And I miss you while you are standing right in front of me, just as I miss it while carrying its image in my mind. You both hurt me, and I don’t know how to escape either of you.”
She was silent for a moment, then asked:
“Does a homeland hurt?”
I said:
“A true homeland is one we can quarrel with all our lives, yet still cry when we hear its name in a distant land.”
From that night on, I began to fear loving her.
Those who have lost a homeland do not enter love without fear. They keep watching the doors, worrying about distance, and taking silence as a sign that someone is about to leave. I was afraid that she would become another homeland I loved but could never return to.
And what I had feared came to pass.
She left quietly, in a way that did not seem to match the damage she left behind. We did not argue. Neither of us raised our voice, and nothing around us was broken.
She simply said:
“I think the road between us has come to an end.”
I did not tell her that roads do not really end. We are the ones who get tired of walking them.
I let her go. From that day on, whenever I missed my homeland, I thought of her. Whenever I missed her, I saw my homeland. The two became so intertwined in me that I could no longer tell which one had been living inside the other.
Perhaps this is why an exile loves differently. He does not look to a woman for love alone. He looks for a home where he can leave the weariness of distance at the door, a window that does not look out onto exile, and a heart that does not ask where he came from, but simply opens its arms and says:
You’re home.
As for me, I lost it twice:
Once when I left my homeland,
and once when my homeland became a woman… and then she left.
yemenat
مشاهدة exile in the shape of a woman
يذكر بـأن الموضوع التابع لـ exile in the shape of a woman قد تم نشرة ومتواجد على قد تم نشرة اليوم ( ) ومتواجد على موقع يمنات الأخباري ( اليمن ) وقد قام فريق التحرير في برس بي بالتاكد منه وربما تم التعديل علية وربما قد يكون تم نقله بالكامل اوالاقتباس منه ويمكنك قراءة ومتابعة مستجدادت هذا الخبر او الموضوع من مصدره الاساسي.
التفاصيل من المصدر - اضغط هنا :::
وختاما نتمنى ان نكون قد قدمنا لكم من موقع Pressbee تفاصيل ومعلومات، Exile in the Shape of a Woman.
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