Then it was as if she had aimed a feathered arrow and struck my liver with it, but I composed myself slightly until I said to her, “I will do so, God willing, and nothing is more beloved to me than that.” So she went about her business, and I was alone with myself for an hour, during which I let my tears flow as much as God willed them to flow, until night came. Then I took my bag and packed my clothes and books in it, and I said to myself:
All that made me happy in this life was to live beside that person whom I loved and whom I loved myself for, and now that I have been separated from her, I regret nothing after her.
Then I slipped out of the house stealthily, so that no one would sense what had happened, and I did not take any farewell from my cousin before leaving except for a single glance I cast upon her through her door while she was sleeping in her bed; that was my last farewell to her.
By your life, I did not leave Baghdad out of hatred, If only we had found a substitute for parting from her. Restrain your sorrow that I left without being able to bid her Farewell, nor did I make any covenant with her inhabitants.
And thus I left the house in which I had lived happily for a period of time, the departure of Adam from his Paradise, and I went out from it a fugitive, an outcast, bewildered, heartbroken, having reconciled with worries and sorrows—a separation after which there is no meeting, a poverty for whose emptiness there is no filling, and an exile in which I find no comforter or helper among any of mankind.
And I had with me a remnant of wealth that had remained in my hand from the remnants of that lost blessing, so I took this bare room in this upper floor as a dwelling. But I could not stay in it for a single hour, so I resolved to travel to where I might find in God’s vastness and the expansiveness of His horizons a cure for my soul from its worries and sorrows. So I embarked on a long journey in which I spent several months, not descending upon a town until my soul yearned for another, and the sun did not rise upon me in one place until it set upon me in another, until finally I felt in my soul a stillness resembling the stillness of a tear suspended in the corner of the eye, neither overflowing nor drying up.