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"Death is what we all must meet at the end of our journey.
Therefore I have already died.
Kaveh, you know ─ as your last sigh you've already breathed ─ but I do not know. I am still here, alive, inert, waiting for the day that Death will appear to me ─ the day the pain will disappear from me ─ then, I will see you."
Kaveh, how much time has passed, if passed has it at all? I feel trapped, caged in this immovable infinity. The light warms me, and the darkness cools me, yet, if I look elsewhere, out of the window ─ the sun no longer rises in the sky, nor does the moon lowers to the horizon ─ I don't understand, but at the same time I understand well.
It is in this terrible immensity that I lose myself, find myself again, then stray away and then return, hot and cold, dark and light, my hands reach out in futile attempts to grasp at us, our understandings and our mistakes, our laughter and our cries ─ the things that made us lovers, devoted to each other by command of the soul, outside and part of our wishes.
It is empty, then it is full ─ there‘s only one thing now ─ it’s the rain, distant and sad, it falls from the ashen clouds with a pain similar to the final heartbeat ─ yours, perhaps? ─ drop by drop, drop by drop, slowly, against the windows of our home, now bare of our presence.
I miss those moments spent together, side by side, touch on touch, flesh against flesh, delicate and rough, your sighs a melody that accompanied me along the path to heaven, and Kaveh, if I ever dreamed of a blessed heaven, it was only thanks to your love.
Memories of us appear and disappear, fights sometimes unfair, screams sometimes empty, yet only your lights reveal themselves clearly inside my soul ─ and I cry, as the clouds rip under the starry sky, they moan, torn by their own flashes of light, fast and piercing. What would I do to see them lit again with that familiar warmth that only you have ever gave me, comforting and tender ─ even for one last sight, close yet far, mixed until the day memory will finally deceive me once for all.
Your touch against my praying skin, beloved to me, as I feast below your divinity ─ on my knees and with my palms open to you ─ merely mortal and dirty under your sacred gaze. This is who you were to me, Kaveh, a goddess of purity, for you have sacred me with your being alone. Keep gazing at me, keep embracing me, keep kissing me, and neither the heavens will take us apart.
But now ─ I am still, my hands cold and trembling that search for your warmth, my eyes dull that see you next to me, my lips eager for a touch now unknown, I can feel it, and the sad pluvium delights it, Time, the punisher of my sins.
How have I sinned? What have I not done that you willed ─ and what does Time know of my devotion and my love, eternally meant for you? How can it measure them, if no one else I have ever loved, if no one else I have ever prayed? Time, I speak to you, now, what makes you deprive me of the deity that illuminated my soul and warmed my body? What is the reason of your cruelty ─ you took him away from me ─ if not depraved vengeance, the fruit of your impotence against the infinite human soul?
Speak to me, answer me now, Time, you who have the knowledge that we humans can only theorize, how life takes shape and death destroys it with your mere vow ─ is our love so superior to your will? Is that why there are the joyous and the suffering? The greedy and the satiated? The judges and the condemned? Is that why you shred eyes from their eyes, arms from their arms, lips from their lips, cruel, careless of their fate meant together?
How do you feel knowing that our souls ─ so stained they are, yet so eternal ─ go beyond the beginning and the ending that you rule? That your every shred will never touch our cores, because beyond we were, are and will be.
How does it feel to watch me, trapped in this inert body, sitting and waiting for the day you will let mortality take me? What is it that satisfies you ─ my pain? My immobility? My memories blurring day after day? Are you satisfied with chewing and devouring them, while I forget, forget and forget us, Kaveh.
That name echoes ─ Kaveh, you are my only certainty, my only religion. My only pray and my only will.
How ethereal were you, Kaveh, with your golden hair, soft and long, and your ruby eyes, happy when they met my aquamarines ─ but why can‘t I remember nothing else of the face I revered for so long? Why can‘t I no longer place every single scar on your flesh, nor your every freckle on your face?
Why can't I remember the touch of your fingers, or the kiss of your lips? Time, why do you keep stealing what makes me faithful?
Even so, there is one thing you have no right to judge ─ it's the one thing I promised. I promised to always be faithful, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health. It is my soul to swear, what you can't touch, what you can't get close to.
And that's what I'll keep doing, with my soul still healthy and with my body degent. Time, you do not progress, rain, you do not stop soaking me, yet my prayers deteriorate, they meddle in my body, one image after another, indecipherable ─ how was your smile, Kaveh? How were your eyes like?
In this anguish I can only wait to reach you, if Time will permit me. I ask nothing more, oh, Time, to make these days and nights pass faster ─ let the rain stop lamenting, let the sun reach the sky, and let the moon rest on the horizon, Time, hear me, and let me embrace the Kaveh of my memories, the only deity I will ever bow down to.
The deity I consacred my soul with, united by two golden and mortal rings around our fingers.
Divine, yet mortal, now he rests cold and limp under the white marble engraved with a name ─ his, Kaveh, and two dates: one of the first breath and the other of the last.
Time, have mercy on me, a dead man, enslaved in your cruel infinity, victim of your pleasures.
Leave this life behind me ─ too distant from Kaveh, my only knowledge and will, I don't want it. Let me return to where I come from, so that I may be reborn in the light that is Kaveh.
And you, Kaveh, who blessed my days and graced my soul, on so for decades, bright, distant memories of a distant time. Your precious possessions and my faded memories are everything that remain of you now, in this world. And I'll always hold them dearly until the inevitable Time catches up with me too ─ but when will it happen? How long will I have to wait? I wait, I wait and I wait ─ I am here, I cannot stand it anymore ─ this torment has stripped me of every prayer, of every blessing that only you could grant me with your gold and rubies that once shone for me, and your rosy lips which invoked my desires.
I still remember, and I still forget, my body is too sick to bear this slow atrocity. It devours me, I don't deny it, and watching my memories fade, impassively still, scratches my soul like an imperceptible thunder that pierces me. Only the last vow remains to carry me forward into the unknown, declared the day of our earthly union.
Till death do us part, we promised each other ─ now I'm left alone, in these once familiar walls, with my grey lashes wet of your mourning.
Death, if you hear me, I beg you to tear my heartbeats and my breaths, violate me, if so I can be baptized again by the man who had once purified my soul, and carry on our eternal sacrament.
The rain falls, slow and painful, and so I live ─ deprived of the genesis of my adulation, nonetheless the only reason I continue to breathe every single day. It is the hope that I will be reunited with you, Kaveh, and when that day comes ─ will you be there to welcome me into your light?