By Dr. Adnan Bozan
There are things that never reach a destination because they were born to remain on the road: nameless stations, faces that crossed our lives like passing shadows upon a wall sinking into dusk, and souls that carried their bags without ever knowing where they were going. As though life were nothing but a long road; each time we thought we had reached its end, another exile opened before us, another window, another night more desolate than the last.
We cross borders that cannot be seen, leaving behind what the heart is unable to leave: a vanished home, a face that never returned, a voice suspended somewhere between memory and absence. We move on, not because the road calls to us, but because standing still has become another form of death.
And deep within this departure, the soul retains its quiet neighing—a cry no one can hear, yet one that awakens in the darkness everything we once tried to bury beneath the ruins of passing years. There, where no hand can reach and no consolation can arrive, words begin to weep on their own, and letters become footprints upon the sands of fate; the wind erases them, only to return and carve them once more.
How many stories have passed through us without ever being written? How much sorrow has lived inside us until it became part of our faces? Sometimes we smiled so that the ruin would not be exposed, and we remained silent because some griefs are too vast to be spoken, and too deep for language to carry.
And because fate has its own cold way of writing, it continued to leave upon our chests letters that could only be read after it was too late: lines of muffled anguish, suspended punctuation, and questions with no doors. Whenever we tried to understand what had happened, silence proved wiser than any answer.
Perhaps that is why stories never truly end; they merely disappear from sight. They settle in the tremor of a voice, in the scent of a distant place, in a song that suddenly arrives from somewhere unknown, or in a long night when we feel that the whole world has fallen asleep, while our souls alone remain awake, guarding what little light is left.
We do not carry our lives with us; we carry only their fragments: a piece of childhood left unfinished, a laugh that lost its way, a love that never found its appointed hour, a homeland that remained longer in the heart than it ever did upon the map, and faces that departed before we could tell them how deeply we needed them.
And so we go on, without an appointment, without certainty, without a clear ending. The days pass through us as we pass through them, stealing things from us with the silence of ancient gods, while somewhere in the farthest reaches of the soul, that distant neighing remains, refusing to die.
And when night lowers its final curtain, and nothing remains of the world but a heartbeat, a memory, and a single word, we discover that the deepest pain of departure is not losing the road, but arriving one day at a place that knows nothing of who we once were.
Only then do we understand that some souls are not searching for a homeland, but for a small trace to prove that they once passed this way; and that some words are not written to be read, but to remain as witnesses that a heart, somewhere in a distant time, loved, suffered, fell silent, and then went on.