When the City Becomes Strange

The road wasn’t long… I was the one who had grown smaller.
No one saw me off.
I left them the way a shadow leaves a room — no one turned, no one said: “take your time,”not even a half‑hearted glance. I just left, wearing a light summer shirt in a night whose cold doesn’t kill, but knows how to sting — so you remember your loneliness.

I felt as if I were walking inside someone’s pocket — dark, cramped, meaningless. I took out my phone and wrote to her: “I’ve left.”Then I switched it off, like closing a door on a heart that no longer served any purpose. I lit a cigarette… I couldn’t taste it. I was walking, but I didn’t know where. The road moved, and I clung to my thoughts like a drowning man clutching a broken plank.

The city’s streets looked strange — as if they had taken off their familiar faces and put on features that weren’t mine. The sidewalks were empty, the orange streetlight like a dead pulse about to go out, as if the city were asking me: “What are you doing here?”

I saw a grey cat cross the street alone. It gave me a long look, then disappeared behind a dumpster. I felt I was watching myself in that moment — that I was that cat: walking without a map, without a home, without a clue. Everything reminded me of her… the stairs, the window that resembled her laugh, the wall she once leaned her back against one evening. Everything. And everything said: “You are alone… and you chose to stay that way.”

I was walking in the dark — literally. No lights, no signs, no colours. Only blackness, and her face repeating inside me as if I were whispering her name without sound. I walked a long way… so far that I no longer knew whether I was truly lost, or just lost inside myself.

Then my apartment appeared — like the last sentence of a book no one wants to finish. I didn’t feel glad to arrive, didn’t feel relief. I entered like someone entering their final cell before execution. I sat on the worn‑out sofa, put my head against the wall, and wept. But it wasn’t crying. It was something like crying — but without tears. A silent spillage of something inside that had broken long ago and never told anyone.

I thought of her. Of what she would have said if she had seen me like this:

•       Would she have laughed?
•       Would she have written me something long?
•       Would she have said, “No one will ever love you like I do”?؟

I don’t know… maybe she wouldn’t have said anything. In my head, images ignited: a child running after his father who doesn’t look back; a girl sitting before a broken mirror, combing the shadow of her hair; a man holding a map with no places; me, in the middle of the road, searching for something that resembles me — finding nothing but the echo of my own footsteps repeating in the emptiness.

Am I lost? Or was I lost from the very beginning? Was I searching for her? Or for myself? All I know is that I came home, but I didn’t come back as myself… maybe I was never myself at all. And all that remained — a dead cigarette, a switched‑off phone, and a question I don’t have the courage to ask: “Would anyone have asked about me if I hadn’t made it?”

Yes… she would have. Who else?