You’ve probably never heard of the Abbasid Dynasty.
But why?
Abbasid scholars collected texts from Greece to China in the House of Wisdom, and spread algebra and zero to the Western world. Doctors removed cataracts with hypodermic needles, merchants banked with letters of credit, and rulers governed with bureaucracy and Sharia alike.
Scandinavian furs, Swahili gold, and Byzantine glass exchanged hands in Baghdad’s bazaars; the air seasoned with exotic spices and poets' voices, with dreams of Sinbad and Arabian Nights.
The answer is simple, actually.
Hülegü Khan.
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They say you smell the Mongols long before you see them.
The stench of burning Khwarezmians must not have alerted the Caliph al-Mustaʿṣim. He executed Hülegü’s envoys, and an entire civilization paid the price.
Drowned books stained the Tigris black. Five centuries of peace wiped away in a few desert nights—reduced to mass pyres and rivers of yellow fat.
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三十年河东，三十年河西。
Their current had shifted.
I looked out at the Manhattan skyline and silently asked a question I already knew the answer to.
Will this fade too?
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I’ve always had an obsession with permanence.
I preferred silver over clothing. Objects over experiences. Hell, I even switched my Minecraft world to creative so my diamond tools wouldn’t break.
Memories faded, but not for a lack of trying. I flatten experiences into poems and photographs, storing the hardtack for harsher seas. I keep a diary, so a far-off me can write an autobiography that nobody asked for.
I chronicle, organize, and preserve.
Futile. Futile. Futile.
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I always knew, but I chose to avoid its gaze.
Just now, I remembered a short story I wrote in the fifth-grade. I’ll give you a simple sketch:
A girl invites a boy over for a picnic. He understands her as no one does, and she falls in love. She wants his everlasting love.
One day, she tells him about her butterfly collection. That, too, was love at first sight; she had raised monarchs from caterpillars with her Kindergarten class. But at the end of the year, the teacher took their net outside, unzipped it, and the butterflies flew away.
She hated that part.
She wouldn’t make the same mistake. She’d keep him in a wooden box in her butterfly room, delicately pinned to a birch board.
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I remember watching the monarchs flutter away. I remember the ache in my chest.
Why do good things leave? How can I make them stay?
I fashioned her in my image, but I know better now. A butterfly in a box is no butterfly at all.
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Maybe this is a good time to define love, to draw a line in the smooth sand between love and passion.
Love is suffering. Suffering you wouldn’t trade the world for.
Passion is a bonfire. It bends, roars, and dances. Love is a quiet blue flame.
But who knows? I’m no expert.
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In the end, I found an answer to my silent question in a Persian fable:
The Sultan asked Solomon for a Signet motto, that should hold good for Adversity and Prosperity. Solomon gave him,
This too shall pass.
There’s something comforting in that.
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The current shifts. The only constant is entropy.
Our lives are dictated by the flow of the cosmos, of things beyond us. We can paddle our kayaks as hard as we’d like, but against an indifferent current, our sweat means nothing.
Yet we paddle on.
I think this is the absurd courage Camus admired. I’ll one-up him:
“One must imagine the Abbasids happy”
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A lover once told me to imagine my thoughts as wind blowing through an empty room.
I like that.
I think the wind has a scent. It clings to our walls, but not forever. Yet, somehow, it feels indispensable—that without a long-passed breeze, the room would be different.
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My art grew purer when I let my audience go.
I write letters as a wisp, tossing paper airplanes into the abyss. If someone catches one, so be it. If no one hears them land, that's fine too.
I dedicate my letters to myself. I sit closer to the stage than any observer ever could, and I hang on each inflection longer.
I used to fear my thoughts. Now, I open the window and let the wind blow through.
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