Whisper

by Tal Bauer

“You’re like a part of me I didn’t know was missing. Part of my mind, or my soul. Like you have the thoughts I haven’t thought yet, feelings I haven’t felt yet, waiting for me. Inside you. You feel like a part of me I’ve been craving.”

“I know what it’s like to be hated for who you are. To have your life dictated by others, your choices made for you. To have that rage in your chest, all the time. That scream, that says you are more than this. The desire to prove everyone wrong.”

A thousand million stars in the sky would not be enough to count the ways I love you. Or grains of sand on the beach, even if you split every grain in half.

“The Quran says all souls were created in pairs. One soul, one life, that was meant for two people. In this world, we’re supposed to find the other half of our souls and join together with them. Rejoin, and find the house of peace that we once knew before time.” David moved closer. “I feel that with you. I always have. From the moment we met, it’s been like I’ve known you for forever. Like everything in me is supposed to belong to everything in you.”

My love, you are the stars and moon of my life. You are the peace my soul has always sought. You were the last gift of a vengeful God, and the only thing that kept my faith alive. Because of our love. Because you loved me. If you exist, Allah must have created you. Nature could not shape someone so perfect as you are for me. My soul, my love, I will always watch over you.

Nietzsche once said, Beware when fighting monsters, you do not become a monster yourself. For when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.

“When we lose ourselves, when we become what we hate, we’ve lost everything. Defeat came, and we lost the war, and we never even saw it. But now we're sitting in the rubble and ruin and trying to make sense of the future.”

“This world is full to the brim with agony and grief and rage. Everyone is searching for something to hold on to, Ryan. Searching for certainty. Who is the enemy and how do we destroy them to make the world safe again? Searching for hope, that there is still goodness in the world, beyond the hatred, beyond the pain. But we have to face the world as it is, and not try and force it to be something it’s not.

The greatest battle they would endure would be to face the world and feel it, see it, through someone else’s eyes. Through someone else’s heart.

“Don’t drag your past into your future. Don’t hold on to that pain. Leave your history where it belongs. In the past. Learn from it. Take it out and look at it, turn it over. But put it back where it belongs. Don’t let those ghosts live with you in the present.”