The Inevitable Parting
Echoes of Love Lost
From the soft harmony of the nightingale's songs to the loud noises of the Monday morning traffic; that was the transformation of my village's serenity to the university life hurricane. Every rooftop and back alley on campus was linked to someone and each moment was rich with anticipation and possibility. Nevertheless, among many unknown faces and the commotion, there was one, who stood out among all the noise – Shakeela.
It did not matter when exactly our ways met in the university hallways, I was under her spell. She was a Sun like no other. A bright smile and this natural charisma that would flood even the darkest corners of my world. Whether it was that playful glance we traded or those awkward smiles we gave each other, something within me told me that I already felt a connection with this girl – a connection that would be full of blossoms someday soon.
"Sorry, may I sit here?" I apologetically asked while pointing at the empty chair beside her, waiting for her to answer me.
Shakeela tore her eyes away from her book and disclosed a smile on her lips as she became literally engrossed. "Not even fantasies…" she replied with a comforting smile of hers. "Please, have a seat."
Through a series of engaging facial expressions accompanied by Shakeela's humble tone of voice, I was immediately captivated by her carefree disposition and boundless joie de vivre. It did not take us long to become fellow mates, an acquaintance that happens to be rare but can be found in the confines of a pilot training room. A room where you begin to share stories and laugh like you are old friends who have known each other for years.
However, our relationship was going deeper, and clouds of anticipation that were hanging over both of us all the time was increasing likewise. Shakeela's drawback was that her family belonged to the world of wealth and affluence, and they, together with our relationship, did not attract people with good views but rather, people who thought badly of us.
"I just wish things were better," Shakeela said one evening while looking at the stars with me as our hands entwined, almost afraid of the inevitable breakup.
"True!," I replied quietly, my heart swelled with the mute agony of the embarked-on-unvoiced. "Indeed, whatever the future has in store, will always have me at your side."
The mumbling rumors and whispers that were slowly becoming clearer and louder started eating into our phalanx and enhancing the gap between us. However, the love that we have for each other kept on growing and that has more ties between us than we could have ever imagined.
With the final days of our undergraduate experience in view, I couldn’t help but feel like terrible truth comes tight around my feet. A curl of the green blurred at every step, until, finally, we were on the opposite sides of a road as wide as the Keelung River, desperately inching our way toward each other, separated by an impassable ravine.
In addition, fate scratched our souls on that very day before our graduation. What emerged before our eyes as we stayed outside the university gates to part away for what felt like forever was a father hurrying out of a crowd with his characteristic and strict face.
"Oh, no!" Shakeela said, as the sound of the crowd drowned her rare mutter, “I rebel with my family.” "I cannot bend the world to me".
Through her eyes, I find myself facing a precipice, the end of our journey, and her words are the inevitable dagger that makes me weigh whether to keep pushing or let myself fall. And I was there, alone and friendless, overwhelmed by a wave of deep sadness, as if the world's very fabric had melted under me, leaving behind a huge void that I could not escape.
"In the absence of apparent reason, is why my heart became yours?" I longed to shout, to quake her, and beg for answers that I knew I would never obtain. Yet, while I gazed into Shakeela's desperate eyes, I started to grasp the reality that the situation made us, both, victims. We were simply a part of the play that we were not involved in.
Needless to say from that moment on my feelings towards Shakeela, namely love, changed over some time into sadness and grief that made me cry bitter tears. I just saw her fetching her handbag and walking away from the crowd with no backward glance. It was exactly then that I became certain about the fact that our love, genuine and firm as it was, could not do more than help us widen the road that society had resolutely closed for us.
In the middle of the crowd I was by myself, where the blackness of loneliness gradually came upon my body of dormant iron with the ghost of Shakeela's memory trailing me all the way through. The only thing that I defend, is to never forget her. Though our time together is finite, her impact and blessings will forever overshadow the supposed adversary; therefore, love proves to be the sole powerful healer.
I exerted all the effort to be as brave as I used to be, make peace with life's progress, and then move on without her presence. But still, I saw it as if she was still there just like a fast-growing morning mist of an old dream. Tirelessly, happiness glowed at every intersection, tender lips spilled the beauty of the world over, the light of a street lamp nodded almost with the breath, the quiet of leaves whispering was a gentle breeze - and her face was everywhere.
That was something that I had never encountered before; it was what I felt like when I sacrificed at least a part of myself – I would be nothing but a piece of it in addition to a part of me; thus, it was tangible to me in that it was the very fabric I had been woven in, and thus a part of me that I could not understand to the core.
Even though I let all my heart's hurting slide into depression and pride, a tiny fragment of that everlasting pain makes me humble and shouts that that love is no longer there.
With time, when the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months, I (came to realize) that I was slowly submerged in a tidal wave of misery and remorse until it felt like I was losing the battle against the Atlantic to stay afloat. All my efforts were in vain as I continued to feel the same way, that she was somewhere, merely outside my reach. I could see the very moment I would run into her again.
However, with the passage of time and all traces of the past, Shakeela becoming a mere memory, I came to realize that there might have been nothing else about it. But what mattered is that we had created something from nothing, a long shot of something we had envisaged, forged by the element of time.
And so I stepped forward, dedicated to finding a unique way of relocating in a world that seemed like an enemy of two of us being together. In my heart, pain that will never go away, but I managed to keep the fact that somewhere there is Shakeela, living her own life just as I was living mine.
And although it was unlikely that our paths would ever intersect again, nevertheless I would have this girl lodged into my memory, a somewhat melancholic memory of a love that was not fated.
Nasrullah Jalbani 2024
