By Dr. Adnan Bozan

There is nothing harsher than looking back, only to find that all which passed was but a beautiful lie—masterful in its deception. That time, which we once believed an ally, was all along counting our breaths, stealing the warmth of our dreams, and bartering our lives for distorted memories.

On a mute night, souls were drifting to sleep on pavements, and eyes stayed wide open, staring into the void—as if awaiting something that would never come. On that very night, I stood before the mirror and saw nothing. I was there—a body soaked in betrayal, a soul shivering not from the cold of winter, but from the cold of meaninglessness... the chill of years that pass and leave behind only hollowed depths.

Time was never just. We were fated to be its victims, to carry the burden of incomplete tales, to be born in the middle of interrupted sentences, and to be buried at the final punctuation. Who said the years teach? They’ve taken more than they’ve ever given. They robbed us of innocence, stole the faces of our loved ones, and taught us that nothing lasts... not even memory.

Life wrote its cruelty upon the chest of night—as if night were its diary of sorrow, and only its chest wide enough to bear such weight. She wrote with her nails, with orphans’ tears, with mothers’ screams, with dreams aborted, and with a love never given the chance to mature. The night bears witness, but it does not speak. It gathers wounds like a secluded monk, swallowing screams without complaint.

We asked nothing of time but to pass gently. Yet it chose to crawl—cruelly slow—as if stabbing us in silence, then smiling as it watched us bleed from within. They said time heals, but never told us how many parts of us must die before a single wound recovers. They promised a brighter tomorrow, but no one told us that some tomorrows are stillborn—that they die before their sun rises. That the road to them is littered with betrayals, and each step costs a piece of our soul.

And when we loved, love was merely another way to survive—to cling to something living amid this vast desolation. But even love could not escape time’s dominion. Lovers fade, promises wither, and feelings are forgotten—just like the names of the dead on nameless graves. It is as if we were made to witness the fading of everything we ever loved, to be buried alive beneath the rubble of what we once longed to call our own.

O Time... how cruel you’ve been, making us live without life, laugh while we shatter, show strength as we collapse, write of hope with ink drawn from fear, and paint suns on walls that no light ever touches. It was not the spinning of days that crushed us, but the still moments that repeated endlessly—without meaning, without novelty, without redemption.

Every night, someone lays their head on a cold pillow and whispers: “It passes... but it never heals.”
And every dawn, someone rises not because they are rested—but because they simply haven’t died yet.

We are the children of this time—a generation born among the ruins of dreams, raised on tales that never end with joy. In our chests, we carry tiny coffins—where we bury our moments, our loved ones, our childhoods, even our laughter. We do not ask time to return. We only beg it to pause, just for a moment, to give us space to breathe, to let us write our lives with our own hands—not with the dry ink of its relentless chapters.

But time does not listen. Time does not care.
And all that remains to us is to write—to record our pain as one would carve a gravestone—
hoping someone, some evening, will stumble upon the words...
and understand.