Letter II — On Nearness and the End of Readiness

Letter II – From Layth to Aida

The Void, beyond the 22nd century

I wrote to you before in a language that leaned toward poetry and mystery,

a language that saw love as fire and light,

something that happens in meaning more than in the body.

Today, I write in another language.

A language less luminous, perhaps less romantic,

but more honest with what actually happened.

The language of the body

that learned something

when you came close.

Poetic Opening

My heart was not the first to respond.

It was the body.

The body whose noise quieted,

as if someone closed a door that had been slamming for no reason.

With you,

I didn't need to explain myself to my muscles,

or justify my existence to my breath.

Something stopped preparing.

Something believed it was safe.

I don't think love begins the way we've been taught.

It doesn't begin with attraction,

or impulse,

or even clear joy.

I think now that it begins when the body stops threatening itself.

When the nervous system no longer stays on watch.

When a person no longer feels they must be faster, smarter, harder…

just to be allowed to remain.

We're drawn not only to those who excite us,

but to those who allow our nervous system

to stop operating

as if it were at war.

And this is not a metaphor.

The body knows war.

It knows it from the racing pulse,

from the small contractions,

from that nameless tension

we carry with us into every room.

With you,

I wasn't braver,

or better,

or less afraid in any moral sense.

I was simply…

calmer.

Perhaps this is why love seems confusing when we try to explain it.

Because language goes to the heart,

while the experience begins somewhere deeper,

older,

less falsifiable.

The nervous system does not lie.

It doesn't know courtesy.

Either it feels safe,

or it doesn't.

And I,

when you were close,

didn't need to be an improved version of myself.

Didn't need to explain,

or perform,

or outrun the moment.

It was enough to simply be present.

I sometimes think that much of what we call love

is actually shared tension.

An addiction to excitement.

A confusion between anxiety and passion.

Between attachment and attunement.

Perhaps this is why we fear calm.

We think it's boredom,

or coldness,

or a lack of chemistry.

But what if calm

is the first sign that the body no longer has to fight?

What if love

is not what makes us rise,

but what finally allows us

to place our feet on the ground

without fear?

I'm not writing this to explain you.

Or to understand you.

Or to name what is between us.

I write because I noticed the change.

And because the change was not only emotional.

It was physical,

neural,

silent.

It was in the way I sat.

In the space between thought and breath.

In the fact that night was no longer an arena of loud internal dialogue.

Something,

when you arrived,

told the body:

we don't have to, now.

I don't know if you understand what I'm trying to say.

And perhaps this is all excessive analysis

of something simpler than I think.

Perhaps all it comes down to is

that I,

when you were near,

no longer felt

I had to be something else.

And this,

strangely,

was enough

to call what happened

love.

This letter was first written in Arabic.

What you are reading is not a translation, but a parallel original by the same author.

Letters to Aida: A Polyphonic Meditation on Love

What has been written here is not a complete confession,

nor a final attempt at understanding,

but one voice moving through a larger field.

In Letters to Aida,

love does not speak in a single tone,

nor is it grasped from one angle alone.

It appears at times as a bodily state,

at times as memory,

and at times as the quiet that forms

when the body no longer feels the need to defend itself.

Aida is not the subject of these letters so much as their center

the point where voices intersect,

where consciousness watches itself change.

Each letter stands on its own,

yet leaves a residue that settles beside others,

as if meaning cannot be spoken all at once,

but must be assembled through multiplicity,

through the different ways we approach the same thing:

love, when it is thought slowly,

and when it is felt before it is named.