Dragging out the final syllable of “nasılsınız” with a vague familiarity meant to warm the distance between us, Polina steps into my room. Unlike me, she’s in her fifties and still manages to be attractive. Maybe it’s out of politeness, or maybe she’s just looking for a way to start a conversation, but she tells me she likes the music I’m listening to—claims she listens to the same kind of thing while working. I tell her I play whatever comes up. I listen randomly. Nothing in my life holds any meaning that outlasts the moment it occurs in. I hide this fact like it’s a kind of deformity, unable to tell anyone. Not even her. Knowing her presence would mean nothing to me the moment she walks out of here—surely, that would be too cruel to admit. Even though empathy isn’t exactly my strongest suit, I am acutely aware that my presence tends to feel like a knife, awkwardly wielded by an incompetent assassin, always stabbing the wrong hearts.

She keeps looking me in the eye while she speaks. I can’t just blurt out that eye contact isn’t really my thing. So, following protocol, I look into her eyes while she talks, even if I occasionally glance away. Big green eyes, speckled like tiny pebbles… Polina, you’re very beautiful. Why doesn’t this move me?

She speaks with conviction, underlining how much the things she values really do matter to her. There’s something cracked in her voice, a distinctiveness that makes it hers alone. You couldn’t sing Ormancı Türküsü or Kadifeden Kesesi with that voice. You couldn’t sing a heart-wrenching revolutionary arabesk with it either. “No one came to Francesco’s funeral but me, Chao,” she says. She found out Francesco had died from the paper, days after the fact. Mourned him for a few minutes, asked people we both knew if they had heard, modulated her response based on the emotion in their answer. Meanwhile, Polina had gone all the way to Luxembourg for the funeral. I guess it’s because death doesn’t really mean anything to me—I didn’t care when Francesco died either. Polina was so affected, and I feel guilty for not being equally moved. So I put on the mask, pretend I’m sharing her grief. What kind of drink goes with this cracked voice?

If I find myself feeling too much—surprised, angry, tender, hungry, thirsty—then I know I’m in one of those days where I feel weak. And on such days, nothing bothers me more than the fact that my consciousness hasn’t been uploaded into a robot. A commemoration of some memory from the past or the future.

Today is the death anniversary of Sebahat, who was never even born. Somehow, she fell from my eyes and died. The lack of her inside me morphs into hunger and thirst. An unbearable fast, an unbearable taming of the self. I feel the dark energy unleashed in the transformation from absence to deeper absence.

On her way back from walking her toy dog, freshly groomed for 3,500 lira and now sporting an obviously expensive polar fleece, she passed by holding several plastic-lidded, red-and-white paper bowls of soup in a way that made it seem like someone else had forced them into her hands. She tugged the leash back and forth like she was trying to keep a nervous kite from flying away, and told me the bakery was handing out soup to anyone who wanted some. Maybe because I didn’t respond, she launched into a pitch: the seasoning’s just right, it hasn’t curdled, the chicken is nicely shredded, not a bone in sight. Hearing this, the neighborhood shopkeepers—well-off and well-fed—stepped out of their storefronts, bellies swaying, mouths watering, drawn to the fantasy of slurping this soup later that night.

Gül Bakery sits just below one of those old, stately buildings where the city’s faded elite still reside. Its owner, once a doctor, inherited the shop after her much older husband, Salih Bey, passed away a few years ago. She believed that turning her knack for pastries and baked goods into a business would help distract her from grief. So now the shop is packed with sesame and black cumin-studded pastries, simit, powdered sugar-dusted cookies, sour cherry jam, and melted chocolate-dipped treats. With the arrival of Ramadan, Gül Hanım clearly didn’t want to miss the opportunity to do some charity work. It seems that every day during this holy month, she’ll be giving away soup to the well-off just before iftar, and will fall asleep each night, proud of her good deed.

The very same shopkeepers who’d snorted “I don’t need that crap” one by one slunk away from their shops to queue in front of Gül Bakery, pretending not to see each other. They each took two, three, four bowls of soup—treating them like they were profit wrung from a pig’s bristle, hoarding them like guilty cats hiding stolen meat. Some reappeared minutes later to stash their soup under the seats of their motorbikes.

That day and after, the hungry remained hungry, and the full got just a little fuller, completing the taming of their appetites. And then, as if it wasn’t enough, a man who didn’t consider his own power sufficient had the city’s mayor arrested, seeing him as a possible threat. As people prepared to protest each evening and the police geared up to stop them, I chose to slip through the cracks, like a bead of condensation sliding down the windowpane. The revolution can start without me.