Thoughts
Sometimes I wonder how I’m still standing by, watching my life continue like a film I was never meant to star in. Stuck. No road ahead, no voice waiting on the other end of the night. Just the same hollow streets and the same reflection that keeps surviving me every time I return home.
Home sits two blocks behind the city bar, buried between rusted shutters and dim windows that never fully close. There’s an old woman living across from it. She watches me whenever I pass, her eyes carrying the kind of judgment that feels older than language itself. Maybe she knows something. Humans adore staring at wreckage as if it might suddenly explain their own.
That night I went to the bar and ordered drinks I couldn’t really afford. The room smelled of wet coats, smoke, and forgotten conversations. When I finally stood to leave, Sudden Remedy started playing somewhere behind me. Or maybe inside my head. Hard to tell anymore.
That’s when I saw Natasa.
She worked there once. A clerk, technically, though she spent more time rescuing me from unpaid tabs than doing her actual job. Usually calm. Usually alive in the ordinary sense. But that night she looked wrong. Not injured. Wrong. Her hands were covered in blood, clutching a single flower like it had been placed there after the damage was already done. Her face was swollen, eyes dry to the point of lifelessness, as if even grief had abandoned her halfway through.
I asked her what happened.
She didn’t answer at first. Just stared past me toward the street behind the window, where the old woman was still standing under the flickering light.
Then Natasa finally spoke.
“I lost my job,” she said quietly. “There’s no one left to look for me now.”
For a second, it felt like I was staring at myself from another version of the world. One where something had already ended, but the body kept walking anyway.
I wanted to help her. Or maybe help myself through her. I still can’t tell the difference.
By the time I turned back toward the counter, the music had stopped.
And Natasa was gone.