Dancing Beneath the Same Moon

I found it rather difficult to write this. There were too many thoughts wandering around inside me, all of them apparently convinced that tonight was an excellent time to make noise.

I don’t know why your writing touched me so much more deeply than I would like to admit. Several times I had to stop reading. Not because I didn’t understand what you meant.

Quite the opposite.

I stopped because I understood some things a little too well.

I wrote a sentence.

Deleted it.

Wrote it again.

Deleted it again.

Stared at the same line for a rather embarrassing amount of time.

Then, somewhere between the coffee going cold and my eyes becoming less useful than usual, I realized that I was writing while crying.

Which is not a particularly efficient way to write a review.

Perhaps tonight I am Kafka wearing a cat mask, writing to Milena.

Perhaps I am Piko, the little cat, sitting quietly in the corner pretending not to understand human suffering.

Perhaps I am Lupin, stealing things that do not belong to me; perhaps tonight I have stolen a few pages from your memories.

Or perhaps, inconveniently, I am simply myself. I think I prefer the last one.

Tonight, **Moonlight by Nadin Amizah** has been playing quietly beside me.

There is something almost unfair about reading Cahiers de Doleances with that song in the background.

The crescent moon in the song seems to ask a very simple question:

Will we still dance when morning comes?

And your book, in its own strange and beautiful way, seems to spend six chapters asking a similar question.

Will we still become who we hope to become when childhood disappears?

Will we still believe in our dreams when everyone else seems to be running faster?

Will we still love when loving becomes frightening?

Will we still hold someone’s hand when we finally discover that hands, like seasons, are not things we can keep forever?

Perhaps that is why the two works met so strangely well tonight.

One speaks through a melody.

The other speaks through memories.

And somehow both ended up sitting beside me at the same table.

Very rude of them, honestly.

I had only prepared coffee.

I remember smiling at the beginning of your story.

A baby arrives in the world.

Rain falls.

A name is given.

A life begins before the person who owns it has any idea what she is supposed to do with it.

There is something very tender about the way you introduced Nisa; not as someone who already knew what her life meant, but as someone who was still waiting to discover it.

You wrote about a girl growing up, about expectations, about dreams, about the strange burden of becoming a person.

And then you wrote something that stayed with me:

that perhaps there is at least one wonderful story hidden somewhere in every chapter of a human life.

I think you were right.

We are terribly impatient creatures.

We want the climax before we have finished the first chapter.

We want to know whether the person will stay before we even dare to say hello.

We want to know whether the dream will succeed before we are willing to embarrass ourselves by trying.

We want the ending before we have learned how to begin.

And perhaps that is one of the gentlest things I found in your writing:

you didn’t pretend to know.

You were seventeen or eighteen, and already you were writing about uncertainty with the honesty of someone who had discovered that growing up is mostly learning how little we know.

Then there was the part about dreams.

About watching other people speak so confidently about their futures while you wondered where yours had gone.

About feeling as though you had been asleep while everyone else was running.

I wanted, very briefly, to reach through the pages and tell that younger version of you:

You weren’t sleeping.

You were growing.

Those are not always the same thing.

Sometimes growth looks suspiciously like standing still.

Sometimes it looks like changing your mind twelve times before lunch.

Sometimes it looks like having no idea what you are doing.

And sometimes it looks like writing an entire book because you are trying to understand yourself.

I think that counts as movement.

Even if the feet are temporarily confused.

And then I arrived at Hades.

Oh.

Hades.

I almost smiled when I read that chapter.

The girl who knows someone’s smile before she knows his name.

The hallway.

The mosque.

The rain.

The orange basketball.

The imagined red apple.

The quiet hope that perhaps, somewhere in the mythology of ordinary life, someone might eventually find his way to her.

There is something wonderfully innocent about it.

And perhaps that is what makes it hurt.

You weren’t simply writing about falling for someone.

You were writing about the terrifying little miracle of allowing another person to become important to you.

And that is where Moonlight began to hurt me.

Because the song never promises that the dance will last.

It gives us two people beneath the moon, holding hands, learning how to dance even though neither of them knows how.

They don’t know what morning will bring.

They dance anyway.

And perhaps that is what love has always been.

Not certainty.

Participation.

We enter someone’s life without knowing how long the invitation will remain open.

We trust without being given a receipt.

We love without receiving a guarantee.

We make plans with people who are, like us, temporary creatures.

And somehow we still say,

let’s dance.

I think that is why your book felt strangely personal to me.

Because lately I have felt a little like a roller coaster beneath the moonlight.

One morning, I was genuinely happy.

A friend of mine was getting married, and watching someone I cared about step into a new chapter of life filled me with a kind of uncomplicated joy.

Then, somehow, the same day became something else.

I met an old friend.

Or perhaps I should say I met someone who looked like an old friend.

Something had changed.

Something I never imagined would happen had happened, and suddenly I was standing in front of a person whose history I knew, but whose present I no longer recognized.

There are losses that come with funerals.

And then there are quieter ones.

No coffin.

No flowers.

No formal goodbye.

Just a person slowly becoming someone you can no longer reach.

That kind of loss is particularly cruel.

Because the person is still alive.

Their face is still familiar.

Their name is still saved somewhere in your phone.

But the friendship you remember has quietly become a ghost.

And perhaps that was the hardest part of my day.

In the morning, someone was beginning a life with another person.

In the afternoon, I realized I had lost someone I once thought would remain part of mine.

And at night, I sat alone with my thoughts and discovered that apparently my heart had decided it wanted to cry.

It did not ask permission.

Hearts are terribly inconsiderate that way.

So I read your book again.

And I listened to Moonlight.

And suddenly the question in the song felt less like a question about romance.

It became a question about everything.

Will we still dance when morning comes?

Will we still believe in ourselves when the beautiful version of life disappears?

Will we still love people after discovering that they can change?

Will we still trust after losing someone?

Will we still make plans when we finally understand that nothing comes with a warranty?

I don’t know.

Perhaps nobody does.

That is the frightening part.

And perhaps also the beautiful part.

Perhaps that is the cruel little lesson of being alive.

We rarely get to know what something means while we are still inside it.

We understand a friendship after it has become distance.

We understand a person after we have stopped hearing from them.

We understand how much a moment mattered only after we can no longer return to it.

Maybe that is why we are always so desperate for certainty.

We want to know that someone will stay before we allow ourselves to love them.

We want to know that a friendship will survive before we give it our trust.

We want to know that a dream will work before we are brave enough to look foolish chasing it.

But life has never been particularly generous with guarantees.

It simply places something beautiful in our hands and quietly says,

“Here. Hold this for as long as you can.”

And perhaps that is all we can do.

Hold it.

Love it.

Be grateful for it.

And when the time comes that our hands can no longer keep it there, learn slowly, painfully to open them.

Not because it didn’t matter.

But because it did.

I think that is what I heard beneath your writing.

You were not merely complaining.

You were learning how to live.

Your Cahiers de Doleances is full of questions, but I don’t think questions are signs of weakness.

Sometimes questions are simply proof that someone is still awake.

You wrote about dreams.

About loneliness.

About friendship.

About love.

About becoming a writer.

About wanting someone to find you.

About wanting to find yourself.

And perhaps the most beautiful thing is that you didn’t solve everything.

You left some doors open.

Some stories unfinished.

Some apples still waiting to be thrown.

Some pages still blank.

That feels honest.

Because life rarely gives us the courtesy of a proper ending.

Sometimes a chapter simply stops.

Sometimes someone leaves before the sentence is finished.

Sometimes the person we love becomes a stranger.

Sometimes the dream changes its name.

Sometimes we wake up and realize we have been carrying a version of ourselves that no longer fits.

And yet,..

we turn the page.

So, Nea,..

I don’t know which mask I wore tonight.

Kafka’s, perhaps.

Or Piko’s.

Or Lupin’s.

Or maybe none of them.

Maybe I was simply a tired person sitting beneath the same moon, reading the complaints of another tired person who once sat beneath another moon, writing about the future as though she might someday understand it.

I don’t know whether you found your Hades.

I don’t know whether every dream you wrote about survived.

I don’t know whether the girl who wrote these pages became the woman she imagined.

But I know this:

the girl who wrote Cahiers de Doleances did something brave.

She left evidence that she had once hoped.

Once feared.

Once loved.

Once wondered.

Once dreamed.

And that is no small thing.

You once wrote that your torque might not be strong enough to keep you from falling, but that it never stopped turning.

Perhaps that is enough.

Perhaps we don’t need to be fearless.

Perhaps we only need to keep turning.

Keep walking.

Keep writing.

Keep loving carefully, even though carefully does not mean safely.

And when the sky begins to fall,

perhaps we dance.

Not because we know the dance will last.

But because, for a little while,

we are here.

Together.

Under the same moon.

So tonight, if you have a moment, listen to Moonlight.

And if those blue eyes of yours happen to become a little too heavy with tears, don’t worry.

Let them fall.

Perhaps they have simply been carrying too much.

And if I could be there, I would simply sit beside you quietly.

Maybe with another cup of that terrible black coffee.

Maybe with a cat between us, judging our life choices.

No advice.

No grand explanation.

Just two people beneath an enormous sky,

waiting for morning,

and perhaps,

when it finally comes,

learning how to dance again.

Until the next page,

Fafa^^