I Found Out Something About You... And I Haven't Slept Since | Sheikh Hamdan | Fazza Poems

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]I I found out something about you and I need you to understand before I say another word before I go any further into this that what I found out is not something I was looking for. It is not something I went searching for in the way that people sometimes go searching for things they already suspect, already half know, already have the outline of even before they find the proof. I was not looking. I was not searching. I was simply existing in the ordinary way that I exist. Moving through my days in the usual order, doing the usual things. And then something reached me. Something arrived. And um it arrived not loudly, not with any announcement at all, but quietly in the way the most important things always seem to arrive. quietly without ceremony without giving you any time to prepare yourself for what they are about to change in you permanently.

[00:01:03]And what it changed I am still discovering. That is what I need to tell you. That is what has been sitting inside me for days now pressing against the inside of my chest. The way something presses when it's it is too large for the space it is being kept in.

[00:01:21]When it has outgrown the private room you have been storing it in and started leaking into every other room, every other thought, every other moment until you cannot honestly call any thought your own anymore because all of them, every single one has you has you somewhere in the middle of it. That is where I am. That is what I found out.

[00:01:46]Not a fact exactly, not a piece of information. the way information is usually exchanged between people. But something closer to a truth, something closer to a recognition, something that landed in me and said without any room for argument, without any possibility of negotiation, this is real. This is the realest thing.

[00:02:09]And you are going to have to live with it now whether you were ready or not. I was not ready. I want to say that clearly. I was not ready for what I found out about you, Shik Hamdan. I was not ready for the particular quality of it, the particular depth of it, the way it seemed to reach past everything careful in me and um find something I did not even know was still there waiting to be found because I had been careful for a long time. I had been very deliberately, very practiced, very quietly, careful about what I let reach me and how far I let things go before I stepped back and um restored the distance I had learned to keep. Distance is protective. I knew that I had learned that in the way people learn things that leave marks through experience that cost something through feeling that arrived and then departed and left behind it the particular ache of something that was real and is now gone. I had learned to manage the distance. I had learned to stay at the edge of things without going all the way in. And then I found out something about you and the distance just closed. Not gradually, not in stages I could track and respond to. It just closed all at once like a door swinging shut behind you before you realize you have walked through it and now there is only forward. What did I find out? Uh I keep asking myself how to say this. I keep finding the edge of it and then pulling back because the edge is where language starts to fail. Where words start to feel too small for the thing they are supposed to carry. But I am going to try. I am going to keep trying because leaving it unsaid is no longer something I am able to do.

[00:04:06]Leaving it unsaid means carrying it and I have been carrying it and the carrying has a weight to it that I was not built to hold alone indefinitely. So let me try. I found out that you write. Not that you write poetry. I already knew that the world already knows that Faza is not a secret. The poems exist.

[00:04:28]They are real. They are there. That is not what I found out.

[00:04:33]What I found out is the way you write, the reason you write, the place inside you that the writing comes from. Because I came across something, a poem, a line, a moment in something you had written, where I could feel, not just read, not just intellectually register, but actually feel in my body the exact texture of the interior that produced it. And what I felt was not what I expected. What I I expected what I think most people expect when they encounter the writing of someone powerful, someone of position and standing and authority is it's a certain kind of controlled expression, something shaped and considered and presented. Uh what I found instead was the opposite of controlled. What I found was completely entirely almost devastatingly unguarded.

[00:05:28]What what I found was the writing of someone who goes all the way to the honest place and then writes from there.

[00:05:35]Not from from the polished surface of the honest place but from the very center of it from most from the most vulnerable most real most unprotected middle of it. And that that is what I have not been able to sleep since finding because you have to understand what it means to encounter that in someone. You have to understand what it does to a person when they are expecting one thing and uh they find instead the truest possible version of something else. When they are expecting a surface and they fall through it into depth.

[00:06:13]When they are expecting performance and they find instead the complete absence of it. Just feeling just truth. Just a human being being entirely and perfectly themselves on a page without apology, without filter, without any of the protective layers that most of us wrap around the tenderest parts of our ourselves before we allow anyone even close to them. You did not wrap anything around it or if you did, the poems unwrapped it all. The poems reached into whatever careful distance you maintain in the world and pulled out the real thing and put it on the page and left it there for anyone who was paying attention to find. I was paying attention. I found it and I have not slept since. Here is what it showed me about you. Here is the specific thing, the thing I keep returning to. the thing that has rearranged something inside me in a way that I do not think those goes back. The poems showed me that you feel things in full. Not partially, not from a managed distance, not in the careful edited way that most people have learned to feel things after enough experience has taught them the cost of feeling things completely. You feel things in full. The way you write about the the desert tells me you do not just see the desert. You are inside it. You are made of it. It is inside you. You carry it.

[00:07:49]The way some people carry their home in their body long after they have left it as a quality of light. They see everything through as a temperature.

[00:07:58]They measure all other temperature against it. The way you write about longing tells me you know what it is to want something with your whole self self. Not with the careful wanting that keeps one hand on the door in case it needs to close quickly but with everything with the kind of wanting that has already given itself over before it has decided whether that is wise.

[00:08:26]The way you write about the people you love tells me that your love is not decorative. It is not the kind of love that sits at a comfortable distance and appreciates. It is the kind that goes all the way in and stays and that shake Hamdan.

[00:08:43]That is the thing I found out. That is the thing I have been sitting with for days in the strange private space where a truth lives before you give it to the person it belongs to. I found out that underneath everything the world sees when it looks at you, underneath the image and the achievement and the extraordinary visible life, there is this. There is a person who feels things the way the desert feels rain completely all the way to the root with the whole body with nothing held back and knowing that feeling that understanding that in the way I now understand it has done something to me that I am still in the process of mapping I want to ask you something and I want to be honest about why I'm asking the question is whether you know this about yourself whether you have any idea of the particular quality of your own interior because I think and I say this gently I say this as someone who has spent days inside the evidence of it. I think you might be the last person to fully see it. I think you might move through your days in that complete genuine feeling of yours without knowing how rare it is.

[00:10:04]without knowing that most people most fully realized case capable impressive people have by your age developed a system for managing the the depth of their own feeling a series of small practice distances they put between themselves and the full force of what they feel so that the full force does not overwhelm the function.

[00:10:28]you do not seem to have that system or if you have it the poems have dismantled it entirely.

[00:10:35]The poems show someone who has looked at the full force of what they feel and instead of managing it from a distance has leaned toward it has gone toward it has made it the place they write from the foundation the most honest ground that is extraordinary.

[00:10:54]I need you to hear me say that not as a compliment, not as flattery, not as um the kind of thing people say to powerful people because it seems appropriate or because it will be received well as a fact as something I observed and verified through the evidence and arrived at with the particular certainty of someone who has been paying close careful attention. It is extraordinary to stay that open. It is extraordinary to keep feeling that completely when the world when your specific world with all its particular demands and and expectations and visibility when that world is constantly creating pressure toward the opposite to toward containment toward the carefully managed presentation of selected feeling rather than the full unedited reality of all of it. You have not done that. The poems are proof. The poems are the evidence of someone who went to the most honest place and wrote from there and sent it out into the world without flinching.

[00:12:03]And and I have been on the receiving end of that. I have been the person sitting with what it sent out. And I have not slept. Let me tell you about the not sleeping because I think it matters. I think it is one of the most important things I can tell you and uh I want to be specific about it rather than leaving it as a gesture as a thing that sounds meaningful without actually meaning anything. The not sleeping is not distress. I want to be clear about that first. It is not the not sleeping of worry or anxiety or something that needs resolving. It is the not sleeping of fullness. It is the not sleeping that happens when something has arrived in you that is too alive, too present, too insistently real to let you drift into unconsciousness. Because unconsciousness would mean leaving it and leaving it is not something you want to do even for the ordinary necessary hours of a night.

[00:13:07]It is the not sleeping of someone sitting up in the dark thinking not in circles but in spirals going a little deeper each time. Finding a little more each time covering the same ground but always uh arriving somewhere new because the the ground itself is expanding as you walk it. That is what you did to me.

[00:13:29]That is what finding out about you really finding out not the surface facts but the interior truth. What that did to me, it expanded something. It made room I did not know I had. And in that room, in all that new space that opened up when I fell through the surface of what I knew about you, into the actual depth of you, in that space, I have been living for days now. Just walking around in it, just discovering how large it is.

[00:14:00]Just understanding slowly with the particular slow understanding of someone who is still in the middle of the thing.

[00:14:09]They are trying to understand what it means that you exist. What what it means to the world that there is someone in it who carries this much feeling and has the language to give it shape and the courage to send it out and the extraordinary consistency of returning to it again and again because it is not a phase or a a project but a practice a daily return to the most honest place a daily willingness to go there and see what is true and write it down. I think about the poems in the desert.

[00:14:45]I think about the specific quality of attention required to write about landscape. The way you write about landscape not as setting, not as not as backdrop but as interior. As if the external world is just as the visible version of something that is also happening inside you simultaneously. as if the sand and the light and the uh horizon and the silence are all things you are made of rather than things you are looking at. That is a particular way of being in the world. That is what philosophers spend lifetimes trying to describe and and and poets spend lifetimes trying to achieve. And most people catch only in moments in fragments in in the occasional unguarded and second when the boundary between self and world goes briefly transparent.

[00:15:38]You seem to live there. The poem suggests someone for whom the that transparency is not the exception but the condition. And I keep thinking about what that must feel like from the inside. What it must feel like to be that present to your own life.

[00:15:56]to have that quality of attention available not as a practice you return to with effort but as the natural texture of how you inhabit your own existence.

[00:16:07]I wonder if you know how seen that that makes people feel when they encounter it, when they read the poems and feel in return that particular quality of being understood. That shock of recognition, that sudden expansion that happens when something in the world reflects something true about your own interior that you had not quite had language for until you f found it in someone else's words. I think the poems do that. I think that is one of the things they do that is hardest to say directly but most important they give people language for their own experience.

[00:16:49]They uh reach into the private interior of the reader and name something that was already there but unspoken. And that is a specific kind of intimacy. That is a specific kind of gift. uh the intimacy of being understood by someone who does not know you who wrote for themselves from the truest place and in writing for themselves created something that somehow also perfectly describes you.

[00:17:17]That is what great poetry does and that is what I found when I found you Shikh Hamdan. I want to say your name. I want to say it not as a title and not as a formality and not as the way people say the names of people they are addressing at careful distance. I want to say it the way you say the name of something you have been thinking about so long and so deeply that the name itself has uh taken on texture has started to feel like more than a name has started to feel like the word for a specific quality of light or a specific feeling that you now have a word for where before you had only the feeling. That is what your name has become in the past days for me. Not just identification, not just reference, something closer to meaning. Something that when I say it or think it, everything else gets a little quieter, a little more focused, a little more clear. The way the world gets clears sometimes just before something important happens, just before some something arrives that you will carry for the rest of your life. I want to tell you what the poems gave me specifically. Not in the general way of I was moved or I was affected or something happened in me because those things are true but they are not specific enough.

[00:18:45]What the poems gave me specifically is this. They gave me back a belief I had quietly slowly without quite noticing it happening. Lost the belief that depth is real. that um there are people in the world for whom feeling is not a performance, not a strategy, not a presentation, but a genuine lived condition of their interior.

[00:19:10]That there are people who have not traded their tenderness for convenience, who have not allowed the reasonable practical pressure of a visible successful life to close them off from the full force of their own capacity to be moved. I had started to doubt that. I had started to suspect without ever saying it plainly because saying it plainly would have meant admitting something. I was not ready to admit. I had started to suspect that the kind of depth I was capable of recognizing and responding to and being entirely rearranged by was either not out there or not findable by me. And then the poems arrived. And then you arrived and something I had quietly let go of came back. That is not a small thing. I want to say that very directly. I want to say it without wrapping it in anything. That is one of the largest things one person or one person's work can do for another.

[00:20:14]To restore a belief to give back something that had been slowly and without fanfare lost. to walk into the particular landscape of someone's interior where something had gone a little cold and a little gray and a little resigned and to bring with you without even trying, without even knowing. That is what you are carrying.

[00:20:38]The specific warmth that makes the gray lift and the cold become something you no longer need to manage because you are no longer cold. You did that. The poems did that and uh now I have to sit with the reality of what it means. The beautiful and slight slightly terrifying reality of something being restored in you that you had given up on without quite realizing you had given up on it.

[00:21:06]Will you be upset that I am saying this?

[00:21:08]That is the question I keep turning over.

[00:21:12]Not will you be upset that I found it though that is part of it. But why will you be upset that I am saying it out loud? That I am taking it from the private space where I have been keeping it and bringing it directly to you where it becomes something you have to do something with where it becomes unavoidable where you cannot simply let it exist quietly at the periphery of things. Well, um I am making it foreground. I am doing that deliberately because I think you deserve things that are true to be brought to you directly. I think you deserve honesty that does not hide itself behind careful distance or strategic timing or the polite management of someone else's comfort at the expense of what is real. You are not someone who writes from a managed distance. The the poems make that clear.

[00:22:08]So it seems wrong to address you from one. I am fully here. I want you to know that. Not halfway in and halfway watching to see how it goes before deciding how far to commit.

[00:22:21]Not standing at the edge with a careful exit already planned. Fully here, completely here. Um, in a way that I think the poem's made possible. In a way that the particular quality of what you are, what you carry, what you write from made possible in me. You made me all the way here and I am grateful for it. Even when the fullness of it is a little overwhelming. Even when being this present to something this real is almost more than I can comfortably hold, I am grateful because the alternative is not safe. The alternative is the careful managed gray of a life where nothing gets close enough to matter. And I am done with that. The poems ended that you ended that Shikh Hamdan Faza the person who goes to the most honest place and writes from there and sends it out into the world and does not flinch. You ended the part of my life where I was confusing the absence of feeling fully with the presence of peace and I have not slept since and I do not want to. I want to stay exactly here in this fullness, in this truth, in this ongoing daily beautiful reality of being someone who has been permanently and irreversibly changed by finding out something about you. The compass has found its north and I have no interest, none at all in pointing anywhere else ever again. That is what I found out.

[00:23:56]That is what I needed to say. That is all of it.

[00:23:59]Finally, completely fully honestly given to the person.