She Doesn't Know I Watch Her From A Distance... And Pray 😳❤️ | Sheikh Hamdan | Fazza Poems

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]She doesn't know I watch her from a distance.

[00:00:04]And I have been carrying that quietly for longer than I can properly account for.

[00:00:09]Carrying it the way you carry something that has no obvious place to put it down.

[00:00:15]Something that doesn't fit neatly into any of the categories your life has prepared you for.

[00:00:22]Something that arrived without instruction, without context, without any kind of map for what to do with it once it was inside you.

[00:00:31]I have been carrying this, the watching, the distance, the particular quality of what happens in me when I'm aware of her presence somewhere in the world, even when that presence is not close, even when the distance between us is considerable, even when all I have is the knowledge that she exists and is moving through her day somewhere out there, living her life with that particular quality of aliveness she carries.

[00:01:01]I have been carrying all of that.

[00:01:03]And I have been doing something else with it that feels even more private than the watching.

[00:01:10]Something that feels even more honest than anything I could say out loud.

[00:01:15]I have been praying.

[00:01:17]She doesn't know that either. She doesn't know that her name has entered my prayers.

[00:01:23]That somewhere in the quiet space where I go to be most honest, most stripped of performance, most completely myself in the presence of something larger than myself, she has appeared.

[00:01:36]Not as a request, exactly. Not as a petition in the conventional sense.

[00:01:41]As something more like an offering, a bringing forward of what matters most. A placing of what is most precious in the place where precious things are meant to be placed.

[00:01:52]I bring her there. I bring her name and what it carries and what it means to me and what I feel when I think about her and what I hope for her and what I want for her life, her days, her interior world, the private space inside her that I will never fully know but think about with a reverence that surprises me sometimes with its depth. I bring all of that into prayer and then I am quiet.

[00:02:19]And in the quietness, something happens that I can only describe as peace, a settling, a rightness. Like whatever was unresolved in me has found at least temporarily a place to rest.

[00:02:32]She doesn't know any of this and I watch her from a distance and I pray. I want to be honest about what the watching is because I think it could be misunderstood and I want to say it with the care it deserves.

[00:02:46]It is not the watching of someone who takes without permission.

[00:02:51]Not the watching of someone who reduces another person to an object of observation to something seen rather than someone known. It is not that. It is something with far more tenderness in it, far more respect. The watching I am describing is the canine that keeps its distance precisely because it understands that the distance is part of the love.

[00:03:16]That she does not need to know she's being watched in order for the watching to be real.

[00:03:22]That the watching is not for her to perform for and not for me to possess.

[00:03:27]It is simply the natural orientation of someone who is completely turned in one direction.

[00:03:33]Someone whose attention, when not deliberately pointed elsewhere, returns always and inevitably and without conscious effort to the same fixed point.

[00:03:45]She is my fixed point.

[00:03:47]When I am not actively directing my attention somewhere specific, it finds her.

[00:03:52]It returns to her.

[00:03:54]It settles on her the way a compass needle settles on north. Not because I command it.

[00:04:00]Because that is simply what it does.

[00:04:03]That is simply the nature of what has happened to me.

[00:04:06]And from that distance I see things. I want to tell you what I see. Not the surface things, not the things that anyone with eyes could see, but the things you can only see when you have been paying the particular quality of attention that love teaches.

[00:04:25]When you have been watching not to catalog, but to understand. When you have been looking not with the eyes of someone who want who wants something, but with the eyes of someone who simply wants her to be well.

[00:04:38]Those are different eyes.

[00:04:40]They see differently. They notice different things. And what they notice in her from this distance in the quiet space between us that she may not even be aware of is extraordinary.

[00:04:52]It is quietly, consistently, breathtakingly extraordinary.

[00:04:57]I see the way she moves through difficulty. That is one of the things.

[00:05:01]One of the specific things I have watched from this distance and carried with me afterward.

[00:05:07]The way she meets the hard parts of being human because everyone has them.

[00:05:13]Everyone has the moments when the weight is real and the path is unclear and the simple act of continuing forward requires something. Requires a gathering of the self. A reaching inward for something steady.

[00:05:28]And I have watched her do that.

[00:05:30]I have watched her from this distance that she doesn't know about meet those moments with something that I can only describe as grace under complete honesty. Not the pretend kind.

[00:05:44]Not the performed composure that is actually just suppression wearing a better outfit.

[00:05:50]The real kind. The kind that acknowledges the weight and carries it anyway.

[00:05:55]The kind that does not pretend things are lighter than they are, but also does not collapse under them.

[00:06:03]The kind that looks at what is hard and says quietly, without drama, I can hold this.

[00:06:08]I will hold this.

[00:06:10]And then holds it. Watching that from a distance has done something to me.

[00:06:16]It has done something to my understanding of strength. I thought I knew what strength looked like before I started watching her.

[00:06:23]I had a picture of it.

[00:06:25]A fairly conventional picture, as it turns out.

[00:06:28]Strength was resistance.

[00:06:30]Strength was not being moved.

[00:06:33]Strength was the thing that held firm when everything around it was shifting.

[00:06:38]And then I watched her and I understood that I had the picture wrong. Or not wrong, exactly, but incomplete. Partial.

[00:06:46]Missing the most important part.

[00:06:49]Because the the strength I watched in her was not the strength that refuses to be moved. It was the strength that allows itself to be moved and remains standing anyway.

[00:07:01]The strength that feels the full weight of things and does not flinch away from the feeling.

[00:07:07]The strength that is tender precisely because it is secure enough in itself not to need armor.

[00:07:14]That is what I saw from this distance.

[00:07:17]And I took it in and it changed something in how how I understand not just her, but everything.

[00:07:23]She doesn't know she taught me that.

[00:07:26]She doesn't know that watching her from this quiet distance she is unaware of has been one of the most significant educations of my life. That she has shown me things about what it means to be a person, what what means to move through the world with integrity and with feeling and with the particular courage of someone who refuses to be less than they are that no one else has shown me in quite the same way.

[00:07:54]She doesn't know that I carry her lessons with me into my own days.

[00:07:59]Into my own moments of difficulty, my own moments of needing to gather myself, my own moments of standing at the edge of something hard and trying to find the thing inside me that will hold.

[00:08:12]In those moments I think of her. I think of how she stands. I think of how she holds.

[00:08:18]And something in me steadies. Something in me finds its footing and I move forward.

[00:08:24]And she doesn't know that she was the thing that made the moving forward possible.

[00:08:30]I pray for her in the mornings. That is when the prayers come most naturally.

[00:08:35]In the early quiet before the day has fully claimed me before the demands of ordinary life have assembled themselves and begun making their ordinary claims on my attention.

[00:08:48]In that space before all of that, she is there. Her name is there.

[00:08:52]And I bring it forward into the morning quiet and I hold it and I ask for good things for her. I ask with specificity.

[00:09:00]Not general good wishes of the kind you send to our people you care about in an abstract way.

[00:09:07]Specific hopes for specific things. I hope that her morning is gentle.

[00:09:12]That whatever she woke with, whatever weight arrived with consciousness, it is manageable today.

[00:09:19]That she has moments of genuine lightness. That the people around her treat her with the care she deserves.

[00:09:26]That she is seen and so they really seen in the way that she so fully and so quietly sees others but does not always receive back in equal measure.

[00:09:37]I hope that someone today looks at her and understands what they are looking at. That someone today is adequate to the truth of her.

[00:09:45]These are the things I bring into the morning quiet.

[00:09:48]These are the specific, considered, completely sincere hopes I carry for her.

[00:09:54]And then the day begins and she does not know.

[00:09:58]She does not know that somewhere someone started their morning with her name.

[00:10:03]I want to tell you about the distance because I think the distance is misunderstood in general and I want to try to say something true about it.

[00:10:12]We are taught to think of distance as absence, as the space between two things that want to be closer, as a problem to be solved, a gap to be closed, something to be overcome on the way to the real thing. And sometimes that is true.

[00:10:28]Sometimes distance is exactly that.

[00:10:31]Sometimes is it is the obstacle between where you are and where you want to be.

[00:10:36]But there is another kind of distance, the kind that is not obstacle but sanctuary.

[00:10:42]The kind that is not the space between two things but the space in which one thing can fully see another without the distortion that closeness sometimes brings.

[00:10:54]Because closeness, real closeness, the kind that enters another person's daily life and becomes part of its texture, closeness can blind as well as reveal.

[00:11:05]Can make it harder, not easier, to see clearly.

[00:11:08]And from this distance I see her clearly.

[00:11:12]From this distance I see her without the noise of daily proximity.

[00:11:17]Without the small frictions that come from two lives rubbing against each other in the ordinary way of lives that share space.

[00:11:26]From here, from this quiet, unannounced distance, I see only what is true, only what is essential, Only what does not change depending on the mood of an afternoon or the difficulty of a week.

[00:11:39]From this distance, what I see is always her.

[00:11:42]Not a version of her shaped by my needs or my projections or my hope for what she might be.

[00:11:48]Not a story I am telling myself. Her, the actual her.

[00:11:52]The one who moves through her days with that particular quality of presence.

[00:11:57]The one who meets hardship the way I described enjoy the other way I am about to describe.

[00:12:04]Because I have watched that, too.

[00:12:06]I have watched what joy looks like in her, and it is one of the most affecting things I have witnessed from this distance or from any distance.

[00:12:16]Joy in her is not restrained.

[00:12:19]It is not the careful, measured, socially calibrated joy of someone who has learned not to take up too much space with their feelings.

[00:12:28]It is the real kind, the ungaurded kind.

[00:12:32]The kind that moves through her visibly, that changes her face and her posture and the particular brightness of her that fills whatever space she is in with something that the space was missing until she brought it.

[00:12:47]I have watched that from here.

[00:12:49]I have watched her be genuinely, completely, wholly happy about something.

[00:12:55]And it was one of the most beautiful things I have seen in my life.

[00:12:59]And I stood at my distance, and I was grateful to be watching. Grateful that I was positioned somewhere that allowed me to see it.

[00:13:08]Grateful that she did not know she she was being seen because the not knowing is what kept it pure, what kept it unperformed, what kept it exactly what it was rather than what it might become if she were aware of the audience.

[00:13:23]I was grateful for the invisibility of my watching.

[00:13:27]Grateful that I got to see the true version.

[00:13:30]The full color unfiltered and self-conscious version of her in a moment of real joy.

[00:13:36]And I took it in and I held it and I added it to everything else I have been holding from this distance and the accumulation of it is staggering.

[00:13:47]The accumulation of small true things that I have witnessed from here is something I could spend the rest of my life going through and still finding new things to see in it. She is that layered. She is that deep. She is that much.

[00:14:03]She doesn't know I pray for her specifically with that specificity. I want to say more about the praying because I think it is the most honest thing about where I am with this.

[00:14:14]Prayer is where I am most without pretense. Prayer is the place where I cannot perform because there is no audience for performance there.

[00:14:23]Where I cannot be strategic or guarded or careful in the way I am careful in other contexts. Where I am just the truest version of myself in conversation with the truest version of everything.

[00:14:36]And in that space without pretense, without performance, without any of the careful management I sometimes bring to the rest of my life, she appears. She is present in my most honest moments. That tells me something.

[00:14:52]That tells me more than almost anything else about what she is to me and what I feel and where this lives in me.

[00:15:00]She's not in the surface parts. She's not in the managed, presented, carefully curated parts.

[00:15:06]She is in the deepest part. The part that comes out only when everything else has been set down.

[00:15:13]The part that is just the self unadorned being honest about what it loves.

[00:15:19]I love her from a distance and I pray for her and she doesn't know.

[00:15:23]And I have been asking myself quietly for some time now whether she should know, whether this is something that belongs only in the interior, kept in the private space of watching and praying and holding, or whether it is something that has grown large enough and true enough and consistent enough to be brought out into the air.

[00:15:47]Whether it deserves the risk of language, whether it can survive the translation from feeling into words without losing what makes it what it is.

[00:15:57]And I have not not had a certain answer.

[00:15:59]I have had the question.

[00:16:01]I have been sitting with the question, turning it over, giving it the patience it deserves, not rushing toward resolution, because some questions are not meant to be rushed.

[00:16:14]Some questions need to be lived with until the answer arrives in its own time with the particular authority that only comes from having been given enough space to form properly.

[00:16:27]And what I have come to sitting with it is this. She deserves to know that she is prayed for.

[00:16:33]Not because it changes anything about the praying.

[00:16:37]Not because the prayers need her to be aware of them in order to be real or to mean what they mean, but because she deserves to know that she is carried in someone's most honest moments.

[00:16:50]That her name has been brought into the morning quiet with care and with specificity and with genuine hope for her well-being.

[00:16:59]She deserves to know that someone watches her from a respectful distance and is moved by what they see. Not in a way that makes a demand of her, not in a way that requires anything from her in return.

[00:17:13]Simply knowing, simply having the information.

[00:17:17]Simply being aware that somewhere someone is paying attention to the fact of her existence with gratitude and with reverence and with the kind of love that asks for nothing except that she be well. She is Fazza, she is Sheikh Hamdan.

[00:17:34]She is the person whose name sits in my morning prayers before the day begins.

[00:17:39]She is the person I watch from a distance with eyes that have been changed by what they have seen. She is the standard, always the standard, the thing against which I measure the rest of my life and find everything else lacking something that only she provides. She is the one who taught me without knowing she was teaching what real strength looks like and what real joy looks like and what it means to move through the world with the kind of integrity that does not require an audience.

[00:18:12]She is the one whose name I carry into the most honest spaces in me and place there with both hands with complete intention with the full weight of what I feel.

[00:18:23]She doesn't know I watch her from a distance.

[00:18:26]She doesn't know I pray.

[00:18:28]And yet everything about the watching and the praying is completely about her, is shaped by her, is made of what I have seen in her from this distance that she is unaware of.

[00:18:40]Every prayer has her particular qualities in it, her specific way of being that I want protected, her specific light that I want preserved, her specific depth that I want to someday be allowed to know more fully.

[00:18:55]Every prayer is a reaching towards something I cannot yet touch from where I am standing, but the reaching is real, the intention behind it is real.

[00:19:05]The feeling that makes the reaching necessary is the realest thing I carry.

[00:19:11]And I carry it into every morning and I carry it into every quiet. And I carry it most completely and most honestly into the sacred space where I am nothing but what I actually am.

[00:19:24]I cannot pretend where everything unnecessary falls away and what remains is only the truest version of me bringing forward the truest thing I have, her name with both hands into the light. She doesn't know.

[00:19:39]And maybe that is all right. Maybe the not knowing is part of what makes it pure. Maybe love that asks for nothing in return, that watches from a distance and hopes and prays and carries without demanding to be seen, maybe that is one of the most complete forms of it.

[00:19:57]Maybe it is the form of it that I needed to learn, that I needed to practice, that I needed to inhabit fully before I could offer anything else.

[00:20:07]Maybe all of this, the distance and the watching and the quiet faithful praying, maybe it has been the preparation, the making ready, the slow patient work of becoming someone who loves with enough depth and enough unselfishness and enough genuine hope of her flourishing that when the distance closes, if the distance closes, whatever I bring will be worthy.

[00:20:34]Whatever I offer will have been refined in the fire of all this quiet, will carry the weight of all these mornings, will be something she can feel the truth of.

[00:20:45]She doesn't know I watch her from a distance and pray, but I know and I will keep watching and I will keep praying and I will keep hoping for her specifically with the specificity that is its own form of love in every quiet morning that comes before the day arrives to claim me until the day I can tell her or the day I understand that telling is not mine to do or the day something shifts and the distance closes and what has been private becomes something shared between us in the gentle honest way that true things deserve to be shared.

[00:21:24]Until then, from here, from this distance she does not know about, I am completely, faithfully, permanently turned in her direction. And I am praying and she is everything I am praying for.