Disappeared

Ali Disappeared in Used Bookstore in Kuwait..
A poem by: Hikmet Elhadj
He went in breathing names.
Spines leaned together like tired men
at the end of a long argument.
The shelves were thick with years,
with commas of dust
settling softly on forgotten wars.

The air was granular.
Every book exhaled its age.
Paper breathed back into him—
mildew, ink, the faint bitterness of glue—
until his lungs learned another alphabet
and forgot their own.

He stood between histories
that had already survived their readers.
Time lay loose here,
unbound,
falling from the edges of pages.

The owner of the bookstore says
Ali did not fall.
He loosened.

Ali thinned into colorless grains,
fine as punctuation erased by touch.
Sand unmade of deserts,
born from margins and footnotes,
whirling once,
twice—
a small private weather.

It moved across the covers:
blue biographies,
red revolutions,
green promises of gardens that never existed.
It slid into titles,
hid in the curve of letters,
settled where fingers pause before choosing.

Now when you open a book there,
something shifts.
A faint resistance.
A breath you cannot place.

Ali is no longer reading.
He is being read—
slowly,
by time,
by dust,
by every hand that lifts a book
and feels, for an instant,
the weight change.

Turning into grains of sand
He melted like salt
between the fingers of time,
Swirled around like a mysterious storm,
Scattering across all the books
Until his trace was lost.

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