We are both; we are all bestowed with a fixed number of orange Moon in the sky. No one escapes from this allotment, and it ends abruptly, so it seems always!
Only for now! We both feel an impulse and are surprised! Soaked in a yearning: eager to gently hold the other’s hand or wrap an arm around the shoulder to walk each other home. One step at a time. As if we are toddlers, picking up something exciting from the ground while strolling with a guardian. We are redeeming each other instead. In that instant, time halts, a twisted route, cloaked in mysteries, begins – we both must travel it together. Neither of us is sure what to expect. Both are puzzled, breathless to interpret why we ended up at that space-time continuum! The shared journey begins about how life should go but not like anything we are prepared for. We take hesitant steps without any grand plan or the warmth of a quilt stitched with great hopes and dreams.
This adventure turns out to be life-long shared coasting along the shoreline. For an exceptionally lucky few, both collect pearls of shiny memories. Though it fades over time but remains fuel and nourishment for a meaningful life. Eventually, frailty appears and stymies everyday activities until it is interrupted when breath becomes air. One of the companions would run out of time. Life, as we know, would collapse into never-ending mourning in the resonance of relentless despair. The pain. The ache. The shock. Time does not halt in that storm, life seems frozen, and the screams for an agent to thaw it and churn the wheel again – somehow. For heaven’s sake! All the fissures in the earth bear witness of that pain.
The companion – at some point – reconstructs the route to continue. How could it be otherwise? It has been in the consciousness ever since the bonds of building a nest in each other’s soul begun. That is the foundation of a relationship. That the sudden end of one, however unexpected, is mere transience. This wisdom blankets a comfort of harmony with the inevitable experiences. And it softens further from the mercy of faint hope, unspoken, snuggled in the heart of believer like a thin spider thread. Optimism stretches for the mysterious, vast unseen universe and plants a seed: we meet again at the singularity! At the juxtapose the planetary laws are indistinguishable from one another. Space and time are no longer interrelated realities. They cease to have any independent meaning. In that dimension, lovers’ rendezvous last longer than what was only at crossroads during their shared journey on this blue planet. Finally, assigned terms – for them, for us – transition into another realm. “The conservation of energy” scientists named it such. Love, spirit, passionate wishes could never annihilate. They only morph into an endless loop.
Our HOME – is not a destination but a solace. Nestled in what lovers had always imagined as “Niyat” – an intention of hope. All from the desperation that maybe, only possibly, things would turn out favorably. The anchor becomes a skillful maneuver in the faith of awareness to stop the agony, the heartache, the bruises of living, and reluctantly let go of the anxiety of irreversible losses.
Exhausted, we kiss gently to reflect – only for momentarily, for now, all parting is “Eabir,” an extended sojourn, so we hope.
(**) Eabir – Arabic for Transient, passing, fleeting
(**) Niyat – Urdu for Intention