The halıcı in Kreuzberg owns the building and won't sell a single flat. Narrow and tall, French balconies on every floor. Every flat one-plus-one. Kahraman walks through all of them. The ground floor is high, windows two and a half meters off the street. Unlike the open-plan boxes upstairs, this one has a separate kitchen. He takes it. The street isn't safe, but his budget reaches here. The best of what's possible, he tells himself, taking the keys.

The couch is from before. The television. Everything else stayed with the apartment, and the apartment stayed with her. The car went last month, when the alimony schedule began.

Next door there's a place with film-coated windows. No sign. Door always closed in daylight. On the other side, Hotel İnci. His window faces the road, high up. No one could reach in from the street, he thinks. Safe.

He moves in.

Within the first week, a Friday night, he falls asleep on the couch. He has come home late again, the suit jacket on the chair, the tie still around his neck, loose. Supernatural is on. He isn't watching it. The vasistas is open because the glass gets warm.

—Yeğenim, get me a water from there.

The voice cracks in his ear. Thick, clear, sure of itself. He jolts awake. The sound is inside the room, vibrating against the couch cushions.

—Coming right up, he mutters, swinging his feet to the floor, taking a step toward the dark kitchen.

Down on the street, metal legs scrape against the pavement. A chair is pulled back.

He stops.

He goes to the window. The floor is cold under his bare feet. He looks down through the vasistas. They've set a table right under his glass. Two men. Rakı. A half-empty bottle sweating onto the tablecloth. The stocky one, mustached, a little heavy, looks toward the film-coated windows. The waiter steps out. He moves with a practiced tilt of the shoulder, a man used to sliding through narrow spaces. So it's a pavyon. It opens on weekends.

He closes the vasistas slowly. The hinge glides. The latch clicks—a small, bright sound. The man below doesn't look up. He knows what happens above him without lifting his chin.

Weeks pass. Kahraman still doesn't know the street. Which corner is empty at which hour, which shutter rolls down when. He stops looking down from the vasistas. The heavy bassline of the pavyon's music creeps through the floorboards every Friday. It arrives through the soles of his feet before his ears register it. Sometimes, coming home late, he sees a shadow lingering by the film-coated windows. A cigarette glows. The orange tip flares bright, then dims. The smoke rises in a thin column, no wind to break it. A head turns his way. His shoulders tighten. A bouncer getting air, he tells himself. I have the street memorized.

One night he is walking home. Late. Light rain. The kind that hangs in the air, beading on wool, on eyelashes. Distracted by the math he can't stop running—the rent, the alimony, the December bonus that probably won't come this year. Instead of the usual corner he turns one earlier. His feet decide before he does. A few steps in, the street narrows, and narrows again. The walls lean in. This is one street under mine, or one above, he thinks. I don't know. The asphalt is wetter here, older, cracked in places where weeds have pushed through and died.

Four of them at the corner. Around him. They see he is uneasy. The tall one tilts his head. A question mark with shoulders.

—Hayırdır birader.

The word birader lands flat, a stone dropped on a counter. The man's hands stay in his coat pockets. Kahraman sees the weight there, the stillness of something held.

—Nothing. I'm going home.

—You don't just pass through here like that. Hold up a second.

His tongue dries. The spit thickens at the back of his throat.

—Brother, don't start, not at this hour. I live up the road, let me get home.

One of them lets out a hollow laugh—air pushed through teeth. From behind, a hand finds his hair. Thick fingers, knuckles grinding into his scalp. His neck snaps back. The skin at his temples goes tight. He hears the wet click of his own throat. The one in front draws his head back, comes forward to headbutt him. Kahraman jerks his head sharply to the right. Hair slips from the grip—a burning rip, strands giving. The other's skull meets air. Teeth clack together, the impact landing in his own jaw.

The one beside him reaches for his belt. With the corner of his eye Kahraman catches the grip—black, ribbed. His hands scramble at the man's waist, clumsy, desperate. The nylon of his jacket slips under his fingers. A belt loop, a cold zipper, then metal. The grip fits wrong in his palm—backwards, sideways. Cold and surprisingly heavy. He yanks it free, throwing his shoulder blindly into the man's chest. The air leaves him in a grunt. He goes down, the back of his skull hitting the asphalt with a sound like a dropped melon. The one in front steps in. Kahraman swings the gun wildly, gripping it by the middle. The heavy steel butt catches him across the cheekbone. A dense, wet sound. He stumbles back, one hand going to his face, fingers coming away dark.

Kahraman stumbles too, completely off balance, and someone catches him from behind, by the neck. The rough fabric of a sleeve cuts off his air. Wool. It smells of cigarette smoke and something sour, old sweat dried into the fibers. The heavy gun slips from his fingers. His fingernails scrape against it as it falls. Something strikes the back of his head. A sharp, bright white. Then the ground.

A trailer.

He opens his eyes. Low ceiling. The panels are warped, water-stained at the corners. A yellowish light. It buzzes—a fluorescent tube on its last weeks, flickering too fast to catch. The hum gives it away. Smell of fried oil, sweat, and cheap barbershop cologne. The oil is old, reused too many times, a sour note underneath the grease. His head throbs in a slow, rhythmic pulse. The back of his neck is wet. Sticky. He leaves it untouched. His suit jacket is still on, the shoulders dark with rain. The tie has gone somewhere. The shirt is wet at the collar. The clothes belong to a different room than this one.

His hands rest on his knees, pressing into the cracked vinyl of a booth seat. His left thumb trembles—a small spasm. He watches it. The thumbnail is dirty. Blood under it. He focuses on the thumb because looking up means seeing things his bladder won't survive. The thumb trembles. He watches it tremble.

Someone sits across from him. He smells the man before he sees him—the cologne, sharp and synthetic, cutting through the oil. Leather pants shift against vinyl with a sound like a low exhale. White shirt, two buttons open at the top. The light is behind him, a corona around his head, his features in shadow. He sits like a boss. The booth creaks under his weight.

—Who are you, the man says. His voice is calm. A verification.

—Kahraman, he says. His own voice comes out flat, a dead string.

The man turns the word over, slowly. Kahraman ha. A brief smile. The smile stops at the mouth.

—What were you doing there.

—Wrong turn.

The words leave his mouth and immediately feel thin, a lie that tells the truth. The boss gives a short laugh. He turns to the man beside him and says something low, fast. The words sit close to each other, too fast to catch. One word lands. Halıcı. The other man nods, slowly, as if confirming a name on a list. The boss looks back at Kahraman. Something has settled behind his eyes. The other one takes something from a bag. Small. A vial. The glass catches the yellow light. A syringe still in sterile packaging, which he tears open with his teeth.

—Don't worry, the boss says. Nothing's going to happen. You'll just calm down.

The other man taps the vial. The glass clicks—a clean, medical sound. He draws the liquid, slow, deliberate. The plunger rises with slight resistance. He holds the syringe up to the yellow light and flicks it with a thick finger. Once. Twice. The bubbles inside scatter and regroup. A single drop blooms at the tip of the needle, catching the light like a bead of glass.

The man takes Kahraman's wrist. Clinical. His fingers are dry and warm. He turns the forearm up. The inside of the elbow is pale, blue veins branching under the skin like a river delta. He taps the crook of the arm with two fingers—soft, almost polite, like a nurse. Something tightens around the bicep. A belt. The leather bites, then settles. The veins rise. A cold circle of alcohol. The smell cuts through the fried-oil air, sharp and clean, a hospital smell. Then the needle.

Cold, sliding in. He feels each layer give—the skin, the fat, the wall of the vein, each one a separate surrender. A small pop he feels more than hears. When the plunger goes down, the cold travels up his arm and into his chest, a slow tide. The needle withdraws. A cotton ball pressed to the inside of his elbow, held there for a count of three. The belt loosens.

For three seconds nothing happens.

On the fourth, it starts.

Fear detaches. It moves behind glass. He can see it—a small, familiar shape, his own fear, pacing like an animal in the next room. He can't touch it. He doesn't need to. The trailer blurs at the edges, sharp in the middle. The yellow light is very yellow. The buzz of the fluorescent tube separates into individual frequencies. The boss is still talking. His voice arrives a little late, thunder following lightning, sound lagging behind the shape of his mouth.

His head is too clear. Everything visible at once. The boss's face is in the light now. An ordinary face. A mole under his left eye. An old shaving cut on his jaw that healed wrong. His eyelashes are short. He notices all of it. The information piles up, useless and precise.

Two streets over, a dark blue VW Passat is parked along the curb. The kind of car no one looks at twice. Rain on the windshield, beading and running, beading and running. Inside, two men. The younger one in the passenger seat, leaning forward, breath fogging the glass. He wipes a circle clear with the side of his hand. From here the trailer sits in an empty lot at the end of the alley, fifty meters away. A weak square of yellow light leaking from one of its windows.

On the dashboard, a battered Lehramt prep book for Geschichte. Coffee stains on page 47. The pages are wavy from a coffee that never dried right. He doesn't open it anymore. He no longer pretends he will.

The radio between them crackles.

—...negative, negative, hold position. I say again, hold.

The older one, behind the wheel, doesn't move. His hands are at ten and two as if he's still driving. The younger one's voice is tight, the throat constricting around the words:

—He's a civilian. They took him inside. We have visual on the civilian. I repeat, we have visual.

The word stays with him after he says it. Civilian. He had wanted to teach history. Three exams the other way and he might still be one.

Static. A long breath of it, filling the car like water filling a basin. The younger one's leg is bouncing. The older one sees it but says nothing.

The older one lights a cigarette, cracks the window an inch. He has been doing this twenty years. He still likes it, mostly. Tonight he likes it less.

—Six months on this. Six months. You breach now, it's burned. Hold. Your. Position. Do not engage. Acknowledge.

The younger one closes his eyes. Opens them. The trailer's yellow window doesn't change. He swallows. He keys the radio.

—Collateral. Copy. Standing by.

He releases the button. The static hums. The older one finally turns his head. There's nothing in his face. He looks back through the windshield, at the rain, at the yellow window. The younger one wipes the glass again. The circle re-fogs almost immediately.

The word sits between them. Collateral. Neither of them touches it.

Inside the trailer the boss stands. The booth sighs as his weight leaves it. He leans over Kahraman. His cologne has a base note that wasn't there from across the table, something musky and warm. He rests a hand on Kahraman's shoulder. The weight of it almost kind.

—Sleep, he says. Don't fight it. You won't remember any of this anyway.

I have to remember, Kahraman thinks. The thought surfaces through the chemical warmth, a stone breaking still water. His brain throws up walls. Hold, he tells himself. He carves the room into memory, traps the details with words before they dissolve. The cracked vinyl under his left hand—a split in the shape of a Y, the foam underneath yellowed and stiff. The hum of the fluorescent tube—a note somewhere between si bemol and si. The boss's face—ordinary, tired around the eyes, the mole, the shaving scar. Smell of fried oil, the sour note beneath it. The cotton ball still pressed to his arm, held by tape he doesn't remember being applied.

He repeats them. Vinyl. Yellow light. Si bemol. Oil. Mole under left eye.

The words slip. They slide off each other. The edges of the trailer dissolve into the damp concrete of the street. His eyes slide shut—heavy, warm, a slow curtain falling. He tries to hold onto the yellow light, but it turns into a streetlamp. The sodium orange of the lamp outside his building. I'm one street above, he thinks, or one below. Why didn't the halıcı sell the building, he thinks, one last time, very slowly, each word a heavy stone he drags.

Vinyl.

Vasistas.

Yellow light.

Yeğenim.

A water.

The desk phone rang. He kept reading.

The second ring sounded. His fingers hit the keys.

The third ring echoed. He pressed send.

On the fourth, he raised his head and lifted the receiver.

“Speaking.”

A hurried voice spilled from the earpiece. He let it run.

“Step by step,” he said. “Do not confuse me.”

He listened. The voice slowed.

“Alright,” he said. “We will talk about this.”

He placed the receiver back in its cradle.

The door opened. His secretary stepped in. She carried a black leather planner. She did not knock; it was precisely four o’clock.

She stopped at the edge of the desk.

“The dinner reservation is confirmed,” she said. “For your wife’s birthday.”

He looked up from the screen. He looked at the open planner in her hands, then up at her face.

“Yes.”

She held his gaze for a second. She closed the planner.

“Thank you,” he said.

She nodded. She turned. She left.

The door closed behind her. He pressed his palms flat against the mahogany. He closed the laptop.

The cabin inside the car was quiet, insulated from the traffic outside.

“The margin is too tight,” his friend said from the passenger seat. He loosened his tie. “If the quarter ends low, they will pull the funding.”

“They will not,” he said. He watched the road. His hands rested at ten and two on the leather steering wheel. “The projections are stable.”

His friend shifted. He slid down in the seat and lifted his left leg, resting the side of his shoe against the lower edge of the dashboard.

“Still,” his friend said. “It is a risk we don’t have to take right now.”

“It is a calculated shift,” he said.

He lifted his hand from the wheel. He extended his index finger. He tapped it against the side of his friend’s knee.

His friend dropped his foot back to the floor mat. He sat up.

“What did you get her?”

“It’s handled.”

“Calculated,” his friend repeated. “But they want guarantees.”

He returned his hand to the wheel.

“I will give them guarantees,” he said.

“Legacy lane in four hundred meters. Manual control will engage.”

“You’re taking the long way as usual.”

Şafak did not answer.

His hands tightened on the wheel.

The restaurant was quiet. His suit jacket hung over the back of his chair. He wore a white shirt.

He lowered his wine glass. A single drop of dark red liquid detached from the rim. It fell. It landed on his chest. The red seeped into the white cotton, expanding in a perfect, dark circle.

His wife stopped eating. She did not speak. She looked at the red mark on his chest. Then she looked up at his face. She waited.

He placed the glass on the table.

“Excuse me,” he said.

He stood up. As he walked across the dining room, a waiter stepped aside for him. Their eyes met for a second. The waiter inclined his head, almost imperceptibly. He continued toward the restrooms.

Four minutes passed.

He returned to the table. He sat down.

His wife looked at his chest. The shirt was immaculate. There was no stain. There was no damp patch from scrubbing. A single faint line ran down the center, from collar to waist.

He picked up his fork.

“The flight is booked for Thursday,” he said.

She picked up her glass. They continued talking.

He unlocked the front door. Laughter drifted from the living room. He walked down the hall. Four friends were on the sofas, holding drinks. He stopped at the threshold.

“Good evening,” he said. He nodded.

He did not wait for the conversation to resume. He turned and walked into the kitchen.

His wife stood at the stove. He took off his suit jacket and hung it on the back of a wooden chair. He unbuttoned his cuffs. He rolled the white sleeves up to his elbows. He turned on the faucet, washed his hands, and dried them on a towel. He stepped up to the counter beside her.

She hummed a low tune, tossing the vegetables in the pan with a flick of her wrist before turning smoothly to pull a stack of plates from the overhead cabinet.

He picked up a discarded garlic peel from the marble. He dropped it into the bin. He took a damp cloth. He wiped the invisible residue from the counter.

She reached across him for the olive oil, poured a thin stream into the pan, and tasted the sauce from the edge of a wooden spoon. “Almost there,” she murmured to the stove.

He turned the burner dial down by a fraction of a millimeter. He took the olive oil bottle from where she had left it. He placed it back in the pantry.

One of the men walked into the kitchen. He held a glass of red wine. He leaned against the island.

“Need any help in here?” the man asked.

She smiled over her shoulder. “No, we have it under control. Go sit.”

The man chuckled. He set his wine glass down on the marble island. He began talking about the traffic on the bridge, gesturing with his free hand.

He stood perfectly still. He listened. He looked at the base of the wine glass resting directly on the marble surface.

“Coming,” the man called out in response to a voice from the living room. He turned and walked out, leaving the half-full glass behind.

He stepped forward. He pinched the stem of the glass. He lifted it and moved it ten centimeters to the right, placing it exactly dead center on a square slate coaster.

“Plates,” she said.

She spooned the food in fluid, generous arcs. He took the plates, two at a time. He carried them into the dining room. He set them down at each place setting. The guests moved to the table. Chairs scraped against the floor.

Before he pulled his own chair out, he stopped. He looked back through the open doorway. The stove was off. The counters were wiped clean. The olive oil was put away.

He sat down. He picked up his linen napkin and placed it across his lap.

“The quarterly reports are due on Monday,” he said.

She laughed at something a guest whispered, and passed the salad bowl down the table.

Morning. The hallway was dim. He stood at the front door, briefcase in his right hand, keys in his left.

He turned to face the living room. The sofa cushions were straight. The throw blanket was folded. The coffee table was clear.

A single glass stood on the side table by the armchair. Half full. Water, by the look of it. Caught the light once as he turned.

He set the briefcase down. He set the keys down on top of it.

He walked to the side table. He picked up the glass. The silver watch slid forward on his wrist the way it always did. He carried the glass to the kitchen. He poured the water into the sink. He rinsed the glass. He placed it upside down on the drying rack.

The house was silent.

He stood at the sink. He looked at the clean glass. He reached out and tightened the faucet handle, though no water was dripping.

The cove, when I reached it, was exactly as beautiful as he’d said it would be. The cliff faced west. The water was clear. The sun was an hour from setting.

I sat on a rock near the edge and looked out at the sea. Lena’s morning notification floated back to me: Your sleep quality last night was 43% below baseline. Lena recommends postponing essential decisions today. I’d dismissed it before we left. I’d dismissed the same warning years ago, the night before that café—the night Deniz had called me. “Konuşmamız lazım,” she had said, and I had said yes too quickly. From somewhere inside myself, a voice had said maybe sleep on it, maybe wait. I hadn’t waited.

Lena buzzed: You seem to be alone. Would you like me to adjust the dinner reservation to one person?

I stared at the notification for a long time. And then Deniz’s sentence came back to me—the one she’d said in that café years ago, the one I’d walked out of thinking I’d understood. We’re both children pretending to be adults. That’s all we’ve ever been. I had heard it as a confession about her and Şafak. A diagnosis I could use. I had not heard—had refused to hear—that she was sitting at a table with a third person, and that the sentence had three subjects, not two.

I had been the oldest person in that café. I had also been the youngest.

Then I typed the only honest thing I’d said all day:

Don’t do anything. Just wait.

Lena paused. Then:

Condition undefined. Queuing request.

Two years of learning me, and this was the one thing she couldn’t parse. She’d handled just wait before, that afternoon with the syllabus, with a simple understood. She couldn’t parse it this time because I didn’t know what I was waiting for. And she could tell.

The sun went down. The water turned from blue to gold to black. Somewhere on a road to the north, Şafak was walking toward a town whose name I didn’t know, carrying everything I’d broken in a bag too small to hold it.

I sat there until the stars came out. The car, parked behind me in the dark, waited—as it always did—for a command I no longer knew how to give.

Neither of us answered right away. Şafak was looking out the window, doing that thing he does where he rests his temple against the glass and watches the landscape scroll by as if it were footage from someone else’s life. I was watching the road—which, I know, is an outdated habit. The car didn’t need me to watch anything. But my hands still floated near the wheel even though it hadn’t required them in over a year.

“Something calm,” Şafak said finally.

The car played something acoustic. Spanish guitar, maybe Portuguese. It had learned us well enough by now—no lyrics when the mood was ambiguous, nothing percussive before noon.

We were heading south toward a cove Şafak had found. Somewhere past Kuşadası, he said, tucked beneath a cliff that faced west. Two days. No agenda. Seven months of not talking. This was our way of not mentioning it.

My phone buzzed before we’d cleared the city limits. Two notifications, stacked. The first: Lena has submitted a request—Grocery order (14 items, ₺312.40). Review & merge? The second, quieter, tucked beneath it like a footnote: Your sleep quality last night was 43% below baseline. Lena recommends postponing essential decisions today.

I dismissed the second one and opened the first. Lena—my assistant, though the word felt wrong, like calling your lungs your breathing assistant—had drafted the weekly order. Mostly the usual: eggs, bread, that one brand of olives I liked but could never remember the name of. She’d swapped the regular milk for lactose-free. A small annotation floated beneath the change: Based on your last three conversations about bloating. I approved it with a tap. Merged.

Şafak’s phone buzzed a second later. He looked at it, frowned, and put it back down.

“What?” I said.

“Atlas wants me to confirm the accommodation. I told it we’d figure it out when we got there.”

“So reject it.”

“I did. Twice. It keeps opening new requests.”

“That’s because you haven’t told it what you actually want.”

“I want it to wait.”

“It doesn’t know what waiting looks like if you haven’t defined the condition.”

He exhaled through his nose. This was a recurring thing with Şafak. He knew that every request was an invitation to decide, and he treated decisions the way some people treat phone calls—something to avoid until someone else answered.

“Just tell Atlas to queue it until we’re thirty minutes out,” I said.

He picked up his phone. I heard him murmur something—the soft, private tone people used with their assistants, the voice you’d never use with another human because it was too honest, too unperformed. A few seconds later, his phone went quiet.

I’d told Lena to wait once, a few weeks ago. I’d been looking at a revised syllabus she’d drafted—clean outcomes, balanced workload, every assessment aligned too neatly with the rubric—and I’d typed: Don’t send it yet. Just wait. Lena had asked: Waiting for what? And I’d answered: I’ll know when I see it. She’d paused for three seconds, then: Understood. Queuing request. Lena could parse ambiguity if you gave her enough context. She’d been learning me for two years.

The highway opened up past Aydın. The Aegean light flattened the landscape into an overexposed photograph. Fig trees and stone walls lined the road, all of it bleached by the same flat glare. An old petrol station sat back from the road, its pumps gone, its canopy stripped to rusted steel. Someone had converted the office into a roadside tea stop—a hand-painted sign, a few plastic chairs under a sagging awning. Most of these places were gone now, abandoned or converted into charging stations. The car pulled into a charging bay without asking. A quiet notification: Charging session initiated. Estimated duration: 8 minutes. Payment merged.

No one got out.

We passed a truck carrying wind turbine blades. Three of them, enormous, white, strapped to a flatbed that seemed too small for the cargo. The truck was in the legacy lane. An old man in a cap, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, doing everything himself. The car moved left without asking, giving the truck a wide berth. I watched the blades in the side mirror, shrinking, looking like the bones of something enormous being carried away.

A few road signs remained, faded blue rectangles pointing to towns, but most of the newer stretches had none at all. The cars didn’t need them. Now the exits came to you.

Şafak was talking about work. His team was designing a long-range strategy while Atlas managed the regulatory filings, the financial simulations, the stakeholder communication loops. Şafak’s job, increasingly, was judgment. He decided what felt right. His assistant handled what was right—the frameworks, the projections, the compliance reviews. When they disagreed, Şafak would submit a revision, and Atlas would push back with a counter-proposal, annotated with data and precedent.

“Sometimes it feels like I’m arguing with a very polite version of my father,” he said.

I laughed. “At least Atlas gives reasons.”

“That’s what makes it worse. You can’t storm out of a conversation with someone who responds in bullet points and cites compliance frameworks from 2023.”

He said “reject” instead of “refuse.” He said “I’ll draft something” instead of “I’ll think about it.” We all did.

Around noon the car suggested we stop for lunch. A notification appeared on both our phones simultaneously: Joint lunch recommendation drafted by Lena & Atlas. Coastal restaurant, 4 km ahead. Menu pre-filtered for your dietary preferences. Review & merge?

Şafak stared at his screen. “They made us a joint draft.”

“They coordinate. They’ve been talking to each other all morning—navigation, accommodation, now this.”

“I don’t want a joint draft. I want to decide what I eat when I see the menu.”

“There aren’t really menus anymore.”

“I know there aren’t really menus anymore.”

He rejected the draft. I watched him do it—his thumb pressing down on the screen with more force than the gesture required.

We didn’t stop for lunch.

I don’t know what triggered it—maybe the heat, maybe the flatness of the road, maybe the way Şafak was sitting with his arm resting exactly the way he used to rest it on the kitchen counter back in his old apartment. Near Söke, a memory floated up like a body surfacing in still water.

Under the hazy yellow light of the hood, the refrigerator humming its low constant note. A Tuesday, or maybe a Wednesday—a featureless night that doesn’t bother becoming a specific day. Şafak leaning against the counter, tea in one hand, the other rubbing the back of his neck. He was talking the way a man empties a room of furniture, piece by piece, until nothing is left but the bare floor and the echo.

About her. About the fights. About how every conversation ended the same way—raised voices, slammed doors, three days of silence, and then a phone call at midnight that pulled everything back together like a drawstring. On and off. On and off. The rhythm of it had become its own kind of sickness.

I remember his face in that light. The extractor fan made everyone look jaundiced, but that night he looked worse—hollowed out, the shadows under his eyes deep enough to hold water. His phone was face down on the counter. A WhatsApp notification lit up the screen and died. The radio was playing something low—a talk show, maybe. Someone else’s problems murmuring in the background behind his.

“I’m done,” he said. He said it with a hollow certainty, testing the sentence to see how it sounded in the air.

I listened. I nodded. I poured more tea.

And that night in that kitchen, under that yellow light, I made a decision that wasn’t mine to make.

The car said: “There’s a rest stop in four kilometers. Your hydration pattern suggests a break.”

“We’re fine,” I said.

“I’m noting that Şafak hasn’t had water in ninety minutes.”

Şafak reached for his bottle and took a sip purely to make the car stop talking about it.

“It also knows I slept badly,” he said. “Atlas sent me a thing this morning. Your sleep quality was below baseline. Consider postponing important decisions.” He put on a flat, clinical voice for the quote. “I rejected it.”

“I got the same one,” I said.

“From Atlas?”

“From Lena. Same message, more or less.”

“Did you reject it too?”

“Of course.”

He almost smiled. For a moment we were two men united by the same small rebellion—swatting away the same fly. It felt good. It felt like us.

We passed an old eczane sign, the red E bleached to pink, mounted above a shuttered storefront. Most prescriptions were automated now. Your assistant talked to your doctor’s system, the order was placed, the delivery arrived. The physical pharmacy—that strange, intimate room where you stood in line next to strangers who could see what pills you were picking up—had quietly disappeared. There was no privacy in those old queues, but there was something else: the decisions were yours. You picked up the box, you read the label, you handed over the cash. Nobody drafted anything on your behalf.

The conversation had been careful so far. Measured. Two men circling the center of a room without stepping on the rug. I asked about his projects. He asked about my work. I told him about a student presentation that had come through so garbled Lena had flagged it as either panic, plagiarism, or both. He laughed. The sound was good. Warm.

Then, we started talking about people we knew. Mutual friends. Who was doing what. And somehow, a name surfaced.

“I saw Deniz last month,” Şafak said.

Her name landed in the car the way a coin lands on marble.

“How is she?” I said, and my voice came out exactly right, which is how I knew something was wrong.

“Good, I think. She’s in Bodrum now. Runs some kind of wellness thing.” He paused. “She asked about you.”

“About me?”

“She asked how you were. I said I didn’t know. We hadn’t talked in a while.”

He said it without accusation, as if he was offering a card face up on a table—take it or leave it.

The second memory came faster. A café—one of those places with exposed brick and too many plants, where they charge twenty lira for a filter coffee and call it “batch brew.” This was before the systems took over, before everything became requests and approvals. You paid with a card. You tapped it on a machine and it beeped and that was it.

She sat across from me. Deniz. Taller than you’d expect from photos. She was wearing a jacket with the collar turned up and her hands were wrapped around a cup she wasn’t drinking from.

I don’t remember the exact words. I’ve tried, over the years, and they won’t come back whole. Something like: “You two aren’t good for each other.” Or maybe: “This can’t go on.” Or maybe something worse, something more presumptuous, like: “He deserves better than this.” I hope I didn’t say that. But I might have.

She looked at me without any immediate anger; that probably surfaced later, in private. At that moment, her expression held something closer to recognition. As if she’d been waiting for someone to say it. Then she said, quietly: “We’re both children pretending to be adults. That’s all we’ve ever been.”

I didn’t understand it then. I thought she was talking about herself and Şafak—a diagnosis I could file away and use.

I paid. She didn’t reach for the bill. I opened the door for her and she walked through it without turning around. I stood on the sidewalk for a minute, watching her go, feeling the weightlessness of something I’d just pushed past saving.

The next day, her tone changed. Şafak called me that week. “We had a fight,” he said. “But this time she won’t come back.” He sounded confused. They’d always fought—screaming matches that ended with doors and silence and midnight phone calls. They always came back. That was the deal. Fight and return, fight and return, the rhythm as predictable as a tide.

But this time the tide went out and didn’t come back.

I said: “Maybe it’s for the best.”

I never told him what I’d done.

A group message notification slid across my phone: 12 new messages in “Cove Trip” group. 2 relevant to you. Summary: Şafak shared a location pin for the cove. Atlas confirmed sunset time for your arrival window.

I didn’t open it. I’d noticed it around the second hour of driving: the music was changing in ways that didn’t match our requests. The Spanish guitar had given way to something softer, almost meditative. Neither of us had asked for it. Lena and Atlas were reading our biometrics and choosing tracks to keep us calm. Managing us.

The road was narrowing. We’d left the highway and were on a two-lane stretch that wound along the coast. The sea appeared in flashes between the hills—bright, flat, impossibly blue.

“Can I ask you something?” Şafak said.

“Sure.”

“You always do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make decisions for other people.”

He said it the way you describe a habit you’ve noticed in someone for years and never mentioned until now.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you have a pattern. You see a situation, you decide what’s best, and you act. You don’t ask. You don’t wait. You just—handle it. Like you’re everyone’s project manager.”

The third memory. The one I had pushed the farthest down.

A torrential downpour that had turned the world into a single grey sound, erasing the line between air and water. Sokak. Gece. Şafak standing in the middle of the street in his sneakers, no socks, soaked through, lit up by a pair of headlights like a man caught in a searchlight.

I was watching from the window of the small bedroom—the room I’d retreated to hours earlier when she’d burst through the front door in her fur coat, tall and furious, looking like a queen arriving to burn down a castle. She’d screamed at me to move and I’d moved. “Çekil!” And I’d gone to the small room and closed the door and listened to the walls absorb their war.

The screaming. Her finger on his forehead, jabbing. “Benden ne istiyorsun.” His voice low, steady: “Git. Sonra konuşalım.” She sat. She stood. She sat again. She was testing him—I understood that later. But Şafak didn’t break. He opened the door and she left.

Then midnight. A restaurant, two streets away. Rakı alone at a table by the sea. I went with him to pick her up. The argument resumed. I walked home ahead of them.

And then the street. The rain. She was in the car and she turned it toward him and hit the gas. I was watching from above and my hand went to the glass. A game. A power play. He knew she’d stop. She had to stop. But the rain—the road was wet, the car could skid, and Şafak stood there, feet planted, jaw set, a man refusing to move for a force he calculated wouldn’t kill him. “Gelsin ya,” I could almost hear him say. “Lanet olsun.”

The car screamed down the street and stopped. Zero distance. He opened her door. “Bizi öldüreceksen söyle, ailemi arayıp veda edeyim.”

She put the car in reverse, pulled out to the main road—and turned into oncoming traffic. Horns and headlights tore through the rain as he screamed at her to pull over. Somehow they made it into a side street. She got out and lit a cigarette. He watched her for a long moment—the smoke curling up through the rain, the orange tip of the cigarette the only warm thing in the entire scene—and then she got in the car without a word and drove away.

He called. She didn’t answer. He called again. Fifty calls later, he was in a taxi at two in the morning, going to her apartment. She locked the door behind him and hid the key. They stayed there for three days. They ate very little, and never at the same table. Didn’t speak. On the fourth day, they made up.

That was the night I decided she had to go.

“I don’t make decisions for other people,” I said.

“You do. You always have. You see someone drowning and instead of throwing a rope, you swim out and drag them to the shore you picked.”

The car drove on. The guitar track had shifted to something in a minor key—the system reading the room, adjusting. I wished it would stop.

“Is this about something specific?” I said.

“You know what it’s about.”

I didn’t answer. The silence stretched until the car filled it with the soft hum of its own movement.

“After Deniz and I broke up,” Şafak said, “something changed. In her. Overnight. We’d fought a hundred times. Worse than what you saw. Much worse. But we always came back. Every time. And then one day she just—didn’t. The door closed and it stayed closed. I never understood why.”

The car spoke. Not a warning, not a mediation offer—just a flat, procedural sentence dropped into the silence:

“I have access to communication records from that period. I can retrieve them if it would help establish what was said.”

“No,” I said.

The word came out too fast. I heard it and Şafak heard it and the car, in its silent way, heard it too.

Şafak looked at me with something worse than surprise: confirmation.

“Why not?” he said. Quietly.

“Because it’s not about data. It’s not about timelines.”

“Then what is it about?”

The car waited. It had infinite patience and zero understanding of the thing that was breaking open between us.

“I thought I was helping,” I said.

“Helping with what?”

“With you. With—that whole situation. I saw what it was doing to you. That night, with the car, in the rain—I was at the window. I watched the whole thing. And I thought: this person is going to literally die in this relationship. And I—”

“What did you do.”

It wasn’t a question. It was a door being opened onto a room he’d already furnished in his mind, years ago, with every piece of evidence he’d quietly collected.

“I talked to her.”

Silence.

“I told her you two couldn’t work. I said it was destroying you. I said she needed to let go.”

The road curved. The sea appeared fully now—a long, unbroken line of blue stretching to the horizon.

“And she listened,” Şafak said.

“She listened.”

“And the next day, the door stayed closed.”

“Yes.”

He nodded. Slowly.

“The car offered to pull up the logs,” he said. “And you said no.”

“Yes.”

“Because the logs would show it.”

“Yes.”

“Messages. Calls. A meeting with her.”

“A café. Once. One conversation.”

He turned back to the window. The landscape was changing—the flat farmland giving way to low cliffs, pine trees leaning toward the sea, the road dropping toward the coast. We were close.

“You know what the worst part is?” he said. “It’s not that you did it. It’s that you were probably right. That relationship was going to kill me. I know that. I’ve always known that.” He paused. “The worst part is that you decided it for me. You merged the request without my approval.”

He looked out at the water for a long moment. “Deniz and I were the right people at the wrong time. We were never going to make it. I think I always knew that.” He paused. “There’s nothing I want to do with this. I’m not going to collect on it. The world doesn’t balance itself out. Things stay where they fall.”

I waited for him to say more. He didn’t.

The car said: “You are twelve minutes from your destination.”

Şafak pulled up his phone and murmured something to Atlas. A few seconds later, my phone buzzed: Şafak Karataş has submitted a request—Cancel accommodation booking. Review & merge?

I looked at it. Then at him.

“I’d like to stop here,” he said.

We were on a two-lane road. Olive trees on both sides. No town, no village. Just a faded bus stop sign leaning at an angle, half-swallowed by dry grass.

“Here?”

“Here.”

The car slowed. “There’s no public transport scheduled for this stop in the next three hours. The nearest town is six point four kilometers northeast. Atlas can arrange—”

“I’ll walk.”

“The nearest accommodation with availability is—”

“I’ll walk.”

He opened the door. A dry, herbal heat rushed in. He grabbed his bag from the back seat. A small duffel. He hadn’t packed much.

I wanted to say something. An apology was too late and we both knew it. I thought about just saying his name, but it felt too heavy and too light at the same time, and by the time I’d found any word at all, he was already standing outside with the bag slung over one arm.

He looked back at me through the open door, done in a way I hadn’t seen before—the way a document looks when someone stops reviewing it.

Years ago, on a rain-soaked street, he’d stood in front of a car and refused to move. Now, on a dry road in the Aegean sun, he was doing the same thing—except this time, the person he was refusing to move for was me. He was going to walk six kilometers to a town he’d never been to, carrying his own bag, finding his own way, making his own decisions. Like the old man in the legacy lane, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, answering to nobody.

“Enjoy the cove,” he said. He meant it.

He shut the door. The car waited, as if it expected me to call him back. When I didn’t, it asked:

“Shall I continue to the destination?”

I watched him in the mirror, walking north along the shoulder. Duffel bag slung over one arm. Getting smaller.

“Yes,” I said.

The car pulled away. The guitar was still playing—it had been playing this whole time, I realized, soft enough to forget, persistent enough to fill the silence. I reached over and turned it off. For the first time all day, neither Lena nor Atlas offered a replacement.

The road curved. Şafak disappeared.

A notification: Atlas has arranged a taxi for Şafak Karataş. Pickup in 22 minutes. No action required.

No action required. The system taking care of what I couldn’t. I approved Şafak’s cancellation request. Merged it. The booking dissolved—a small, clean removal the system was built to execute.

The receptionist had reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a pen behind each ear.

“Şafak?” she said.

The waiting room smelled like someone had recently microwaved fish and then tried to cover it up with lavender. Şafak had been in one of the orange plastic chairs for thirty-two minutes. A woman in a stiff blazer sat reading her phone with surgical focus. Next to her, a young man kept adjusting a tie that didn’t need adjusting. Şafak counted the adjustments. He stopped at nine.

He stood up before the second syllable had landed.

She pointed down a corridor with the pen from her left ear. “Second door on the right.”

The office was larger than he expected. A wide mahogany desk, nearly empty—just a closed laptop, a glass of water with no coaster, and a single manila folder, very thin, positioned exactly in the center. Behind the desk, a window that looked out onto a construction site. A crane was moving something slowly across the sky, and for a moment Şafak watched it, trying to figure out what it was carrying.

The man behind the desk stood up to shake his hand. He was short and wide, built like a filing cabinet, with thick fingers and a watch that sat too loose on his wrist, sliding down toward his knuckles every time he gestured. His eyebrows were remarkable—dense and expressive, two grey caterpillars conducting an orchestra only they could hear. He wore a shirt that had been ironed recently and well, except for one crease along the left forearm that he kept smoothing with his other hand, a gesture so habitual it had probably lost all meaning years ago.

Şafak let his arm fall against the side of the chair without deciding to. His own silver watch slid down his wrist the same way.

“Sit, sit,” the man said, waving at a chair. The chair was leather, tall-backed. Şafak sat.

“So,” he said, opening the manila folder. He looked at whatever was inside for a long time. Longer than felt natural. Şafak resisted the urge to lean forward and peek.

“Tell me about yourself.”

Şafak told him. University, internship at a small agency, some freelance social media work, a certificate in Google Analytics that he’d earned on a Sunday afternoon while eating leftover börek. He didn’t mention the börek. The man nodded throughout, his eyebrows rising and falling with the rhythm of Şafak’s sentences.

“Good, good,” he said. He closed the folder. Opened it again. Closed it.

“And your English—how is it?”

“Fluent,” Şafak said. “I lived in England for a year.”

“Let’s continue in English, then.”

This made sense. International company, probably. Maslak was full of them. Şafak straightened in his chair.

“What do you think,” the man said, switching to English with an accent that was hard to place, “about the current state of the Turkish economy?”

Şafak blinked.

“It’s in a transitional period,” he said. “There’s inflation pressure, but the export sector is showing resilience, and there are structural reforms underway that could—”

The man wrote something in the folder. His pen moved quickly. Şafak tried to read it upside down. He couldn’t.

“Now. If you had to choose between—let me think how to phrase this—between institutional loyalty and operational efficiency, and you could only preserve one, which would you eliminate?”

“I’d argue they’re not mutually exclusive,” Şafak said. “But if I had to choose, I’d preserve efficiency, because loyalty without results eventually erodes itself.”

The man stared at him for a full three seconds. On the fourth, he smiled—a wide, genuine smile that rearranged his entire face, pushed his eyebrows up toward his hairline, and revealed his teeth.

“Very good answer.”

He leaned back. The chair creaked under him. He picked up the glass of water, took a sip, and put it back down in a different spot. A wet ring remained where it had been.

“One more question. This is important.” He leaned forward again. “Do you believe that a person can be taught integrity, or is it something they either have or they don’t?”

They must know what they’re doing, Şafak thought.

“I think integrity can be practiced,” he said. “It’s like a muscle. Some people are born with more of it, but everyone can develop it if the conditions are right.”

The man closed the folder for the last time. He stood up. He extended his hand.

“Welcome aboard.”

Şafak walked out of the building into the afternoon sun, lighter than he’d been in months. The receptionist smiled at him on the way out—a knowing smile, the kind receptionists give when they already know the outcome. The woman in the stiff blazer was still in the waiting room. The young man with the short tie was gone.

Outside, he called his mother. She cried. He called his roommate. His roommate said finally. He walked to the Starbucks on the corner and ordered an Iced Shaken Espresso Lavender Oatmilk, which cost more than his dinner the night before.

The email arrived two hours later. He opened it on the bus home, standing, holding the overhead rail with one hand and his phone with the other, reading between the jolts.

Dear Şafak,

We are delighted to confirm your appointment as Junior Policy Analyst at the Strategic Planning Division of…

He read the sentence again. Then once more.

He had never applied to be a policy analyst, never heard of the Strategic Planning Division. He had walked into the wrong office.

He could call. He could say there’s been a mistake, I’m not who you think I am, I was here for the marketing position on the third floor.

The bus stopped. Someone got off. Someone got on. The doors closed, and they moved again.

Şafak put his phone in his pocket.

He started on Monday.

“You’re the only one I know who still wears an analog watch.”

Şafak looked down at it, smiled. The kettle clicked off behind him. He turned the watch a quarter-turn around his wrist, an unconscious habit.

At the other end of the table, Moris lifted his head. He looked at the watch. He looked at Şafak. Then he looked at me—that long, patient look from somewhere very far inside himself, the one that says I have seen everything in this room a thousand times. He set his chin back down on his paws.

“There’s actually a story behind this one.”

He poured. He sat down. He started.

“The last day of school smelled like warm asphalt and cheap erasers. June had already started doing its work on the city—heat so thick it made the tar on the roads go soft under your sandals and turned every apartment balcony into a stage for drying laundry and slicing watermelon. It was the early nineties, and summer began with my report card.

It was perfect. Pekiyi across the board. All A’s, every single line. I held the thin card in both hands like a winning lottery ticket, careful not to crease it, and walked out of the school gates into the blinding afternoon sun. My dad was waiting by the car—a boxy sedan with vinyl seats that would brand your thighs if you sat down too fast. He glanced at the card, nodded with that quiet, satisfied look fathers had back then, and said the words I’d been waiting to hear all week:

“Haydi, kasetçiye gidelim.”

A small, dimly lit place squeezed between a bakkal and a tailor, its walls lined floor to ceiling with VHS cases—their plastic spines faded from sunlight, their cover art promising worlds I could barely imagine. Action heroes with impossible muscles. Spaceships hovering over alien landscapes. The cases on the shelves were empty. Display copies only, their hollow plastic lighter than they should have been. The actual tapes lived behind the counter, and if someone else had rented the one you wanted, all you could do was stare at the cover and wait. Sometimes for days. Sometimes for weeks.

And there, right at eye level, as if the universe had placed it there just for me: Superman IV.

The film had come out years before—but in those days, everything reached us a few summers late.

The cover alone was enough to stop my heart. Christopher Reeve, cape billowing, fist raised toward the sky. I grabbed the case off the shelf and brought it to the counter with the urgency of a man delivering an organ transplant. The shop owner checked behind him. The tape was there. It was available. It was mine.

My dad exchanged a few words with the owner—adults always had to talk, even when the most important movie in the world was being held hostage on the counter—and finally, mercifully, we walked out with it.

Excitement that makes your legs move on their own, that turns every sidewalk curb into a launchpad. I hopped off steps and swung my arms. I looked up at the sky and calculated the exact trajectory I would take if I could fly. All I was missing was the cape. The red one. I made a mental note to negotiate with my mom about a towel later that evening.

Report card: perfect. Superman: in the bag. I was, by every measure available to a seven-year-old, on top of the world.”

Şafak took a sip of tea. He was smiling at something only he could see—his own seven-year-old, probably. Then the smile went out, and he went on.

“But we didn’t go straight home.

My dad pulled the car over on a side street I didn’t recognize, outside an apartment building with a rusty garden gate and a vine-covered balcony. ‘I just need to stop by a friend’s for five minutes,’ he said—a sentence that, in the language of fathers, could mean anything from five actual minutes to the rest of the afternoon.

We went upstairs. The friend was a large man with a mustache—they all had mustaches—sitting in a living room that smelled like cigarette smoke and strong tea. There were small glass cups on a brass tray. The TV was on, showing something boring. The two men fell into conversation instantly, as if they hadn’t seen each other in years and had never stopped talking.

I sat on the edge of a chair that was too big for me, the VHS tape on my lap, the report card folded neatly in my back pocket, and waited.

Then the man turned to me.

He leaned in with that big, friendly face, reached over, and gave my cheek one of those pinches—adults in the eighties considered them affectionate, children considered them an act of war. He squeezed and smiled, then asked:

‘Yakışıklı, senin nasıl gidiyor bakalım? Kaç manitan var?’

I was seven. I knew about Superman. I knew that if you mixed Fanta with milk it tasted weird but you’d still drink it because someone dared you. What I did not know was what a ‘manita’ was.

The word rolled around in my head for a moment. Manita. Manita. It sounded vaguely academic. Official, even. Like something that belonged on a report card.”

Outside, a ship sounded on the Marmara. A seagull flickered. He was still inside the pause. I waited with him.

“And the man had asked ‘how many.’ So I did what any seven-year-old with a perfect report card would do.

I straightened up in my chair. I answered:

‘Hiç yok amca. Hepsi pekiyi.’

For three seconds, the room went silent. On the fourth, it exploded.

My dad threw his head back and laughed—really laughed, mouth open, shoulders shaking, the whole thing. I’d never heard him laugh like that. He was a quiet man, my dad. He smiled plenty, but this was something else entirely. The friend grabbed his knee and the tea nearly went with it. They fed off each other, the way two men do when something catches them completely off guard, and the laughter just kept going.

I smiled along. Clearly I had said something brilliant… I was a cute kid. People laughed. I didn’t mind. I had things to do—and right now, the thing to do was get home and press play.”

Moris had moved at some point. He was now along the edge of the table, paws tucked under, eyes half-closed. Şafak smiled, quietly, and went on.

“That evening, after the cape had returned to being a towel and the Fanta had gone flat in its bottle, my father called me to the kitchen. He had a small box in his hand.

‘Karne hediyen,’ he said.

A silver watch. Analog. Too big for my wrist.

‘Evladiyelik,’ he said, and helped me with the clasp.

I wore it the rest of the summer.”

Şafak put his cup down. The refrigerator hummed. The balcony door was open and the warm air came in carrying the sound of someone watering plants downstairs. I poured him more tea. He reached for the cup with his right hand. The silver watch slid forward on his wrist the way it must have been doing for thirty years.

I forgot I had a cat.

It was his first night in the apartment. He was six months old, a tiny, terrified shadow that had spent the entire daylight hours wedged into some invisible corner of the house. He only materialized briefly to eat, moving low to the ground, before vanishing again. I had spent the day buying bowls, carrying litter, doing all the loud, practical things required to welcome another life into your own. But by the time I turned off the lights and got into bed, the exhaustion of the day had wiped the slate clean. My brain simply discarded the new data. I fell asleep as a man living alone.

Around 3:00 a.m., I woke up to a frequency. The distinct, primal sensation of being watched.

The room was pitch black. I opened my eyes and tried to adjust to the dark. Hovering right in front of my face were two massive, glowing green eyes. Just the eyes. Disembodied and perfectly still.

His name is Moris. He is entirely black. In a lightless room, he doesn’t just blend into the dark; he becomes it. He had silently climbed onto the bed, stretched his neck forward, and was inspecting my sleeping face with intense, unblinking curiosity.

For three seconds, I experienced pure, unadulterated terror. My heart slammed against my ribs. I physically jolted, convinced the void itself had grown eyes and come for me.

On the fourth second, I took a breath. The void blinked, let out a tiny, inquisitive sound, and sat down on my blanket.

I lay back down, my pulse slowly returning to normal. He simply found a spot near my feet, curled into a tight shape, and went to sleep.

I stayed awake a little longer. The refrigerator hummed. A whistle rose from somewhere in the street below. I lay there doing what I always do in the dark—sorting, rehearsing, replaying. Moris simply existed. He breathed—slow, even, entirely without effort—the way only a creature with no unfinished business breathes.

I listened to that rhythm for a while.

Then I closed my eyes and let the dark simply be the dark.

I—The Trigger

I walked into the concert. I'm forty-five. Stage lights hit my face and the bass guitar punched my stomach. My boots stuck to the floor. Spilled beer and dirt pulling at my soles with every step. Ten years ago this same song would have made my eyes close. Now they stay open. The sound lands as noise first, music second. Two friends beside me. One shouts, "Man, this is legendary!" The other films on his phone, the screen a small bright rectangle hovering over his head. I nod on reflex. Something inside me gives way — a hairline crack you only notice when you touch it.

The show ends at 1:17 a.m. The room releases us all at once. Heat and sweat and spilled beer. A damp jacket brushing my arm. Someone's elbow in my ribs. The exit sign flickering a little, as if it's tired too. "Let's grab something," a friend says. "Sure," I hear myself say. Refusing would have been a whole conversation. Outside, the night is still working. Traffic on the main road. Horns. Exhaust. A scooter threading between cars, engine whining like a mosquito. An ambulance tears past with its siren, so close it lifts the hair on my forearms.

We talk while we walk. The conversation keeps circling back to "the old days," like a tooth your tongue won't leave alone. Someone says, "Back then the night went on till morning after a show." We laugh. The laughter arrives on time and leaves early. There's a hollow space in it. No one turns toward it.

I reach home. Stairs. Key. The familiar resistance of the lock. The door closes. Complete silence. For three seconds my shoulders drop. On the fourth, a heavy ache blooms behind my temples. The aftershock of the kick drum still in my bones. I leave the lights off. Stand in the hallway long enough to hear the refrigerator click, then settle. Somewhere in the building a pipe ticks once, cooling. I pick up my phone without deciding to. Thumbprint. A blue-white wash on my face. YouTube. My fingers type the name of an old song like they've known the route for years. 2009. Same band. Same album.

The video loads. The first note lands. The room shifts around it. Basement apartment, summer of 2009. A fan in the corner pushing hot air in circles. Cigarette smoke caught in a shaft of streetlight from the blinds. Rakı in cloudy glasses. Someone laughing in the kitchen, a lighter flicking again and again because the first spark won't catch. A couch with a rip in the armrest, stuffing showing like bone. Back then nothing had to be enough. We hadn't learned that word yet, not in that way.

The song plays on. My eyes close. The headache stays, but it changes shape. It loosens. It starts to move, like a knot turning into a rope. The video ends. The screen goes black. I set the phone face down on the table. The silence of the apartment rushes back in, but it doesn't bite anymore. I stand there in the hallway a moment longer—the corridor dark in both directions, behind me and ahead—listening to nothing, and then I go to bed without pressing play again.

II—The Echo

I sat in the barber's chair at 19:15. Outside, the Friday evening rush on Bağdat Caddesi was thick and loud. Headlights bleeding into the wet asphalt. A furious chorus of horns. But inside the shop, the heavy glass door sealed the chaos away. The noise became a murmur.

The barber was a quiet man in his sixties. Silver hair combed perfectly back, hands steady most of the time — though lately I'd noticed a faint tremor when he set the scissors down between cuts, something he seemed to know about and work around. Twenty years I'd been sitting in this chair — long enough that silence between us had become its own language, and when one of us spoke, it was never small talk. He draped the cape over my shoulders and pulled it tight around my neck. The fabric snapped like a small flag in the wind. I looked at the mirror. Forty-five. The harsh overhead light unforgiving on the lines around my eyes. The gray at my temples. I closed my eyes as the metal clippers touched the nape of my neck. A cold, steady vibration.

From a small radio on the counter, a song drifted into the room. 1997. Sezen Aksu. The volume was so low it felt more like a memory of a song than the song itself. The clippers stopped. I opened my eyes. The barber was looking at me in the mirror. He wasn't smiling, but the lines around his mouth had softened. "When I was younger, this song used to tear me apart," he said, his voice just barely above a whisper. He picked up the scissors. Snipped the air twice. "Now, I play it when the shop is empty. When I'm tired." I watched his reflection. "Doesn't it make you miss those years?" He shook his head slowly. The scissors went back to work, a sharp, rhythmic snip-snip near my ear. "I cut the same heads for thirty years. The face changes. The man in the mirror gets older. But when this song plays, I see the kid who first held these scissors. He's still here. Steadier now." He paused, dusting a few stray hairs from my collar with a soft brush.

The song faded into an advertisement. The spell broke, but the echo remained. The haircut finished. I paid, put on my coat, and stepped out into the rain. The city noise hit me instantly. The rush, the horns, the friction. But I didn't brace myself against it. As I walked down the crowded pavement, the melody stayed with me — a thin, strong line holding the weight of the night.

III—The Fuel

The last bell had rung hours ago. Summer afternoon. The classroom was an oven, but I had Leonard Cohen playing on the computer. Famous Blue Raincoat. The slow, acoustic guitar and that deep, heavy voice. I sat at the teacher's desk. Doing the two things that always made the noise stop: being in my classroom and writing. I wasn't alone. I was spending the afternoon with my two favorite people. Little Hakan and his grandfather. They were sitting right there, inside the glowing white document on my screen.

I typed.

My grandfather was hoeing the earth beneath the flowers in the garden again. It was a warm, quiet afternoon, I remember.

"A new girl joined our class yesterday, Grandpa."

"How nice."

"No, it's not nice. She's just a fatty. And a bit stupid, I think."

…

"What is that at the base of the flower, Grandpa?"

"The flower is a honeysuckle, and what's at its base is manure. Go on, smell it."

"It doesn't smell at all."

"If your nose is blocked, you won't smell the flower, nor the manure. The whole point is to understand."

"Understand what?"

"Everything."

"I don't understand anything."

"To understand, you must manage to hold the eyes you look with, the ears you hear with, the tongue you taste with—all your old learnings—at a distance from yourself."

"What does that even mean?"

"Look at everything with brand-new eyes. Eyes without memory, unstained by past recollections."

"Üf, Grandpa, what's a memory?"

"A memory is the accumulated knowledge of the past inside us, and sometimes it can seem more real than reality itself. If you look through your old learnings, you don't see the thing you're looking at; you only see what you used to know."

"How so?"

"Because eyes can only see things as they truly are if they look purified from everything they have seen before."

"What does it mean to be purified?"

"To be washed clean."

"Can't I see?"

"You see with what you have learned. What you have learned is your prison."

"Üf, Grandpa."

"Is something dirty inherently bad?"

"Of course it's bad."

"But is it always bad?"

"It is."

"Look at the flower. Honeysuckle… It grows out of the dirt, but it smells so entirely different from the dirt."

I stopped typing. The classroom was entirely still. Outside the window a bird called once, then stopped. A call that sounds like a question and doesn't wait for an answer. I held my breath.

When I let it out, I felt a sudden, quiet lightness spread through my chest. I saved the document. Closed the laptop. I stood up. Turned off the lights. The switch snapped softly.

The school corridor stretched ahead of me—long, polished, lit by the last daylight coming through the windows at the far end. Behind me, the dark classroom. Ahead, the glass doors and the street beyond. I walked.

My footsteps sounded different on the linoleum.

Lighter. Smaller. Younger.

The corridor was still there. But for a moment, I had stopped building.

Adversity strips you bare. What you choose to maintain in that bareness—the small, stubborn acts of order—reveals less about taste than about what you cannot afford to lose.

There is a detail about Fatih Altaylı's time in prison. Surrounded by gray concrete designed to reduce a man to a number and break his will, he would carefully iron his shirt before seeing visitors. Without an iron, he used what the cell allowed: water heated in a kettle, poured into a mess tin, pressed against the collar, the cuffs—the visible parts. The parts that faced the world. But visitors come and go. The cell stays. A crisp collar is a solitary architecture. It holds the man upright when the walls try to crush him.

I remember Augusts in the village during the hazelnut harvest. Long before the trip, the anticipation of seeing a girl I liked from school would take hold. Every morning, stepping out into the wide courtyard facing the orchards, my hair was already combed, my clothes carefully put together—as if she might suddenly walk into that yard. She never did. But somewhere in those mornings, the gaze had already moved inside. It no longer needed her to arrive.

In those long, isolated summer days—just earth, damp heat, and the relentless hum of insects—I would wake up, tidy my bed, put myself together, holding onto a form in the middle of that silence. The danger of surrender lay in who you became inside the disarray. Let the heat and the dirt dictate long enough, and the person looking back from the mirror is a stranger—someone you didn't choose and don't recognize. The rituals build a fence against the wrong version of yourself.

The fear of eroding drives the comb through the hair and the iron across the fabric. The visibility points entirely inward.

We are told we exist in the gaze of others. The mess tin pressed against the collar in an empty cell says otherwise. Existence, quietly, refuses to come undone.

The corridor narrows in adversity. The man who keeps ironing his shirt keeps walking through it.

My stomach knots somewhere in the second act. The third. I stop counting. The whisky sits untouched. I'm aware of my jaw. I reach for the remote and kill the image mid-frame. Grace frozen. The sudden silence is violently loud.

Nobody speaks for a moment. One of them sets his glass down.

"This is too much," I hear myself say. My voice sharper than I intended.

Three pairs of eyes turn toward me. Waiting, maybe. The screen holds its frozen frame. I don't look at it.

It is a physical rejection. Not a moral argument, not yet. My body decided before my mind caught up—the same tightening I've felt in arguments, the same thing I described in On Perceiving. But this time I'm not protecting a building. I'm refusing to enter one.

The moral architecture we've inherited insists on a resolution: forgiveness. The highest, cleanest, most redemptive form. I look at the frozen screen and realize I don't believe in it.

To truly forgive—to look at intentional destruction and offer absolution—you need the towering arrogance of a god.

We conflate survival with forgiveness. Moving on is mechanical. Processing the grief. Letting the tissue knit over the wound. You step back from the fire. You map the exact perimeter of the heat. The skin heals. The memory of the burn stays perfectly intact. The ledger remains exactly as written.

Forgiveness demands a reset. It takes that ledger, draws a thick black line through the total, and hands it back to the debtor. The pardoned man steps out through the gate and resumes the habit on the first afternoon of freedom. Forgiveness is a corridor, handing out a permit at the exit door.

One summer afternoon I grabbed a garden gate by the iron bar. The scorpion hadn't wanted to sting me, maybe. Maybe it was frightened. Maybe it simply did what it was. Writhing in pain, forgiving it never crossed my mind. Now, before I put my hand anywhere, I look first.

The screen stays dark. Someone sets a glass down, a heavy clink against the wood in the quiet. Another reaches for a phone, pairs it to the speaker. The night pivots.

Leonard Cohen.

Famous Blue Raincoat.

We sit there for two hours. We let the song pull us apart. The slow, deliberate drag of the acoustic guitar. The heavy, resigned frequency of a man drafting a letter to the friend who betrayed him. The man who took his woman, who carved out a piece of his history.

Then the line drops into the center of the room, sinking straight to the floor.

Did you ever go clear?

It hits all four of us—the breathing in the room changes. We wait for the lyric to offer an act of grace. It delivers a cold acknowledgment of a passed storm. Cohen writes the letter. He documents the theft. He signs it. Sincerely, L. Cohen.

The slate stays deeply scored. The lock stays turned. He states the facts, wishes the man a quiet afterworld, and folds the paper.

An honest negotiation with betrayal. The debt sits untouched in the archive. You just stop trying to collect it.

I still don't know what forgiveness means.

Some debts belong to the gravity of the room.

"To tell the truth, it doesn't matter if anyone reads it. I write for myself."

I nodded. I let the sentence hang. It is a beautiful thing to say. It is also a lie. I know. I've said it too.

Open your eyes, or the world won't see you.

I published an essay last week. Fourteen people read it. I know this because I checked the stats nine times. My fingers hit refresh before I'd even finished reading the number. At some point the thing I'd written stopped being mine. It collapsed into a number. And I kept refreshing.

A friend of mine makes music. We met years ago when I first came to İstanbul. He played in a basement on a borrowed guitar, and the room moved without being asked. He called me a few months ago—he'd been working on something new for six months. Wanted me to hear it. We met at a place near Kadıköy. I put my earphones in my ears.

I closed my eyes.

A song that finds a specific frequency in your chest and stays there. When I opened my eyes, he was watching my face. He had his phone out. He was already writing a caption.

"Does it work as a reel?" he asked.

We ordered coffee. The song took six months, he told me. The reel took four hours. "Nobody hears it if nobody clicks." He said it the way you state a law of physics. He wasn't wrong. That's what I kept thinking afterward. He wasn't wrong.

There are more writers now than at any point in history. More musicians, more filmmakers. The tools are everywhere. The audience is the same size. It's the same pool of attention, divided across millions of songs and reels.

Walk into any coffee shop and count the laptops. Most of them have a draft open. Ask yourself when any of those people last read someone else's full piece. All the way through.

Everyone figured this out at the same time, and nobody said it out loud. Everyone moved toward the stage. The seats emptied behind them.

I watch people at concerts now. Half the crowd is filming. They will never watch that footage. It's proof of attendance. A room full of directors and no audience.

There should be a comforting freedom in this. If nobody's watching, the stakes are zero. You can build anything in the dark. But nobody uses the dark. We built a guard tower instead. The spotlight is broken, and the guard has left. We still stand there, sucking in our stomachs, performing for a warden who isn't there.

I scroll at 2 a.m. "Nobody reads anymore." Posted by a writer who dropped three reels that day. I smile. Then I open my own draft and hit publish. It's the same as the taxi driver on Bağdat Caddesi at rush hour, slamming his horn, shouting "The city is overcrowded!"—engine still running, refusing to get out and walk.

Everyone knows the theater is empty. Nobody wants to be the first to step off the stage and sit in the dark.

Game theory calls it the prisoner's dilemma. Every essay you scroll past is a small defection—it costs nothing, and nobody sees it. A billion of those, and you get the landscape we're in—nobody benefits from changing alone.

Last week, between checking my stats nine times, I forced myself to stop. I found an old magazine at the bottom of a shelf—one with a cracked spine and pages that smell like someone else's apartment. A piece about a man who spent thirty years repairing clocks. I almost put it down twice.

I finished it standing in the kitchen—the coffee went cold.

I couldn't tell you if the writing was good. I remember the clocks—the specific sound each one made when it was finally right. I sat with it. Something came back—a small memory I hadn't touched in years. At some point I'd put my phone face down without deciding to.

No metric moved. Nobody noticed.

But something loosened. It's hard to obsess over who's watching when you've just been watching someone else.

That lyric keeps coming back: Open your eyes, or the world won't see you.

The emphasis was always on the first three words.

Open your eyes.

The rest follows.

I've never trusted anyone who says this. Lying was the subject of On Lying. This is a different phenomenon entirely. They actually believe it. That's what makes it harder to argue with and almost impossible to fix.

A corridor is only a lie when someone else builds it. The liar knows the walls are artificial—that's the whole point. But what happens when you build one for yourself and forget you built it?

I carried a memory for years. A conversation with a friend, late at night, in which he said something dismissive about my work—something cold enough that I filed it under betrayal and left it there. It shaped how I treated him afterward. Small distances. Declined invitations. The slow arithmetic of resentment.

A decade later, I mentioned it. He had no idea what I was talking about. This went beyond simple denial; he possessed zero memory of the event. So I went back and replayed it—really replayed it—and realized I could no longer hear his exact words. I had the setting. The kitchen. The hood's hazy yellow light. The sentence itself had been rewritten so many times in the retelling—to myself, mostly—that I could no longer distinguish his actual phrasing from my assigned meaning.

I had built a corridor. I had walked to the only door. And I had done it to myself.

The brain is no camera. Everyone knows this, but almost no one feels it. We process reality entirely as a story. Something happens, and before we've finished living it, we're already explaining it to ourselves—selecting details, assigning roles.

The trap is the feeling of recognition. When you see a pattern, it arrives as if you found it—hiding the fact that you built it.

Walk into any room with a belief and count how long it takes before someone confirms it. Your ears tune themselves to one frequency. Everything else becomes noise. The signal was yours from the start.

There's a man I know—smart, accomplished, certain that the world is organized against people like him. Every setback is evidence. A rejected application: bias. A delayed promotion: politics. A friend's success: luck, connections, external forces devoid of merit. His map is airtight. Nothing gets in that would require redrawing it.

I recognized the architecture. I've built rooms like that. Smaller ones, maybe. Rooms where I was always the one who tried harder, deserved better. Rooms with no windows.

We abandon the territory the moment the map stops matching it.

I watched it happen to me on İstiklal one evening. A street musician was playing—badly, I decided within seconds. Out of tune, wrong tempo, amateur. I walked past. Something made me stop fifty meters later. The crowd's reaction pulled me back. They were still. An authentic, unperformed stillness. I walked back, and this time I heard the song before I heard the technique. It was a sevda song, and his voice broke at exactly the right place—triggered by the lyric hitting him in real time. My first reading had been accurate in every technical detail and wrong about the only thing that mattered.

I had perceived. I had failed to truly see.

The difference between lying and misperceiving is that the liar maintains two versions—the truth and the performance. The misperceiver has only one. The lie is a corridor with an architect who remembers the blueprint. Misperception is a corridor whose architect burned the blueprint and moved in.

This is why it's harder to fix. You can confront a liar with evidence and, in theory, the structure collapses. The truth was always there, hidden but intact. Confront someone with evidence against their perception, and you're attacking the only truth they have. The walls simply thicken.

I've seen it in arguments. The moment the evidence gets too close, something shifts—locking immediately into defense. The eyes change. The voice flattens. You can watch the exact moment a person stops processing information and starts protecting architecture. I've felt it in myself. A tightening behind the sternum. A sentence forming before the other person has finished speaking. The body knows before the mind admits it: this fact is a threat to the building, and the building must survive.

Here's the part that keeps me up.

What if some of the buildings should survive?

A woman loses her son and decides he is in a better place. She builds an entire architecture of meaning around the loss—signs, small coincidences reclassified as messages. All of it keeps her alive.

A man fails at everything he tries for fifteen years. He tells himself the story of persistence—the long arc, the late bloom. His map says the territory will eventually match. Is he deluded? Maybe. Is the delusion the only thing standing between him and the abyss? Also maybe.

Perception often serves as a negotiation with reality, moving far beyond mere distortion. A way of saying: I know, but I can't—yet.

I'm unsure when negotiation becomes denial. I doubt there's a clean line. I think most people cross it without noticing, and by the time someone else notices, the building has load-bearing walls.

The liar's quiet disappointment has its own mirror here, inverted. The world keeps surprising you, and you keep missing it. The same argument with the same person, replayed for the hundredth time, and you still believe the next one will be different. Every surprise is reclassified as an anomaly. The pattern holds. The map stays clean.

There's a particular loneliness in this. The liar is isolated by secrecy—he can't tell anyone the truth. The misperceiver is isolated by certainty—she can't hear anyone else's version. Both end up in the same place: a room with no windows, convinced the room is the world.

I've been trying to notice the corridors. It's harder than it sounds. You can't inspect the lens while you're looking through it. The closest I've come is a feeling—a faint resistance when something doesn't fit. A fact that slides off. A compliment I can't absorb. A criticism that burns longer than it should. These are the seams. The places where the construction shows.

I don't know what's on the other side of the architecture. I suspect it lacks the clean, bright clarity promised by "seeing things as they are," revealing a far messier territory. A territory with no map. The discomfort of not knowing which version of the conversation was real.

But I think the discomfort might be the point. The moment perception becomes uncomfortable is the moment it might be getting accurate.

The buildings we never question are the ones we should.

I'm starting to check the blueprints. Some of them are mine. Some of them were inherited floor plans from people who built their corridors and handed me the keys.

The architect is waking up. The building is still standing.

I don't know yet if I want to renovate or walk out.

But at least I know there's a door.

The liar constructs a context in which the false conclusion becomes the only one available to the listener.

The most effective deceptions are built from true information, arranged carefully. Ask someone, "Did you withdraw that money?" and they might answer, "I haven't even walked past the bank today"—knowing full well they transferred it online. You build the corridor. They walk to the only door.

Or consider anchoring: "I was at home" collapses under pressure. "It was exactly 2:12 PM, the neighbor was drilling upstairs, and I was making coffee" holds. The mind latches onto the drill and the clock and stops questioning the structure around them.

Watching it happen breaks the clean lines of theory.

I once watched a colleague reframe a significant mistake in a meeting. He simply repositioned what he could have denied—a calculated risk, taken in good faith, with the information available at the time. For three days it lingered. On the fourth, that was the story. And the strangest part was the look on his face afterward—the quiet disappointment of a man who expected more resistance.

There's a version of this in Catch Me If You Can. DiCaprio steps into an airport in a pilot's uniform and people instinctively move away. He expects a door. He finds air. A slow erosion of the world's ability to surprise you.

Intelligence agencies refined this into doctrine. When cornered, confess to something minor—a surveillance program that was "overly broad," an interrogation technique that was "inconsistent with values." The public, fed just enough truth, closes the case. The real damage stays buried. And here's the uncomfortable part: many of those lies never surface. The file stays where it is. Nobody checks. Some secrets go to the grave undisturbed.

But not being caught carries its own sentence.

Think of Ripley—brilliant, unable to sit still inside the life he built. A lie carries no physical weight and still expands like a black hole. The outside world sees nothing while gravity pulls you apart from the inside. You can't afford to forget. Every new person becomes a potential threat. At some point, the performance has no audience except yourself.

What's strange is that most lies are reflexive. Fear of conflict. Fear of being seen as insufficient. The deception that feels like control is usually just panic—slowed down and renamed.

The liar's real achievement is the years spent fooling themselves into thinking the cost was worth it. Honesty was always available. Most of us knew that. We just couldn't stomach what it cost on the first day.

Suddenly, the opening sentence of the article I've been stuck on for three days pops into my mind. I stop and look around. Then I laugh to myself. "Is this what I've been struggling with for three days?"

I have experienced this before. Everyone has. In the shower, staring out the window on the bus, waiting in line at the grocery store… The moment I get distracted, my brain silently starts throwing a party in the background. Neuroscientists call it the Default Mode Network—the brain's idle mode. A network that kicks in when the noise dies down, letting the mind make connections it normally wouldn't. Mathematician Henri Poincaré cracked a problem he had struggled with for weeks—on a bus, while thinking about something else entirely. His brain had never stopped working in the background.

Perhaps fishermen illustrate this best. They sit on the shore for hours, looking at their fishing lines, thinking about nothing—at least, that's how it looks from the outside. But in those tranquil moments, the mind is quietly rearranging everything.

Think of memory as cluttered rooms, each one connected to the others by a labyrinth of corridors—by time, by feeling. When every room is occupied, when every corridor is cramped, the traffic stalls. Nothing moves. New ideas need empty spaces to pass through. It's the only way to keep the network moving.

There is also the matter of letting go.

In class, a student of mine was glued to his paper, so terrified of making a mistake that his pen wouldn't move. The moment he noticed his first wrong word, the color drained from his face, his breathing quickened, and his hands began to shake. The harder he tried to suppress the panic, the faster he wrote, only to press so hard while erasing that he nearly tore the page.

He stopped.

He turned to me and, in a small, helpless voice, asked, "Hocam, what if I write the wrong thing?"

His panic wasn't unique. Performance anxiety, the fear of making mistakes, the fear of judgment, the rush to be fast—they all silence the brain. It locks down. What psychologist D.W. Winnicott calls the transitional space is an antidote to this: that gray area between reality and imagination. A realm where there is no fear of making mistakes, where the outcome is uncertain yet exciting. This is where the DMN operates—both want the same thing: to drop the pressure.

The second you let go—while doing the dishes, or staring at the ceiling—the brain goes back to work.

Now, when an idea hits me by the water, I stop—unlike all those times I let them fade away. I pull out my phone and write it down. Then I keep walking, but it isn't the same walk anymore; the sun is fully up now. The sea is no longer silver—it is blue.

The brain is funny like that. We think it's working the least when actually it's working the hardest.

Her eyes fill with tears. She pauses. She grabs a napkin and crumples it under the table—trying not to show she is crying, but her voice has already broken.

"I did everything right," she says. "Everything. And it still wasn't enough."

I almost say something useless. Something about time. A sentence that closes a conversation instead of keeping it open. I can feel the words forming, and I know they're wrong before they arrive. So I stop. I don't know the right thing to say. I just know it wouldn't help.

A silence. Then something comes out—almost on its own:

"Maybe it wasn't your fault that it wasn't enough. Some things are out of your hands, no matter how right you get them."

Something in her face shifts. Her shoulders drop. She takes a breath. "I needed to hear that," she says.

I smile. Something in me feels certain—the way you feel certain about other people's lives from a distance.

The waiter arrives. We order two more coffees. The topic drifts. We even laugh at one point. Evening falls. We say our goodbyes. I walk home.

And on the way, the sentence comes back. Exactly, word for word: "Maybe some things are out of your hands, no matter how right you get them." But this time it's pointed at me.

The strange thing is: nothing happens. The same words, the same construction, the same logic. But when I say them to myself, they're hollow. That relaxation doesn't come. That breath doesn't arrive. And I find myself wondering—did I mean those words at all, or did I just find the shape of what my friend needed and fill it?

At the cafe, I summarized my friend's life in three sentences. I saw what hurt, I saw where she was stuck, I showed her the way out. Or at least I think I did—maybe I just simplified what I didn't understand, and the simplification looked like clarity.

Because in my own life, I can't simplify anything. I know every detail. Every "but," every "what if," every exception to every rule I try to set for myself. I can't leave anything out. And what I can't leave out, I can't see clearly.

My friend's life is a map—I look at it from above, I see the paths. My own life is a forest. I am inside it. The trees block everything.

Last Tuesday, I was writing. A character I've been working on for months—a woman who keeps rebuilding the same relationship with different people, each time convinced it will be different. I wrote her a moment of realization. She's sitting in her car after another fight, engine off, and she understands it the way you understand things you've been avoiding—that she is terrified of being still.

The sentence came easily. I wrote it in one pass. I sat back and thought: that's exactly right.

Then I closed my laptop. And I realized the woman in the car was me. The fear of being still was mine. I had written my own way out, handed it to a fictional person, and watched her walk through the door. I was still standing on the other side.

Bakhtin had a word for this—outsideness. You can see someone else because you are outside their story. You can never be outside your own.

Moris meets me at the door. He flops down right in front of me, blocking the way—then gets up, rubs against my legs, walks toward the kitchen, and looks back. "Time for food," he says with his big green eyes. I fill his bowl. I sit next to him.

Moris has never understood me. He doesn't know what I write. He doesn't ask how my day went. He doesn't say, "Is everything alright?" He just looks. That's all.

But there's something strange: even as I listened to my friend at the cafe today, there was a tension inside me. Was I going to say the right thing? Was it going to work? Was I going to be enough? Even empathy had turned into a performance.

Next to Moris, that tension is gone. And tonight, right in this moment, I realize I don't need someone to understand me. I just need a silence that doesn't ask questions.

I remember the relaxation on my friend's face at the cafe. "I needed to hear that," she said. I found the right words for her. Or maybe I just found words that were the right shape—and maybe that's all the right words ever are.

Moris rests his head on my knee. He starts to purr. He understands nothing. He solves nothing.

And exactly because of that—tonight, this is enough.

They wanted to be a light. Perhaps they even were, once. But somewhere between the wanting and the fearing, something shifted. The monsters they feared so deeply—they became them. They were forged by the very fear they harbored.

Middle-earth had Helm's Deep. The walls held because of courage. This city's walls are built from something else. From the certainty that everyone outside wants you gone. From the knowledge—or the belief, which by now feels the same—that survival justifies everything. Fear always does this. It starts as a shield. It ends as a weapon. And the hand holding it can no longer tell the difference.

Anakin Skywalker was driven entirely by love. He wanted to save Padmé. He wanted to protect what he had. And that wanting—so pure at its origin—slowly became something else. Fear hollowed it out and took its place without him noticing.

That is the most insidious trick fear plays. It arrives wearing love's face. It speaks love's language. "I am doing this for you. I am doing this to protect us." And by the time you realize what is actually driving you, you are already Vader. You are already the thing you swore to fight. The transformation unfolds quietly. It is a series of small decisions, each one justified, each one reasonable, each one slightly more afraid than the last.

Steven Moffat once wrote something that has stayed with me: "People think Hyde is rage, or hate, or greed, or lust. But Hyde is far worse. Hyde is love. And love is a psychopath."

A mother holds her child for the first time. And in that exact moment, she realizes she could kill anyone. Anyone at all, if she had to. This is the line that is almost impossible to see. Because love can destroy too. Love has burned cities. Love has started wars. The actions mirror each other; the motives are worlds apart. Fear knows only what it stands to lose. Love knows what it is protecting. Though fundamentally different, from the outside, they can look identical.

And fear knows this. Fear is not stupid. Fear is the most intelligent thing inside us. It studies love, learns its vocabulary, wears its clothes. It will call itself patriotism, loyalty, family, faith. It will sound completely convincing. Even to you.

There is another cost to fear that rarely gets named. When fear is your engine, you can never stop. You can never be weak. You can never fall. Because the system you built—the one that runs on intimidation, on dominance, on the certainty that strength is all that matters—that system will turn on you the moment you show a crack. The moment fear stumbles, it falls completely, because those it terrified have simply been waiting for their opportunity. You taught everyone around you that power is what counts. Now you are trapped inside that lesson forever.

Love operates differently. When you fall, the people who love you pick you up. Because that is what love does—it instinctively moves toward weakness. When love is weak, it finds support, because it was never standing alone to begin with. You do not have to perform. You do not have to win every room. You are allowed to not know the answer.

Fear is a closed system. It feeds on itself. It grows strongest in isolation, in the middle of the night, in the silence between thoughts. It tells you that you are alone and that alone is all there is.

Love inherently requires a direction, a face, a presence—or at minimum, a belonging. A cat resting his head on your knee. A friend across a table, two cold coffees between you. Love reaches outward. Always. And that reaching—that need—looks like weakness to fear. Fear looks at love and sees something naive, something soft, something that will eventually break.

Fear is wrong. But fear wins anyway. Often.

In Swordfish, the villain makes an argument. It is a terrible argument. It is also completely coherent. He says that good people lose because they have limits. They will not cross certain lines. Evil has no such problem. There is a chilling truth to his claim.

In parts of Mexico and Latin America, cartels have infiltrated neighborhood protection organizations—the very groups built to stand against them—and destroyed them from the inside. Rather than relying on force, they used patience as their true weapon. They succeeded by understanding exactly how love and loyalty operate, and using that understanding against them.

Vader died, yes. But not before he had done everything the Emperor needed him to do. Those cities may one day find peace. But not before generations have been shaped by what fear built. This is the part we do not like to say out loud: fear is effective. Fear is patient. Fear understands the long game. And love, for all its power, keeps getting surprised by this. Keeps believing that if it is just genuine enough, visible enough, real enough—it will be recognized. Sometimes it goes unrecognized. Sometimes it loses.

And yet.

Aragorn stands at the Black Gate. The armies of Mordor are endless. The math does not work. Any rational calculation says this is over. He turns to the people beside him and says, "There may come a day when the courage of men fails. But it is not this day." He speaks without any guarantee of victory. Hope transcends mere prediction; it stands as a deliberate choice made in full awareness of how dark it actually is.

Rust Cohle sits across from Marty in a hospital parking lot, looking up at the stars. He has seen everything humanity is capable of. He has lived inside darkness longer than most people could survive. And he says: "Once, there was only dark. If you ask me, the light's winning." The dark still exists. Yet light refuses to stand still. It advances. It finds new places to exist. It asks for nothing more than to keep going.

I am not a simple person. Most of us are not. I know what it is to act from fear—to feel that cold engine start up, to feel it take the wheel. I also know what it is to act from love and to feel the difference in my hands. Fear is faster. Fear is louder. Fear, in the short term, often wins. But I have never once, in the morning after, felt anything from fear except exhaustion.

Love is slower. Love loses more visibly. Love does not always get to write the ending. But love is the only thing I have ever done that felt like it was actually mine.

It is either from love or fear. Everything is. Every wall built, every war started, every kindness offered, every sacrifice made—trace it back far enough and you will find one of these two things at the root. Beyond ultimate victory, the only thing that truly matters is which one you choose to feed. Even knowing what you know. Even in the dark. Even when fear is louder.

The light is winning. Look closer.

I reach for my phone—it feels like it buzzed. It didn't. Nothing there. But, the thing vibrating was never the phone. It's my mind. Thoughts that never quite settled today are cycling through my head. Like a small list. Blinking on some screen no one else can see: "Should I have written that email differently?" "Why did I go quiet back then?" "Why didn't that piece get the response I hoped for?"

And here's the strange part: the quieter the moment, the louder it gets. Because stillness turns up the volume on the inner checklist.

This isn't a time management problem. Or some simple to-do list thing that we can just check off and forget. It's something more like a list of unfinished confrontations. Words we swallow. Objections we postpone. Things we keep meaning to say and keep not saying. The day ends. The list doesn't.

The Mind Can't Carry Uncertainty

So why are we like this? Why does the mind keep snagging on what's unfinished?

There's a name for it in psychology: the Zeigarnik effect. The mind files away completed tasks like closed folders. But everything unfinished stays open—like a tab left on your screen. If you don't close it, it keeps running in the background. It quietly drains you. Because the mind always struggles with the unresolved. Workload isn't the issue here.

Every unfinished thing is a small alarm going off inside: "This isn't closed yet." That's why you can knock out ten things in a day and still, when your head hits the pillow, drift toward the one thing that isn't done.

You open a draft in your mailbox. Write two sentences. Tell yourself you'll come back to it. The day moves on. You move on. But your mind keeps circling back. The problem is that it's still hanging there.

The Unfinished Sentence

You're at dinner with a friend. You're about to say "Actually, I also… " and the waiter shows up. The thread breaks. The night ends. You go home. But that half-sentence is still running. Sometimes you catch yourself at 2 a.m. staring at the ceiling, quietly rehearsing what you should have said. The Zeigarnik effect at its clearest: the finished conversation fades away, but the sentence you didn't get to say stays open. Because that sentence was your way of saying:

"I'm here too. This matters to me."

Unfinished Paragraphs (and Hemingway)

Let me give an example from my own routine. I sit down at my desk in the morning. I'm right in the middle of a piece. "I'll tie this paragraph together tomorrow," I tell myself, and close the laptop. The day fills up—students, classes, the usual rush. But when I lie down at night, that unfinished paragraph comes back. What will the character do? Where will the story go? My mind never really leaves it alone.

In those moments, I sometimes think of Hemingway: "Stop when you know what is going to happen next. Leave it for tomorrow." Hemingway did this intuitively. But in doing so, he was already practicing what Zeigarnik would name years later. He stopped where he knew what would happen next. I stop where I don't—and that difference matters. Leaving something unfinished can wear you down. But sometimes that very incompleteness becomes the force that pulls you back to the desk the next morning. Not all unfinished things are the same—some consume us, others carry us forward.

The File Closes. The Meaning Doesn't.

Sometimes the unfinished thing does get finished. We close the file. We move on. But the meaning doesn't close. I sent the email. The piece was published. I said the words. Done. But not done. "Was I really understood? Was I truly seen?"—still there. You close the email, but the email was never the point. Being seen was. And the need to be seen doesn't close with any email. You get the thing, but the wanting doesn't stop—it slides to the next thing. Because desire was never really about the object.

Lacan had a name for this endless reaching: lack. The very engine of desire. Let's take a look at Zeigarnik's open tabs through that lens. The unfinished email. The swallowed words. The paragraph is left hanging. They are the actual shape of our wanting. We keep trying to close the loop and hope to finally feel whole. But it's a finish line that keeps moving, because we mistakenly believe an external action can fill an internal void. The mind doesn't just carry unfinished work. It also lingers, caught in the tension of unfinished feelings.

The Story We Keep Telling Ourselves

We keep narrating the same story: "One day the list will be done. Everything will be complete. Then I'll rest." That day isn't coming. Life is a series of interruptions. Phones that ring at the wrong time. Plans that fall apart. Days that slip away. And sometimes just the beautiful mess of being us. The list never ends, and this should be OK. The problem is that we treat the never-ending as a catastrophe.

The Inner Checklist: Noise or Compass?

Not all unfinished things sound the same. Some are noise—they exhaust you. Others are a compass—they call you forward. So which one are you carrying?

To tell the difference, look at how these thoughts behave. First, noise shows up randomly during idle moments, like brushing your teeth, whereas a compass appears when triggered by something specific, like a deep conversation. Next, imagine the thing is finally done: noise leaves you with a heavy sigh of relief, but a compass makes you feel energized, so you start to wonder what's next. Finally, look at its lifespan. If a thought has been stuck for months, spinning without any real movement, it's noise. If it's been there just as long but gets a little clearer every time you revisit it, that's your compass.

If it is noise, give it an owner. Name the open tab. Give it a specific next step. Write it down. The mind calms when the problem has an owner. But if it is a compass, name it and give it five minutes. Some items are invitations. Just move five minutes toward it: five minutes on the draft, five minutes on the message, five minutes walking and thinking. A compass becomes real through small moves.

Maybe none of this works. Sometimes you know what to do and still can't do it. You can only name it. Some unfinished things are noise—they grow if you don't put them somewhere. Others are a compass—they don't stop because they're not supposed to.

Life Is a Work in Progress

The list will never be finished. Because life won't be finished. Some incompleteness is just noise—anxiety without a home. Give it a date. Give it a plan. Give it a place to live. It'll settle. But some of it is a compass. The kind of incompleteness that makes you who you are. That keeps you reaching—Zeigarnik's tension meeting Lacan's motor.

The line at the register moves forward. My turn comes. I empty the basket onto the belt. From the outside, everything still looks ordinary. My phone feels like it buzzes again. This time I don't reach for it right away. I wait a second. Did it really buzz, or am I making it up again? I don't know.

The incompleteness is still there. It hasn't gone anywhere. My head is still full of open tabs. That email. That sentence. That piece. Maybe some of them would close if I followed through. Some of them look like they never will. But which is which—I can't always tell. Sometimes I'm just lazy. Sometimes I'm scared. And sometimes the thing I thought mattered quietly fades on its own a few days later.

The cashier hands me the receipt. I thank her and walk out. The air is cold. The list in my head is still warm. I'm thinking. Some things can't be solved. Some of them I'm just making bigger than they are. My phone buzzes for real this time. I don't look. Not yet. I just want to walk for a bit.

The answer to this question lies at the core of the "shadow" concept, introduced by Carl Gustav Jung as he explored the human psyche. The shadow represents everything our conscious self refuses to accept and represses. For years, most of us have known this concept only by its dark face: our anger outbursts, our jealousies, our laziness, our selfishness, the parts of ourselves we are ashamed of…

Cinema and literature frequently use this dark side too. Interestingly, many of us are deeply drawn to well-written characters of the dark side. Darth Vader in Star Wars, Tyler Durden in Fight Club, or the mysterious stranger in Secret Window—these are the concrete embodiments of the destructive yet equally alluring shadow within us. This is the side most talked about, feared, and wondered about in psychology and pop culture.

But Jung's real great secret was different: The shadow is not just dark; it also has a golden face. In Jung's own words:

"The shadow does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc… The shadow is, on one side, regrettable and reprehensible weakness; on the other hand, it is healthy instinctuality and the prerequisite for higher consciousness."

The positive traits we suppress, the strengths we fail to notice, the talents and potentials we've locked away inside ourselves for years, saying, "I don't have that in me, I'm not that kind of person…"

They all live inside the "Golden Shadow."

And the most ironic part is this: We usually recognize it the exact moment we see it in others. That recognition often brings along feelings of envy, resentment, and bitterness.

The Invisible Baggage on Our Backs

The poet and Jungian commentator Robert Bly describes this with a striking metaphor: We all drag a heavy, invisible, massive baggage behind us.

As children and teenagers, we received messages like "This doesn't suit you," "Don't be too ambitious," "Don't shine too brightly," or "Be humble," and we stuffed the most beautiful parts of our personality into this baggage. Not just the dark sides we feared; our creativity, our charisma, our adventurous spirit, our deep emotionality, our natural leadership… All of it. This way, we felt safe. Because we had dropped anchor in the harbor of doing what was expected of us.

We spend the first twenty years of our lives deciding what to lock away in that baggage. And we spend the rest of our lives trying to pull things back out. Because inside that baggage, according to Jung's definition, lies the debris (the trash) we deem worthless and want to get rid of, alongside the potential (the pure gold) we hid at the very bottom out of fear of its brilliance.

And without realizing it, every day we see that pure gold—our true potential, which deep down we believe we also deserve—in other people. Now let's pause and really think about it.

The Mirror in the Office

You are in a morning office meeting. The assistant manager is at the head of the table, captivating everyone in three sentences; everyone is laughing, taking notes. You sit silently in the back row, feeling a slight bitterness inside:

"I wish I could speak so naturally, so comfortably, so charismatically…"

Your glances slowly start turning green. That is the moment you come face-to-face with your own golden shadow. That sparkle you see in your colleague is actually nothing more than the leadership, self-confidence, and natural expressiveness you have forbidden yourself for years.

The Ache of the Scroll

You come home in the evening, dead tired, and open your phone on the couch. The scroll begins. An old friend posts a story about watching the sunset at Machu Picchu. Another post, "I started my own business at 30, I'm my own boss now." Another writes, "I visited 12 countries this year, life is short."

Your finger freezes. That same bitterness surfaces again. In that moment, you're actually looking in a mirror—but the mirror isn't in front of you, it's inside the phone. Your suppressed adventurous spirit, your free side, your courage to take risks, your power to say "This is my life"… They are all looking right at you from other people's photos, straight out of your own baggage.

The neighbor's shiny new car in the garage, your friend's promotion news on WhatsApp, your cousin saying "Yoga is my new hobby, my life completely changed"… That feeling of "I wish I had that too" you get every single time is no coincidence.

The Confession at the Rakı Table

The most naked form of this repression reveals itself at the rakı table.

After the fifth glass, that friend who always says, "I don't drink much, I wake up early, I have work tomorrow," suddenly changes. He starts singing, gets into deep philosophy, spills stories he hasn't told in years, or sometimes his eyes well up, his nerves give way, he loses control, and sobs.

A restaurant-owner friend of mine exploded on a night just like this:

"I'm sick of playing the good guy! Everyone expects me to be polite, calm, and understanding. They got used to it. I got them used to it. I got used to it myself. But sometimes… Sometimes I just want to flip the tables, scream, and say screw it all!"

When we met the next day again, we didn't talk much; he looked at me and gave a subtle smile. His rebellion from the night before had returned to its place in the baggage. Rakı is like a key that briefly unlocks that baggage. Those who never open the baggage grow older as the years pass, but they never mature. Those who open it are terrified at first, but then they become lighter.

The Poison of Keeping the Baggage Closed

In the long run, this suppression leaves much deeper wounds. As we stuff our own golden shadow into the baggage, a toxic envy grows inside us. Instead of wanting our own success, we start wanting others to fail:

"If my salary is low, theirs should be low too."

"If I got a bad grade, they should get one too."

"The pandemic is good, I couldn't leave the house, now nobody can…"

These sentences are not innocent. They are the desire to drag others into the same darkness because we cannot live out our own potential. As long as we don't open the baggage, this poison slowly eats away at our lives, our relationships, and our happiness.

So, the next time you feel that bitterness, that slight envy, or that toxic thought of "I wish they would fail," stop. Quit hiding behind excuses. Ask yourself this harsh question:

"Where exactly in my baggage is this feeling hiding? Which piece of my gold am I attacking because I'm too afraid to bring it out?"

That is the moment you truly look in the mirror.

And the person you see in that mirror is the one you have judged the most for years, but actually know the least:

"Your own golden shadow."

Whenever I decide to build a wall—around an issue, toward someone, or even toward myself, for whatever reason—I throw my whole self into figuring out how to build it best. If I've truly committed to that wall, I work hard to make sure nothing can ever get over it.

Whenever I feel like one of those walls has been breached, I turn to Beckett:

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Most people see that quote as motivation to keep chasing success. I use it when I'm rebuilding my walls. If a crack appears, I immediately ask, "Where did it go wrong?" and start building an even stronger one. I don't hold back from doing whatever it takes. Sure, I might still be defeated; the wall might still come down. But this time I'll fail better—and that's fine by me. At least I'm trying.

So what does this habit actually do to my life? Am I really protecting myself, or am I handing the keys to an inescapable prison over to its jailer with my own hands?

Personally, I've never been the type to pretend I'm flawless. I know I'm human—I make mistakes, I learn from them, and as long as I can recognize them, I believe I can keep moving forward. That said, I've always thought defense mechanisms are necessary. We should protect ourselves as well as we can; in a world full of "lunatics," I can't let anyone steal pieces of my life. But right here lies a very thin line…

This is, in fact, where the paradox starts. What begins as a way to shield us from unnecessary drama—rationalization—eventually builds immunity not just to pain, but to joy and excitement too. The wall gets so thick that sunlight barely trickles in, or doesn't get in at all. The fortress that was supposed to protect me slowly turns into a damp, moldy cell.

Not long ago, someone told me, "You're really hard to talk to sometimes." My first reaction was neither anger nor sadness. The only thing that crossed my mind was: "Are they right or not?" I reviewed the file, closed it, moved on. But as time passed, I realized I had felt absolutely nothing in that moment. No anger, no relief. Just an analysis process. That's when I understood where rationalization had taken me—the system I'd built to keep pain out was keeping everything else out too.

These are precisely the paradoxes explained by the theories Sigmund Freud laid the groundwork for and that his daughter Anna Freud systematized in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. Anna Freud describes ten primary defense mechanisms the ego uses to escape anxiety. One of the most familiar to all of us is probably projection: instead of accepting our own flaws or mistakes, we see them in someone else and blame them. When a friend seems distant, rather than noticing that we've pulled away ourselves, we say, "They've always been cold anyway," and shift the responsibility onto them. It feels good in the moment, but over time, it damages our relationships and leaves us more isolated.

This is where we see how defense mechanisms can initially serve as a protective shield in the short term and become restraining chains in the long term. There are others too—repression, denial, displacement. In the moment, they all feel like lifesavers. The ego hides our fragile selves from shame or guilt. But when these patterns become habitual, they don't just keep external dangers out—they also block the joy and connections inside.

Yet we need to make an important distinction here: defense mechanisms can also be adaptive. Even the maladaptive ones can be genuinely lifesaving when used in the right dose. It depends a lot on how we look at life. Sublimation, for instance, is an adaptive mechanism: instead of expressing anger or aggression destructively, we channel it into art, sport, or some productive pursuit. A friend of mine worked through a major disappointment by painting; as he poured his pain onto the canvas, he expressed himself and ended up creating beautiful work. Another friend used to say that writing healed him.

But someone else in the same situation might go maladaptive—displacing their anger by yelling at the first driver who cuts them off in traffic or snapping at whoever feels safe to target. It releases tension for an instant, but it doesn't solve anything and only further damages relationships and peace of mind.

In the end, defense mechanisms are neither purely protective knights nor cruel dungeon masters. They take shape based on how much authority we give them. If we use them with awareness—knowing why we're building that wall—they keep us standing. But if we hand over the reins and let them run on autopilot, we get lost in Freud's complex theories and watch helplessly as the many-headed monster Anna described devours us piece by piece.

So how do we build that awareness? The first step is simple: observe our defense mechanisms without judgment. When we start raising a wall, pause and ask: "Is this wall really protecting me from what's outside, or is it imprisoning my own feelings?" Trying to name the mechanism out loud—or on paper—is already a crack in the wall. Maybe not enough to walk through. But enough to remember the door exists. It's also possible to consciously shift toward adaptive mechanisms: channeling anger into sublimation instead of repression, bringing in humor, or embracing Beckett's "fail better" mindset to crack the door open a little.

While we still hold the key to our own dungeon, stepping outside occasionally—despite all the lunatics out there—to take a clean breath of air is far better than rotting behind the walls we built ourselves. And as long as the key is in our hand, it's entirely possible to relieve that inner "dungeon master" of its duties.

Sometimes, this worries me. It feels like we're walking a thin, invisible tightrope between surrendering to AI and using it as a mind-expanding helper—perhaps even a friend.

I was recently talking to a friend who is a university professor. He laughed and said something quite strange: "Hakan, it's reached a point where students are having AI write their essays, and I'm sitting there having AI read them."

Isn't that surreal? One machine writes, another machine reads, and we pretend an education is happening in between. Perhaps this is an inevitable part of the transition we're in. Naturally, we prefer whatever makes our work easier. But before we find ourselves standing in a sudden, vast void, unsure of what to do next, we need to talk about this—for the sake of conversation itself.

Could this void I'm talking about be the absence of human effort? Those painful moments when we used to pause to fix a sentence, delete and rewrite, or rack our brains for the perfect word… Were those moments just a waste of time? Or were they the very necessities that make us who we are—the friction that allows our thoughts to cook and mature?

If we outsource that process—the jagged, unbalanced, and rugged path of thinking—to machines, will the flawless, sterile result truly satisfy us? More importantly, when we stop enduring that struggle, are we quietly surrendering our ability to be self-sufficient?

And what about the bonds we form while supporting each other through hard times? If we solve every problem with a single command, will we stop needing one another? If we deem those bonds unnecessary and let them fray, will we cross a line from which there is no return? I'm not sure.

But I think part of the answer lies in realizing that the "it's too hard, let someone else do it" mindset isn't always our friend. Because being self-sufficient means choosing to do some things ourselves—even if technology could do them better—simply because it feels good, because we love the walk along that difficult path.

Perhaps in the future, our greatest joy will be saying, "No, stop," and then, "I want to feel this, I want to solve this, I want to experience this myself."

Because life is about who we fall with and whose hand we hold to get back up. And I fear no algorithm will ever be able to replicate the warmth of a hand reached out when you hit the ground.

I had a friend who valued self-sufficiency above all else. He never wanted help with anything; no matter how hard it was, he did it himself. When he finally bought the house he'd dreamed of since childhood, he refused our help even with the move.

"By doing this, you're taking away the moments we could have shared," I told him. "We could meet in the morning, finish the heavy lifting together, and then head to the seaside to eat and share a glass of rakı. You're robbing us of these memories just to avoid being a burden by saying, 'No need, I'll handle it.' Those moments would have been memories now. We have many beautiful memories together, but they are limited. We missed those times of helping each other and celebrating the result together." I lost that friend two years ago. I still miss him dearly.

Today, technology whispers the exact same sentence into our ears: "No need, don't tire yourself, I'll handle it." While this promise feels like ultimate comfort, I can see the desolation behind it more clearly now. That's why, no matter how much AI eases our lives, we must stubbornly insist on choosing the difficult path sometimes. We will remember the moments we stood shoulder to shoulder, got tired, perhaps made mistakes, but then sat down to celebrate—moments that were truly ours.

Completed by Eric Berne in just two years, Transactional Analysis, or TA, offers us a map of human psychology to make sense of these internal dynamics and the invisible layers of communication. Developed in the 1950s, this approach grew out of his detailed studies on how individuals project themselves and engage with those around them. It focuses on the active exchange between people to decode the underlying patterns of their behavior.

It serves as a guide to discover the hidden corners of our inner world—parts we aren't even aware of—and helps us bridge the gap between who we are and the world around us in a healthy way.

The Mind Behind TA

Born in Montréal, Canada in 1910, Dr. Eric Berne was a psychiatrist and a polymath who received education in various fields alongside his medical training.

In addition to medicine, he pursued studies in literature, public relations, and anthropology. This diverse background enriched his perspective and greatly influenced his development of TA.

A Simple "Hello"

In the business world, a transaction refers to a simple exchange process. However, when Berne applied this to social life, it took on a much deeper meaning. According to him, every greeting and every glance is a spiritual exchange. This idea leads us to a fundamental question in social psychology: Why do people communicate with each other? Or why do we say "Hello" in the first place?

According to Berne, the answer to this is recognition hunger, which is just as vital as physical hunger. Just as our bodies need food to survive, our souls need stimuli to feel that they exist. Berne named every unit of attention that satisfies this hunger a stroke.

For us, the greatest fear is being ignored. Therefore, if we cannot attract positive attention, we seek a negative reaction just to prove our existence. Think of a child who knowingly makes their mother angry by being naughty. They willingly accept being scolded, as her shouting is far more bearable than her indifferent silence. Because receiving a reaction, no matter how negative, is the most concrete proof of saying I am here and I exist. I think I can also give the example of my cat trying to bite my foot out of nowhere when I haven't paid attention to him for a while.

To understand these dynamics, we need to go a little deeper and meet three separate characters inside us struggling to take control at any moment.

The Four Key Tools of Transactional Analysis

Structural Analysis explores the architecture of our personality. It answers the question: Who is really speaking right now? The Parent, the Adult, or the Child?

Transactional Analysis Proper examines the flow of communication between people. It looks at whether we are really understanding each other, or if we are entirely disconnected.

Game Analysis reveals the hidden patterns in our relationships. It explains why we keep falling into the same conflicts and repetitive emotional traps to gain attention.

Life Script Analysis focuses on the unconscious life plan we wrote for ourselves in childhood. It shows how yesterday's decisions limit today's freedom.

Structural Analysis

Ego States: The Three Voices Inside

You can think of an ego state as a consistent set of feelings and thoughts, accompanied by related behaviors. We switch between three distinct ego states constantly, and use them to interact with the outside world or to hold conversations—sometimes endless ones while staring at the ceiling in bed—with ourselves. While inspired by Freud's psychoanalytic model, these states functionally categorize a person's internal world:

• Child Ego State—The present-day manifestation of the emotions, thoughts, and behavior patterns a person experienced as a child.
• Adult Ego State—The part of the person that evaluates internal and external reality as it is in the "here and now," processes data, and responds logically.
• Parent Ego State—A reflection of the values, rules, and behaviors of the parents or other authority figures that the person has internalized since childhood.

Parent Ego State

The Parent Ego State encompasses the attitudes and behaviors learned and copied from the parents and other role models. Think about the significant people from your past. It could be your mother, father, older siblings or your teachers—anyone who was important to you. Those are the people who have positively and negatively influenced your life. Your Parent Ego State contains all these people. At any given moment, you can go into thinking, feeling and acting like one of them.

Adult Ego State

The Adult Ego State emerges around six months in the child. It always functions in the present, and processes our thoughts and feelings rationally. In this state, we are aware of ourselves, our impact on others, and take account what is going on around us. In other words, it's us being our true selves, free from external influences of our Parent and Child Ego States.

Child Ego State

Generally speaking, when we are being selfish, affectionate, playful, creative, mean, or are simply having fun, we are operating from our Child Ego State. We are in our Child Ego State when we think, feel, and behave in the same way we did when we were children. In many ways, it is one of the most important parts of our personality because both creativity and curiosity come from the child in us.

"Creating a harmonious relationship between the ego states is one of the most effective ways of being more mindful, staying in the moment and enjoying life more."

Reading Between the Lines: The Hidden Layers of Talk

Transactional analysis proper examines how people actually communicate through three main types of transactions: complementary, crossed, and ulterior.

Complementary Transactions: When the response matches the ego state that was addressed, the transaction is called complementary. In such cases, communication usually flows smoothly and can continue for a long time without conflict.

Crossed Transactions: A crossed transaction occurs when the response comes from a different ego state than the one that was expected. This mismatch often causes confusion, frustration, or a sudden breakdown in communication.

Ulterior Transactions: According to Berne, communication often happens on two levels at once—the obvious social message and a hidden psychological message underneath. People usually sense the hidden layer, even if they can't clearly explain why they feel uncomfortable.

Life Script: The Unconscious Blueprint

One of the central concepts in TA is the life script. Essentially, this is a life plan that we wrote for ourselves when we were just children without even realizing it.

As kids, we try to make sense of the world. Based on the messages we get from our parents or from the people we consider significant, we create a 'survival guide' to secure our place in the world. Back then, these decisions were vital strategies.

However, the tragedy begins in adulthood. Even though the years pass and the stage changes, we stick to that old script. Even if it limits us, we stubbornly continue to play out the specific role we wrote as children.

For instance, many boys around the world might decide early in life that it's unsafe to express emotions like crying. This decision might be reinforced by their parental figures, leading them to have difficulties in connecting with emotions as adults in the present.

Games People Play

Berne observed that human interactions often follow specific, recurring patterns he called games. This concept became the foundation of his 1964 bestseller, "Games People Play," a work that remains influential today. In TA, a game always involves an ulterior motive—usually a subconscious quest for recognition or validation—which operates beneath the surface.

To be classified as a game, the interaction must meet specific criteria:

• It follows a repetitive pattern.
• It occurs outside of Adult awareness.
• The true message is conveyed at the psychological level.
• It always results in a hidden payoff for the players.
• It concludes with a familiar, often negative emotion known as a racket feeling.

"Why don't you…? Yes, but…"

Imagine a scenario where someone named Blue complains about a lack of energy.

Blue: I feel exhausted all the time. I really need to get back in shape.

Green: Why don't you join the gym down the street?

Blue: Yes, but it is too expensive for me right now.

Green: Well, why don't you go for a run in the park?

Blue: Yes, but my knees hurt when I run on hard pavement.

Green: Why don't you try swimming then?

Blue: Yes, but the pool is always crowded when I get off work.

Eventually, Green runs out of ideas. On the surface, this appears to be a constructive conversation. However, underneath, Blue is playing a game to prove that the problem is unsolvable. Blue rejects every solution to leave Green feeling helpless, and confirms the hidden belief that nothing will work.

Breaking Free: The Power to Choose

The ultimate objective of TA is to empower the Adult Ego State. By developing a conscious understanding of our psychological games and life scripts, we gain the ability to make more intentional choices. This awareness allows us to detach from the weight of past traumas and the pressure of future anxieties. Ultimately, TA provides the framework we need to view our relationships and what is happening around us with greater mindfulness and clarity across all areas of life.