She leaned back,
eyes scanning a sky too wide for her truth,
and said, “The world is so small.”
But I knew —
it wasn’t the world,
it was the echo chamber
she built from her own voice,
calling me “Turkish”
like a broken clock
that never learned a new hour.
Maybe she was tired,
not of me,
but of tasting her own lie
every time she spoke it,
sick of the stale air
she’d been breathing alone.