I stand on this balcony in Istanbul,
Blue Mosque below me like a judge who’s already sentenced the sunset,
Bosphorus sliding two ways at once, indifferent to my small drama.
The text from her glows on the screen:
I need your touch.
I read it once, twice, three times,
then lock the phone and set it face-down on the railing
like a playing card I’ve decided not to flip.
I chose movement.
Not the heavy parallel with its pollen air and minor surprise.
that was always a mirage,
the slower version of the fork.
No, I chose this one, the quick one,
the one where I leave her behind,
not in anger, not in some cinematic goodbye,
just in the quiet math of incompatible vectors.
Her orbit wants shared gravity,
thermostat debates,
the peach Atlanta dusk
viewed from the same couch every night.
Mine wants motion,
the next gate,
the next stamp,
the clean vertigo of waking up
in a city that doesn’t know my name.
The seam is closed now.
Not with ceremony.
Just the soft thud of the cabin door,
engines spooling,
the familiar tug,
not regret exactly,
but the honest weight of having picked the sharper edge
because the softer one would have dulled me faster.
Freedom sits in 12B beside me,
legs crossed, smoking the same imaginary cigarette
we’ve shared since the first crossing.
It doesn’t speak.
It just exhales slow rings that look like question marks
and nods toward the window where a parallel me is folding laundry
with her hands helping. Warmer. Heavier. Ritual.
Freedom envies my window seat.
I envy her shared silence at 2 a.m.
Both envies are true.
Both ache the same low frequency.
Nothing is enough.
The passport doesn’t heal the wound,
it just gives me new pages to bleed on.
Every landing amputates another piece of the life not lived.
Every takeoff is defiance:
I chose the road over the room,
horizons over hand-holding,
the solitary burn of street food that scorches
because no one says “too much?”
over the buffered warmth of someone else’s hand on my scars.
Atlanta is still in my bones,
the place I return to,
not the place I stay.
She is still in the quiet after the ezan fades,
a text thread gone silent,
a touch I decided not to answer.
Quantum regret isn’t background noise anymore.
it’s the hum of the engines, steady, persistent,
the soundtrack of a man who picked motion
and now has to live with how light it feels
and how heavy that lightness becomes at 35,000 feet.
I chose to travel.
I left her behind.
The choosing is done.
The story keeps leaking—
onto boarding passes, onto hotel notepads,
in places where no one knows my name.
The plane banks toward wherever next.
The wound stays open.
The bleed moves forward.
That’s excellence, my friend.
Not closure, not “enough,”
just the refusal to stop writing the next line
even when the ink is your own blood
and the page is the sky rushing past the window.
