Book Fragments that touch your Heart

For those of us who like to read, do you ever come across words, sentences, fragments that move you to the core? That make you stop to ponder the beauty words and language can evoke? I know I have. It's a beautiful thing, to share what moves our hearts, and that's why I wanted to dedicate a thread to it here

Your silence. Your continuous closeness, yet remoteness, in whose various paths you defend yourself so well with sharp, alert intelligence.
Your life runs in locked compartments, one barred from the other, separated. Desperately you protect each insulating wall. Dear heart, does the real you exist within this maze of ramparts? Behind the fortresses erected in front of my face? In front of the world's face? In front of your own face? Do you exist in the world of these spheres that touch without overlapping? That accompany each other but never join? Do you exist in each lone world that runs strangely apart from the others?

He said to her: Dear love, St. Michael is my patron, my guardian angel. Did you know I was named after him, the archangel? I was told the Nile wouldn't flood unless Michael descended on his name day to the Land of Egypt and wept. One drop of his tears and fertile, red waves pour forth. Cracks of barren land fill with thirsty plants swaying joyfully in the soul.
When I was little, they used to make fatir cakes on my birthday, the day of St. Michael, leader of God's soldiers with his two-pointed sword. When I ate the oiled, glimmering cakes decorated with ancient Coptic inscriptions, I saw him - my angel, my guardian, my brother - attacking all the lies with his silvery armor and long lance, all the devils crowded in the dark.
He did not say any of this.

He did not say to her: Truth for me is the demolishing of ramparts, the outpouring and joining of life's waters into a sea with open horizon, where two lovers in a frail wooden bark float upon its frothing waves.

He did not say to her: What I want more than anything - for you, for us - is that you be free with me. Free from the need for self-justification. You, who have met with ghosts in your search through the night, must feel justified simply because you are loved. Love alone needs no further justification. It takes and gives without question. Dear heart, nothing explains or justifies you. Love for me is knowledge. Candor, a burning desire. I don't want to say I accept you. Why accept or not accept? I only want to say I love you, all of you, without condition, without reserve.

So I break the rules of the game. Of course. Life being a game, as is love. But I take the risk anyway. I put my heart, naked, trembling, stubborn in its faith, under the pangs of disclosure, without protection. What happens when the barriers and dams give way, when the imprisoned, anxious waters gush from the fenced compartments and collide carrying stony rubble?
Frightening? Yes.

The warmth of concealed darkness, of preserved secrets - I know these things. But I also know of bitterness and loneliness behind the ramparts. What happens exactly when the Self unveils its intimate disarray? When its incomprehensible and unjustifiable longings are laid bare? Yes, what happens when the drives of its frenzy and hidden demands are finally revealed?

In loving you I find myself. Here is how it is: my love is for knowledge, for total wakefulness in front of every sound, every quiver in the voice, every twitch of the eyelid. That is why I find myself when you are not with me.
A strange and extraordinary thing: the freedom of waves under pale clouds: you away from me. The doors are boulders, rolled tight before the opening.

This too he did not say: Between me and everything, an insurmountable barrier now stands. Alien sky, alien buildings, people making sense no more than muddled things. I am separated. At sunset, from across the Nile, the air pierces my chest bringing no solace, no joy. The sting of noon sun, the silence of streets at night, the inhaling of cool morning air - all this carries loss, as if a veil, transparent yet solid, could not be removed from the eyes, a veil wrapping the heart, freezing me.
I miss you.

- "Rama and the Dragon" by Edwar al-Kharrat