Chapter 7

"Some of us think holding on makes us strong;
but sometimes it is letting go."
- Herman Hesse

Sayid could not recall how long he had bent there, repeating those words. But at last, it was as if a calming wind had breathed on his spirit, and the aching stopped. He fell back onto the sand and he drifted off to sleep. The next morning, he resolved that he would not walk on alone. He would turn home.

He made it back to the beach camp in less than two days, and there he threw himself into the service of others. That night, however, when he gathered his own little fire and sat alone, the pain crept back, but it was somehow different. It was like a bittersweet longing calling him to attention and immersing him in the depths of thought. He drew from his pocket Nadia's photo and Shannon's ballerina, and he held one in each hand, staring at them both in the flickering light of the fire. He felts as if a void were alternately expanding and constricting within his heart.

Tonight, as he sat holding his two prized possessions, his eyes lighting from one to the other, he thought to himself, How could I have loved them both?

He knew he had not betrayed Nadia by loving Shannon. He had never sworn loyalty to Nadia, and he had never expected her to wait for him. He had only been grateful for the work she had begun in his soul, and he had hoped one day to secure her love.

But Sayid had some time ago admitted to himself that clinging jealousy to the mere thought of Nadia was an act neither of love nor of loyalty. He could not now make the same mistake by allowing his memory of Shannon to prevent him from growing and from helping others, from immersing himself in the community of man, from even, one day perhaps, loving again.

For seven years, from Nadia until Shannon, solitude had been his mistress, and she had born him no children; he would not reclaim her now. He would be repeating an old error if he allowed his failure to protect Shannon to consume him and bind him, to lock him away from the hurt and hopes and joys of others. He was determined to allow fellowship back into his heart, and he knew that he must seize happiness if and when it came to him.

So when he now wondered how he could have loved both women, it was not because he thought such dual love impossible or unfaithful. It was because they were two so very different people. If Nadia had accepted his kiss that day in the cell, it would have been for her an act of intimacy no less profound than Shannon's willingness to let him possess her body. Yes, they were very different indeed. And yet he had…somehow he had…though they were as unlike as steel and silk …somehow he had loved them both.

He held the ballerina up to the light and turned it in his hand, wondering again what it could mean. Shannon had possessed so much unrealized potential. And perhaps that was why he had loved her. He had once been shown by the tenderness of a woman what he could become, and he had wanted to do the same for Shannon. The men around her had convinced her she was worthless, and yet Sayid had believed he saw in Shannon the same spark Nadia had once beheld in him, and he had longed to nurse it into a mighty fire. But he had never had the chance to discover if he had been right.

It was strange, he thought, as he looked from one token to the other, it was strange, but it seemed that first love--his love for Nadia--had been the midwife to his love for Shannon.

He lowered the photo and the ballerina and glanced into the fire. He thought again of the father of his people, Ishmael, banished from his home and wandering in a strange and deserted land, of how he must have paused here and there to build an altar to the God Who Hears, sacrificing in the mounting flames some cherished thing, the first fruits of the hunt--the dearest and the rarest. Sayid thought, too, of how the objects he held were not just sweet reminders of past loves, but also permanent symbols of his sins and failures. And then he thought, at last, of how the Sufi poet Rumi had asked his disciples, "Would you willingly wear manacles just because they're made of gold?"

"Allah," he whispered, "you are my last and only refuge." And then he dropped the photo in the fire with one hand, the ballerina with the other. He watched the face of Nadia curl and melt, and he saw the color fade from Shannon's tiny treasure.

And as he watched the last shred of Nadia's photograph turn to ash, he heard approaching from across the ocean the rough roar of a propeller plane, and he watched it glide choppily across the beach toward the jungle, falling closer to the land every moment. It crashed through the foliage, and its landing was surprisingly quiet, but he could see the flames beginning to grow. He rose and ran toward it. Half of the beach camp rose and ran after him.