Al Qatee Neighborhood

Yemenat

Ahmed Saif Hashed

Aden, Al Qatee – the neighborhood that claimed fragments of my adolescent beginnings and took vast portions of my imagination. It has always lingered beside me, kept me company, and slept beneath my eyelids. Even in absence, it remained present, a familiar companion in the quiet of my heart. Whenever its image crosses my mind, longing surges within me. Oh, how overwhelming my yearning becomes each time I remember it or feel its memory drift through me. A vast emptiness opens inside me; is there a return that could ever fill it?

I lived within it, enraptured by love, and it lived within me, deep in my heart and being. How often I wandered through its alleys in reverie, how many times I let my soul sing like a dove in its embrace, and how often it wept within me. Its love streamed through the farthest reaches of my spirit, flooding the horizons of my soul. In Al Qatee lies my own epic, a life filled with passion and longing. Its embers still glow within me, flickering in the secret corners of memory, a fire that never dies.

The name Al Qatee still rings in my ears, softly singing the melodies that once stirred my heart. How often it has touched the strings of a lover’s soul and awakened the nostalgia of childhood and youth. How fiercely love once burned, how brightly it flamed within my heart. How many times shyness overcame me, and how many hopes quietly faded away. Some have died, others have gone, yet within my blood the ache and the flame still remain, alive and unquenched.

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