I once loved a man who broke my heart . I loved him because I saw his soul. Sensitive, loving , gentle... he was a Kurd. His mother, an Arab. The most handsome man I ever saw, the only time I fell in love at first sight. I was so embarrassed, I took a four hour detour after getting lost trying not to cross his path again, so he would not see blushing, hopelessly besotted me.
He caught me the same night. Sitting in front of his door, as I walked by, no one in sight, so I said hello, and he invited me in and I followed. We drank tea and talked in the yard til it got very very late and I could not stand the cold any longer. He said, there is a room upstairs where I can stay because I was frightened to go home in the night.
What followed was the most ravishing and the most heartbreaking, painful love story of my life.
What we shared were our wounded souls. Once while we sat in a garden full of pomegranate trees, with vines growing on the roof above our terrace, he started telling me of his grandfather. Who used to make wine and had a garden. Then he died. Now nobody lives on that land, he said. He said, his grandfather went to Mekka, they read him the Quran and then he died. I kept thinking, he must have died from a shot to the head. And his land maybe disowned and taken away. Or flooded by water. Like the land around the Euphrates now, by Kurds trying to take new land from the Arabs.
I have never forgotten him. And til today I have a wound that never healed and just broke open again, looking at photos of the waters of the Tigris flooding the land of his ancestors.
And the Euphrates flooding the land of my new friends. Never a love story like this again. And yet, wounded souls.
And I am wary. My heart. Still bleeds.
