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I was studying neurology that cold October day, sipping a cup of hot chocolate as I looked through a particularly nasty case of brain decay. The details escape me now, like they escaped me then. So I decided to go and meet the old man in room number 426 to see for myself.
"So what, if you're not a poet?" N was speaking to the glass window in his room as I entered. "Aah, look Zahra, we have a visitor!" He told the empty room. 𝘏𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘶𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘤𝘬. I smiled, introduced myself and sat down in a chair. He told me his wife was complaining that she wasn't a poet. It amused him. Seventy years old, but if there was one thing he couldn't forget, N said, it was her face at their wedding. He'd forget what he ate for breakfast, perhaps even his own name, but if you asked him the tiniest details about the one he had spent his life with, he'd know. "Zahra"; the word bloomed flowers in his heart.
"You know how these young people go around saying love is blind? It's true, I guess, one of the nurses here called me blind because I could see Zahra and she couldn't." N laughed. "But they don't know, Zahra's right here." He points to his heart. "She spills poetry in my heart, filling my words with colour and growing a garden. She hasn't died, because if she had, I would've too."
"But the real you has died with her, grandpa N." I wanted to say. "All that is left here is a lie, waiting to become an answered du'a." Is it like that, "death"? I still wonder sometimes, that they take a piece of you away from yourself, with which you can unite only after death? Is the soul an entity so complex, that separation scorches it to the extremes of memory loss? Allahu 'Alam. Grandpa N believed all the truths in the world, and some more, to keep his already unwound mind in a state of sanity. And I thought, what really is love after all?
