A quote by Mahmoud Darwish

“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand, small, uncaring ways.”

“Never seek the wind in the field—it is useless to try and find what is gone.”

Oh! you understand that if I consent to live—to seem to forget you— it is to feed my pain —and so that this apparent forgetfulness can spring forth more horribly in tears, at some random moment, in the middle of this life, when you appear to me

love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.”

Something is fading, not the memory of him but the press of memory, the urgency of writing, the closeness of him. He is somewhere in the atmosphere, but also not.

We want whatever it is that can help us draw the absent shape, we look for more information, more data points, an ever-greater accumulation of stories and remembrances. But the quest is never finished, the one who went away never returns. Slowly the bank of stories is depleted. The memories evaporate.