How Is Life Treating You?

There are two of you.

Seven times one turns to the other and asks.

Did you sleep?

Have you eaten?

Are you warm?

Book III How Is Life Treating You? A Love Between the Body and the Soul Abdulla Ahmed Al Mansoori The Red Thread Two of them have shared your whole life. One will, one day, have to let the other go. Tonight — long before that — they talk.

For the body that carried me, and the soul that made it worth carrying.

The body — that carries you through the world, that eats and tires and keeps you warm. And the soul — that makes the carrying mean something; that feels, and wonders, and is afraid.

They have never spent a night apart. They will be parted only once. What follows is one day of their conversation — the questions two lovers ask when they think no one else is listening.

Only the day, the thread, and the two of you.

The body and the soul, face to face — one asleep and spent, one awake in the dark, keeping watch over it.

The questions the body and the soul ask only each other.

Or did you lie awake inside me, turning the faces of the gone?

I wake first. It is my task — to test the air, to see if the world is safe before you have to feel it.

Did you sleep? I carried you all night; I can carry this too. Tell me.

Unpacking...