“Upon the Mountain of Silence, Where the Wind Splits the Final Word in Two, There Where My Heart Remained Like a Wingless Dove, I Still Wait for You, O Love Who Left Like River Water in Autumn”

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That morning, the sun refused to rise. It lingered behind the hills, ashamed to witness our parting. It dragged itself slowly, like someone who knows that its light would only expose my first tears. The fog had settled over the field like a white veil of mourning. The birds fell silent. Even the neighborhood dogs—those who knew us walking hand in hand every evening—did not bark that time. The entire world was in mourning for what was about to happen. Everyone except you.

You stood there, hands buried in the pockets of that grey coat I had given you for your birthday. I still remember it—how you held your right shoulder slightly higher than the left, the way you always did when something weighed heavy on your soul. My fingers trembled, not from the November cold, but from the weight of that word I dared not speak. You said it before me. “We are breaking up.” Not “I’m leaving,” not “I have to go”—but “we are breaking up.” That word that splits beings in two.

I counted the stones on the road beneath my feet. Forty-seven stones from your gate to the square. I knew them by heart. I had counted them so many times, on those nights when I came late and you waited for me at the window. But that morning, those stones looked like the final rosary of our prayers—each stone a plea for you to turn back, each stone a desperate cry for time to stop.

“Don’t cry,” you told me, but your voice trembled like dry leaves in October, like a guitar string snapping. And you knew, my love, that this was the most futile sentence you could ever utter. Because you were my tears. From the very day we met, every tear I had ever shed was for you. And now, telling me not to cry was like telling the sea not to wave.

I remember struggling with the thought of holding your hand, but my arm wouldn’t rise. It weighed like lead. Your hand was there, in your pocket, warm—yet farther than the stars. Because a whole ocean of silence had grown between us, an ocean we ourselves had created with unspoken words and nights spent on opposite sides of the pillow.

When you turned away, to avoid meeting my eyes—those eyes you once called “two windows through which light entered”—I saw your back. That back where I had slept so many nights, counting the beats of your heart in the darkness, as if they were the seconds of a clock that would never stop. I remember the shape of your shoulders beneath the coat. I remember how your hair touched the collar. I remember so much that sometimes, in my dreams, I chase after that back and wake up reaching out to touch it.

And you walked away. You didn’t run. You didn’t stop. You had that slow walk of yours, like someone who knows that every step is writing a farewell on the wet pavement. Your footsteps on the fallen leaves created a rhythm I will carry in my ears for life: takutak, takutak—a sound like a retreating heartbeat. I stayed there, rooted to that spot, with unspoken words burning in my mouth like live coals. I wanted to say “Come back,” but my mouth wouldn’t open. I wanted to say “I loved you more than myself,” but my voice remained prisoner in my throat. I told myself: “Let her go, because if you stop her, you’ll keep her in a cage.” But inside me, another voice screamed: “A cage is better than a desert.”

That day went on, endlessly. Hours crawled like ants over a wounded body. I returned to our home—no, to my home now. The door creaked as usual, but inside it was no longer a home. It was a box with walls, where your pillow still carried the scent of your perfume—that lavender-and-smoke smell that made me close my eyes and breathe deeply. I held that pillow to my chest for hours. I didn’t cry. Not then. I cried only when I heard your voice on the phone days later, when you asked “How are you?” and I couldn’t answer because tears drown every word.

Then came the months. Winter entered without you, and it became colder than ever. Snow was no longer white, but grey, like the ashes of a burnt fire. Spring came, but I saw no flowers—I only saw that road of yours, that back of yours retreating among fallen petals. Summer burned me, not from the sun, but from the absence of your shadow.

Now, after all these years—how many years? I no longer count them, because time without you is a frozen river—I still hear your footsteps in the rain. When it rains, I go out without an umbrella, just to hear that rhythm: takutak. I still search for your scent in every season, in every wind that blows from the south. I still keep that red scarf of yours—not for warmth, but to remember how the color of love never fades, even when love itself departs, even when that scarf now carries only the smell of dust and memory.

I have walked that mountain of silence, the one spoken of in the title, thousands of times. Every stone there knows your name. Every tree there is bent by the wind of my longing. I speak to the clouds, my love. I tell them: “If you see her somewhere, tell her that here, in this silent valley, I am still waiting. Not for her return. But for her to know that somewhere, someone keeps her alive with his breath.”

Because parting, O my love, is not an ending. Parting is another way of loving—in silence, in absence, in that sacred space where you are no longer physically present, but I still feel you in every breath. Parting is that strange state where I see you in every mirror, but when I turn, there is no one. Parting is eating bread and tasting the hands that cut it.

And I am not afraid of loneliness. I am afraid of the day when I will grow accustomed to being without you. Because then, it will mean the wound has closed—but a closed wound is not healing; it is merely a scar that no longer lets you feel the pain. And the pain of your love, oh God, is the only thing that makes me feel alive.

Early in the mornings, when the birds begin to sing, I open the window and call your name into the wind. The word “I love you” spins in the air like a golden leaf and rises higher, higher, up to the sky that was once ours. And there, in that endless blue, I see your face. Not as you were when you left—tired, broken, in that grey coat—but as you were that first summer, with that smile that could melt glaciers.

Yunus Emre once said: “Love is a sea, and I am a drop. But this drop holds the sea within.” You were my sea. And I, even today, am that drop that does not dry up, that does not forget, that does not stop searching for the traces of your waves. But now I understand more deeply: perhaps you were the sea that had to leave so I could realize that the true sea is not outside me, but within me. And in that inner sea, you still swim, free and indestructible.

Come, O wind, and carry this word for me: that I am not waiting for a body. I am waiting for that soul that once rested beside me. And if you cannot come, then at least come in my dreams, at least come to that mountain of silence, where the wind splits the final word in two—and there, together, let us weep for what we were and smile for what we will always be: two strangers who agreed to love each other eternally in a brief moment of time.