ŞAH

URAZ

I opened my eyes between the high walls of my nightmares. It wasn’t the kind of awakening that follows a sweat-drenched night — it felt more like drawing breath again in the middle of a never-ending life story. The room was still dark, but the air inside was familiar; because I had grown used to it by now… Darkness, sometimes, illuminated what was inside a person far more than what lay outside.

The room with its peeling ceiling and crumbling walls was a shelter that didn’t deceive with appearances. Sharing the same breath with twenty people wasn’t easy, perhaps — but I had come to realize, over time, that I felt lonelier in places where I was truly alone. This deprivation had turned into a kind of connection. As if we were freezing together in the same past, even when we couldn’t fit under the same blanket. Our stories had nothing in common, yet they leaned against the same emptiness.

Everyone had their own story… Some wrote letters at night to mothers whose faces they couldn’t remember, while others still waited behind a door, clinging to the hope that someone might return. Some had been buried in a morning, others had gotten stuck in the night. But whatever our story, we sensed each other’s wounds without ever having to memorize them.

I… was the one who had known a family, but chosen to run from them. Growing up in a crowd devoid of love contradicted every definition of loneliness, at first. But I learned with time: some bonds were built not just by blood, but by a pair of eyes you could meet without shame.

Perhaps a person couldn’t choose their mother and father… But they could choose to look, to see… or to look away. I chose to erase the things that cut into me in plain sight. Because I no longer wanted to keep learning from wounds that bled every time I remembered them. Maybe it wasn’t forgetting — but silencing them… was sometimes the best way to survive.

Being the son of a father like the Angel of Death, I was living the real hell inside an orphanage. A place called home was supposed to hold peace within it — but I had learned the meaning of home for the first time inside this building, ringed with rusted iron. It turned out that some homes locked away every last bit of light inside their walls… Even my father’s breath felt like a threat. Every time he said my name, I shuddered as though death itself were being summoned. But strangely, when I moved out of that man’s shadow, I realized the true darkness only emerged in his absence.

The day I arrived at the orphanage was still as vivid as yesterday. The damp walls of the building had introduced me to a weary silence. Inside, children leaned against one another like crutches — some looked worn out from crying, others from going quiet.

I didn’t need to remember the time that had passed since that day. Because every bit of it had already been carved into my skin. There wasn’t a single day without a mark. Some days were etched by a word, some by a glance, some simply by the fact that, once again, no one had come. I didn’t count the time; hours were useless here. The walls didn’t speak, and people rarely listened.

Prisoners carve notches into walls, don’t they — well, I carved them too. But not into walls. Into my skin. Into myself. In places I knew could never be erased… I made each notch with a “Today passed too,” but in truth, no day had ever really passed. Nights that pretended to end were broken apart by mornings that had never truly begun. I understood it was time to leave this place when there was no room left on my body. For me, it was a kind of release — but for them, it was an escape. Because some places didn’t promise to heal you. They only held you, and turned you into a kind of survival reflex. My escape wasn’t the first step toward freedom — it was the first step toward becoming human.

There was only one way I could get out of this place, and it ran through school. The path to scaling the walls, to piercing the barbed wire, ran through a classroom, a recess bell, from behind an empty stare. And strange as it was, the key to freedom lay inside another form of confinement. I thought about this often. I even tried a few times. But each time, my escape was undone by carelessness — caught just barely before I could make it.

Our school was attached to the orphanage. Which meant the outside world was nothing more than a window. Light could come in, but no steps could be taken toward it. From the guards to the teachers, everyone had the same duty: to keep us in place — or more precisely, to keep us within their borders. Education came much later. The moment you attempted to leave, a few people would appear at your back all at once, silently, without shouting, like a shadow. They were supposedly protecting us. If another notch hadn’t come afterward, maybe I would have believed it.

But I had to think differently now. This time, it wouldn’t be careless. I had learned the hard way that I couldn’t escape by confusing recklessness with courage. For days, I wove my plan stitch by stitch. I lay awake at night pretending to sleep, rehearsing in my mind every door in the school, the rhythm of the teachers’ footsteps, how many seconds before the guard glanced at his phone. Until I had memorized it all…

Slowly, a small hope began to gather inside me. I wanted to strangle the darkness here with that hope, stretched out like a rope. Today… one way or another, I was leaving this place. My soul no longer fit between these walls.

As a new day broke in the dormitory, I quietly pushed myself up, leaning on my elbow. My feet dangled off the side of the bed, my toes catching on the iron bed frame. I felt, for a moment, like I belonged there.

Everyone was rushing — searching for socks, drinking water, lining up before the guards could catch them. I was only watching. This morning, the routines felt different. Either I had changed, or the world had. But somewhere inside me, I could feel something trying to come out: grief… or perhaps I had simply grown attached to my friends.

I put on my shoes and slowly stood up. As I took off what I was wearing and left it on the bed, the faint smell of dust rising from the fabric hit my lungs. Every piece of clothing felt like the sum of the days I had spent in this room — like memories that had been washed but never cleansed of their grime.

I looked at myself in the mirror we had stuck above the wardrobe. I let my gaze move downward from where my shoulders began; my eyes couldn’t find the courage to travel to my face. Perhaps in that mirror, I was most a stranger to myself. I was slight, yes… but I was tall. My sharp-edged shoulders competed with an imaginary stoop left over from childhood. Because I was trying to hold upright not just my body, but the weight of everything I carried.

My hands moved on their own. As if without thinking… like a reflex. As my fingers moved across my body, it was as though I was meeting again the aches that had waited for years beneath my skin. Scars. Bruises. All silent, but never mute. Every place I touched throbbed as if to say,“You haven’t forgotten me.”

Pain never disappeared. No matter how much a person tried to ignore it, it seeped into somewhere. It pretended to have healed, but it never truly did. It only shifted. It hid in the deepest parts of your soul. It coiled into the darkest corner of your own silence. And there… it fed on rage.

Pain… was no longer something that came to you from the outside. It was inside you. It was a part of you. It spread through your body like a poison — circulating in your blood, multiplying in your breath, seeping into the words that left your mouth, felt even in a single glance.

This was pain: Familiar. Silent. Permanent. A wretched feeling…

But sometimes… the only thing that reminds you that you are still alive.