He was sitting alone at the far end of a graveyard in the last hour of the night, quietly weeping by a distant grave. He was holding a wooden staff in his right hand, just like the staff of Prophet Moses. He was weeping intensely, like Prophet Jacob mourning the loss of Yusuf — like Adam parted from Eve, burning with the ache of longing for his lost companion in the dark.
He felt as if he had buried his very soul in that grave.
In that heavy silence, memories of their tender days only deepened his pain. He breathed a deep sigh and writhed in pain like a wounded bird searching for home in the darkness.
He sat like a dethroned king, suddenly thrown down into the dust, stripped of his stolen glory and forgotten by the world.
There was a pain in his heart — a pain born of separation, the kind that stays for a lifetime, the kind for which there is no cure, no replacement, and no relief.
It was the grave of his beloved.
He leaned over it as though embracing her, crying like an old father holding the lifeless body of his young son. The tormenting question before him was: How would he survive this endless journey of grief now? How would he live after his whole world had been stolen?
The one who had given him strength to face the bitterness of life had now left him with nothing but silence and separation — a separation which no time could heal.
With a long, cold, deep sigh, he looked at his hands — the same hands that once nurtured his soft, delicate flower; a flower crushed beneath careless feet before blooming. Today, those very hands had returned her to the earth.
This grief was consuming him from inside. It felt as though he had dug his own grave with his own hands, as if he had already buried himself — only death remained to arrive.