A MAN'S SORROW CUTS DEEPER

In the hands of the rightful owner...

The days since she lost Can's ring felt like eternity. For all of her life, she valued that ring above everything else. It was the one thing she had left of him that reminded her of the love they once shared. The love that was gone now, but never forgotten...

She fell in love with Can as a girl of simple means. Though she always dreamed, she knew that dreams had a price. And she never dared to dream of reaching the highest of stars with Can by her side. A man of his background would never have loved someone like her. Yet that came to pass. He fell in love with her even before she got to admit to herself that she may have fallen for him. That scared her, for she never pursued him as one would puruse a man of love interest. She never showed him how much she cared. Her lips never told him how much she yearned for him. He fell in love with her all on his own...

When he proposed to her the first time around, she did not know how to describe how she felt. Where did his heart began and where did hers end? Where was the border of his soul, for his merged with hers? But she still held the secret that weighed deep on her mind. She declined his proposal, and watched his beautiful eyes cloud with the deepest of sorrows. She could not imagine how he must have felt, she could only feel the pain in her heart. And from that moment on something had broken between them, it created a shaddow of doubt on his trust...

When he proposed to her second time around, the joy they both felt could not be denied. She accepted that ring with all that she was. She never forgot the moonstone within it, and wondered in secret deep in her heart whatever had happened to it since the last time she saw it. So when he proposed to her, with the same moonstone ring, her heart flipped a thousand times right in her chest. To others, especially Hüma and Polen, it was a simpe ring. But to them it stood for everything they went through, everything they shared. And from that moment on she vowed to herself and to him that she would never take it off for as long as she'd live...

When Can took that ring, he was not aware what that might mean to Sanem. She thought she lost it, the only thing she had of Can. Though it gave him satisfaction, and amuzed him as well, he realized that he may have hurt her. And that made him think. Would the ring belong better in his hands or in hers? Did it matter to him more than it mattered to her? Why was it exactly that she carried it next to her heart? And those thoughts proved him right exactly when the bandana went missing. He knew she had taken it, for who else could? He would not admit to her he was looking for something, because that would mean admitting to the fact that he took the ring and he knew she would look for vengence. An eye for an eye. The payback had backfired, and he admitted he failed. In taking his ring back, he lost her bandana.

So he returned the ring, just as Sanem returned her scarf. Both the ring and the bandana returned to the hands of their rightful owners. How poetically more powerful it would have been if they just knew that they both returned what they had taken without knowing that what they held dearest to their heart was returned to them first?

With the ring back by her heart, Sanem walked toward the pier. She looked to the waters and looked to the stars. She thanked both Aremiz and the princess of the amber tears for having Can back in her life along with his ring. She shone with the light of his love from within. He saw that light, and it led him right to her heart. And Sanem hoped that there would still be time to hear his heartbeat right next to her own, for they again possessed that one thing they had left of each other...