KABUL, Afghanistan — The last time Zaheer Ahmad Zindani thought he could still see, he was 17 and in a hospital bed, covered with shrapnel wounds from a Taliban bomb.

He asked the doctor for a mirror.

«The doctor told me, ‘Son, you don’t have eyes, how will you be able to see your eyes?’» Mr. Zindani recalled. «I raised my hand to feel my eyes — it was the ashes after a fire has burned, and nothing else.»

That was five years ago. Even as the reality of his blindness made him howl with grief, another realization took his breath away: His love for his childhood sweetheart had already been difficult because the girl’s family did not see him as worthy. Now, it was surely doomed.

«If I had lost my eyes and had her hand, I would still be happy,» he said. «But now I neither have eyes, nor her.»

Mr. Zindani is one of the founders of a march for peace that reached Kabul, the Afghan capital, in June after a nearly 40-day, 640-kilometer slog from the south of the country through summer heat and war-torn territory. He is protesting a war that has, so far, swallowed his father, his uncle, his sister, his eyes and his love.

Mr. Zindani, now 22, is illiterate. But he is a poet. At home, he has 50 pages of original poetry that he dictated to his siblings, including these lines:

Even after I died, my eyes did not shut

Waiting for you, I remained looking at the door.

When he was 7, his family lived in Gereshk, in Helmand Province. They farmed opium poppy, wheat and grapes along a main highway used by coalition forces to supply the units that were pushing into what had been Taliban territory.

One day, his father and uncle were preparing the fields for a second crop, onions, when they were hit by an American airstrike, Mr. Zindani said.

«We found nothing of them, not even their blood,» he said. «It was just a large crater, and dust.»

His father, Ghulam Wali, was 29 when he was killed.

After the airstrike, Mr. Zindani’s family moved to Kandahar, near distant relatives who had a young daughter. She was also 7, and the two children were often together. When they played hide and seek, Mr. Zindani would find himself «deliberately» hiding with her.

«I just liked her way of talking, her walking, her scent, everything about her,» he said. «Wherever she would be walking, I would find myself there. I didn’t know it — I would just end up there.»

As the two grew close, Mr. Zindani moved with his remaining family members to another district, where he became a mechanic’s apprentice. But every time his mother visited the relatives, he would come with her, just to see the girl.

When did he know it was love? They were both 12. They were walking to a shop.

«I remember reaching out to take her hand,» he said. She reciprocated, and they giggled.

The girl’s mother was understanding of the young romance, Mr. Zindani said. «Whatever is her destiny,» he remembered her saying with a smile.

But that is not a typical attitude toward marriage in Afghanistan, and her father, coming from a rich background, did not see him as fit for his daughter. But Mr. Zindani knew he had a trump card: the girl’s heart. She loved him.

All that changed when he lost his eyes.

The night before, Mr. Zindani had booked two bus tickets in Kandahar. Just before dawn, he and his sister Ahmadia, 15, set off to visit relatives in Herat Province. They had grown close — she was his secret bearer, and a frequent courier for his love notes.

They were sitting in the fourth row opposite the driver, he recalled, when the bus struck a roadside bomb planted by the Taliban. He remembers fire all around him, and either him or Ahmadia screaming their mother’s name.

She didn’t make it.

«When I reached the hospital, I remember calling out for her,» Mr. Zindani said. «No one would say anything.»

After the bombing, the family of his love made their opposition clear: Not only was he from a different province and tribe, now he was blind and could not provide for a family. They married her off, and she now has a baby, he said.

Mr. Zindani said that he still talks with her sometimes, secretly, on the phone.

Images are not just something of the past for Mr. Zindani. They grow, they keep him busy.

«In my mind, I find myself in a place where there is no one else. I walk, with myself, and I start from the beginning of one poem, to the end of another. I keep walking,» Mr. Zindani said. «There have been times that, in my thoughts, I have made her mine, that in my thoughts, we have gone very far.»

He paused.

«Then, as they say, ‘When I raised my head, I was nothing.’ »

He wrestles with the question of whether a love denied is better than none at all.

«I have not reached an answer,» he said.

Solace in poetry, mental images and a dream of peace.

© 2018 The New York Times