Each day, Sanem's heart shattered into a thousand pieces as she visited Yigit in the hospital. The sight of him lying still, a shell of his former self, a victim of Can's brutal attack, was enough to break her completely. She felt trapped in a never-ending nightmare, unable to reach Can or find out where he was. She could feel herself slipping into a dark void of hopelessness and despair, unable to shake off the weight of guilt and grief consuming her every waking moment. The weight of it all crushed her until she succumbed to a heavy and suffocating depression.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The muted glow of dawn scarcely peered through the curtains, casting a weak light on Sanem Aydin's hollowed eyes. Her gaze was fixated on nothing in particular—a spot on the wall, a blemish that seemed to hold all the sorrow of her fractured world. The sheets lay crumpled around her like discarded dreams, and she lay motionless, her breaths shallow echoes of the storm that had raged in her chest the night before.
"Sanem? Have you eaten anything?" Leyla's voice, tinged with concern, barely permeated the thick fog of Sanem's desolation.
"Food doesn't matter," Sanem murmured, her voice a ghostly whisper. Every word felt like lifting stones from the depths of a well.
"Can isn't worth this," Leyla insisted, trying to breach the chasm of grief that separated them. "You have to get up, live your life."
"Life..." Sanem trailed off, her eidetic memory cruelly replaying every moment with Can—their laughter, their whispered promises—each recollection a needle to her already bleeding heart.
Leyla sat at the edge of the bed, her hand reaching out tentatively. It hovered over Sanem's shoulder but retracted as if the air around her sister was electrified with anguish. "You're more than this pain, Sanem. More than what he left behind."
A tear escaped Sanem's eye, charting a solitary path down her cheek. She turned her head away, shutting her eyes tight against the intrusion of sympathy. Her thoughts spiralled inward, retracing paths long etched into her mind.
"Everyone's worried about you," Leyla's voice broke as she stood up, flustered by Sanem's silence. "I'm worried about you."
Sanem heard the door close softly, leaving her once again enshrouded in solitude. She didn't move to wipe away the tears; they were testament to the love lost, the future dissolved. Her friends had messaged, called, knocked—and each time, it was Leyla who answered, who offered hollow reassurances that Sanem would soon be herself again.
But how could she be? The tapestry of her life, once so vivid with colour and possibility, now seemed grey and threadbare. She retreated further into the recesses of her mind, where the world couldn't reach her, where Can's absence didn't echo quite so loudly.
"Come out with us, Sanem. Just for a drink," begged Ayhan, her best friend since childhood, through the phone later that day. Her voice was the warmth of a hearth she could no longer feel.
