“I slept peacefully that night, feeling exultant and determined. Little did I know that I was making the most common and the most painful mistake women have made all throughout the ages: to naively think that with their love they can change the man they love.”
—The Forty Rules of Love
27th September, 2019
Dear Kimya,
I had a heartbreak recently, an achingly painful, wrenchingly crushing heartbreak, and I thought of you. I should have known better Kimya, I should have looked into his eyes and known from that lingering silence like the one you shared with Desert Rose, that something terrible was going to happen. But it was his laugh that did not stop me, that warm as sunshine laugh before the silence, much like yours that did not stop me from making the most common and the most painful mistake women have made all throughout the ages, the mistake that killed you.
My heart cries for you Kimya. I cried the evening I read your story, tears unstoppingly, unapologetically rushing out of my eyes even as I sat amidst a crowd of people, each lost in their own lovelorn existences, oblivious of the truth that centuries before them and centuries after, love has and will continue to burn hearts and souls. Yet I did not care, not for the hundred pairs of eyes that looked at me, some questioning, some reaching out as I shed tears on your death, nor for Shams of Tabriz.
The world can quote the love of Rumi and Shams all they want, but I want no part of it, no part of the men who hurt my Kimya. How could they, how could Rumi after having called you his daughter let you walk into the scorching hell that was your marriage, only to keep Shams near him, knowing full well that Shams would leave? What a pity it is that men know men leave, so they break women to make them stay…
Yet, I will be honest, I forgot your story, not entirely, but in the way that daughters forget their father’s follies until they fall in love with a man. For two years, I did not mourn for you, having placed the book neatly amidst other worlds where love and loss, women and men who have made me cry, have lived. I closed the book at your end, marking the page of your peaceful sleep and of your death. Until I made the foolish mistake, and your memory flooded my life, giving me solace in our shared heartbreak and loss.
I will remember your words now Kimya. I will remember and I will remind every woman I know that you were indeed right, that men do not change with our love and that we should not ask them to change. Remember this Kimya, I want you to know and remember this, if you have to change the man you love, you fell in love with the wrong man. If you have to change the man you love, you fell in love with the wrong man.
I hope I will remember this too, and the next time I write to you, it will not be about a heartbreak.
Your sharer of grief
Sobia
