Pieces
Essays, short fiction, and other writing.
-
Collateral
A Turn Too Early
-
The Best Ideas Come When You Let Go
Default Mode Network and the Art of Not Thinking
-
The Empathy Paradox
Outside Every Story but Our Own
-
It Is Either from Love or Fear
Fear Wears Love’s Face—and Speaks Its Language
-
Why Do Unfinished Things Haunt Us?
The Zeigarnik–Lacan Trap We All Fall Into
-
Jung's Golden Shadow
Why Do We Envy the Things We Forbid Ourselves the Most
-
Our Defense Mechanisms
Have We Handed Over the Keys to Our Own Prisons
-
Will AI Be Enough for Us?
A Reflection on AI's Promise and the Warmth It Can't Replicate
-
Why Do We Say Hello?
Transactional Analysis and the Hidden Games in Our Relationships
The On Series
Seven essays on what we build inside ourselves—and why.
-
On Lying
Not Being Caught Carries Its Own Sentence.
-
On Perceiving
Misperception Is a Corridor Whose Architect Burned the Blueprint.
-
On Looking
A Room Full of Directors and No Audience.
-
On Forgiveness
Cruelty Made Architectural.
-
On Keeping
The Corridor Narrows in Adversity.
-
On Longing
Lighter. Smaller. Younger.
-
On Silence
I Forgot I Had a Cat.
Unified by a corridor metaphor and a movement from the external to the solitary.
Şafak's Arc from The Fragments
How a boy becomes someone who knows where to put his hands.
Book
The Fragments
First, there was Symmetry. Then matter hesitated. It disobeyed. From that hesitation, everything we know and everything we don't was born. Stars learned to hold against the void, and the first cell tasted fear.
Now that same tremor lives in a cup of tea going cold on a kitchen table, in a man who walks into the wrong office and stays, and in a pair of green eyes watching you at three in the morning.
The Fragments is a story of forgetting and remembering, of betrayal and longing, of a silver watch that survives time, and of becoming whole again in a garden at the end of the universe.
Moris
Moris is the silent presence behind the stories, the witness who became part of the work. The muse who is already there.
The one who made it to the cover
About
Hakan Altun
I tell stories that want to live, and I give them a home where they can be.
Most of what I explore lives in the gap between what I feel and what I allow myself to name. Defense mechanisms, the weight of unfinished things, the unwilling negotiations I have with my own reflection—the corridors I keep returning to.
I teach at Yeditepe University in İstanbul—a city that insists on being looked at. What I do is an attempt to look back.