Islands of Fikr

In the hush after ruin, the heart falls to love.

I. The Language of Gaps

Who owns the past—our past?

Does the weight of silence burden you, too? We never truly lived in the clamor of voices; we learned to thrive in the nuance of whispers. We spoke the silence itself. See the kinship: listen and silent are built from the same letters, rearranged—proof that meaning is a kaleidoscope. A slight turn alters our sense of place, shifts the gravity of feeling. Emotions are notoriously slippery; words, those blunt instruments, cannot honor them without harm. Only silence—that vast, generous realm beyond our auditory edge—can cradle them with tenderness.

We huddled in fear, then crept toward possibility, seeking passage beyond the artificial boundaries erected by our own sound. Diction, rules, rhythm—these we used to weave an acoustic cocoon, a safehouse against the dark of the unknown. Without silence between notes, music would not exist; the gap is as essential as the instrument. The real world—the one that holds the past—lives in those gaps. When noise fades and memory clutters, the enduring quiet becomes the heir to what words could never name. Between the hurried syllables of a confession lie the unvoiced gifts of the heart, trembling and binding, the hush that makes us lovers.

II. Remnants of Warmth

Have the longings for that affinity—the closeness beneath a star-streaked sky—begun to thin? The space between our bodies once stayed warm with tenderness. Only a stubborn perseverance in togetherness could have taught us how to embrace what lay between. Again and again we stumbled into that glow, those tear-bright moments, asking the same question: would we stay with the yet to be, peering through our Moni—the retina—into the unending chasm of the soul?

Close your eyes with me. Be patient. Breathe slowly. Surrender to Mon—the heart—in reflection. When did we first meet, and how many eons have passed? Do you hear the heartbeat as I glide through memory in search of answers, or do the winds steal each wave before it reaches you, leaving you alone on the shore? Know this: once we bathe in Love, we may dry out of it, yet its presence lingers in the senses. Like unfulfilled wishes, it leaves us bereft and lucid. There is no transgression in returning to such yearnings again and again.

III. The Spared Ground

The language of my feelings is a kipuka—an island spared amid rivers of lava. When destruction surges, it sometimes hesitates. In that brief second thought, a patch survives: plants and bare, breathing soil in a scorched silence. My affections speak from that spared ground, blessed by the pause.

My psyche, too, burned with the searing grief of regret. You must feel those countless aches when you touch my heart with tenderness. To endure, I anchored myself in waiting—yes, in waiting—and shaped a kipuka from the memory of your fondness for my limping, spiritless soul. That is how I bore love then: by forgetting that no love grows without sustenance from truth and the effort to seek it. Grief, after all, is the midwife of love within our senses.

IV. Time’s Erosion

Entropy, faithful to its nature, separates us. Time never befriends us. Let us treasure what we are endowed with now. Let us wrap our arms around each other, make a curl of devotion, lean into each other’s shoulders, and meet again in the endless field of our shared becoming. Blessed are those who wander this landscape and reach a summit where two hearts breathe one rhythm.

Yesterday is as distant as last year. Four more seasons will turn; the patient will watch their procession—the sun and wind, the changing hue of leaves. Still, I sail the tides of time, eyes fixed on the harbor where my vessel once rested, recalling a life gone by. What once felt true no longer does. Aporia—the posture of seeking amid uncertainty—has lost its grace. Time’s abrasions change what was, furrowing the future we draw. Its mastery is erosion, drip by drip, of what the heart holds dear.

In a twilight hour I walked a shore, each breath sharp and frail. My body cried for attention while the waters lapped in and out, thoughtless and free—unaware that it is the Earth’s motion, not the sea’s might, that makes them dance. Beneath perception, truth rests—patient, unmoved. Life continues.

V. The Witness

A mound of soil in a meadow murmurs quiet stories of those who once wandered here and have since fallen into Silence. Flesh, bone, and breath—born of dust and water—have returned to the Earth’s womb. Attachments scattered. Futures imagined yielded to an unseen current guiding them toward the inevitable end. We are all travelers bound for the same destination. No one belongs to the island called Future for long; each becomes part of the eternal past.

A few pale slivers of yesterday slip between our fingers, drifting like moth wings into an unmarked reliquary. The rest sinks into forgetting’s dark water.

VI. The Keepsake

Later, we—or someone after us—lift the lid of the keepsake. A greeting of glare, the hush of a cathedral. Glass-like walls, treacheries of mirrors, a sighing bell. Light enters, bends, and leaves in pieces, without shape or story. A memento demands extraordinary effort to unearth; what remains are fragments of rubble. The story we hold is never the one that lived, but a mirage burnished by time’s funhouse—our private constellation, trembling in the silvered dark.

VII. The Endurance

So who owns the past? Perhaps no one does. Perhaps it is held—tenderly, wordlessly—by the silence that survives us.