GOLDEN SPIRAL: THE CODE OF WOUNDS

As the days passed, I began to speak less and less.
Neither the classes, nor the teachers, nor even the voices of my friends could reach me anymore. From the outside, I looked the same: someone who came to school, said a few words during breaks, even smiled from time to time. But inside, something was slowly collapsing. A shadow I couldn't name, growing heavier with each passing day.

I started turning to cigarettes more often. Not just in my free time anymore, but whenever I felt the need. Before leaving the house in the morning, after school on street corners, even during lunch breaks, secretly leaning out the bathroom window. What began as a temporary escape had now become a habit I couldn't silence. It was like I was carrying a weight inside me, and with each puff, I was trying to suppress it. But in reality, I was just inhaling it deeper—getting even more lost within myself.

Words had already long failed to build a bridge between my father and me. Now, that silence had turned into a wall. When he saw me, the expression on his face hung somewhere between disappointment and indifference. He neither scolded me nor showed love. He simply passed by. My mother still tried to act like everything was normal, but I had memorized the tiredness in her eyes too well. There was nothing in that house that felt like me. I was just an object—something that stayed in its place, unnoticed.

And loneliness... it took shape right in that emptiness.
At first, it was just silence.
Then that silence echoed.
The emptiness inside me began to talk to itself. Even when I tried talking to myself, there was a fog in my mind that I couldn't clear. When I looked in the mirror, my face didn't look familiar. I had become a stranger even to myself. I no longer knew what I looked like, what I believed in, who I was.

Some days, I would lie in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling. Sometimes I just... stopped. I didn't want to listen to music, watch anything, or talk to anyone. My desires, my goals, everything slowly evaporated. I was going to school, answering questions, but nothing stayed in my mind. Even the friends I used to hang out with during breaks felt like strangers. While everyone was telling stories and laughing, I just sat there thinking about my next cigarette—dreaming of the moment I'd get to smoke again.

Even the things that once made me feel good started to lose meaning. In technology and design class, I was no longer creating—just going through the motions. My hands were still drawing, but my heart wasn't in it anymore. Everything I did felt shallow, temporary, and hollow. The small connections that once kept me going were unraveling one by one. And I—who had once gathered myself in a corner—was now slowly falling apart.

Do you know what the worst part is?
There was a cry for help inside me, but no one could hear it.
Because even I couldn't hear my own voice anymore.

Some nights, I would sit with the cover of that half-burned notebook in my hands. The pages were gone, but the memory remained. I wanted to write—to myself, to someone, maybe just into the void. But I had pushed down my words for so long, I couldn't bring them back out. What I had silenced had now turned into nothingness. I had so much to say—but no strength left to carry any of it.
So I smoked.
And I waited.
Without knowing what for.
Maybe for someone to find me.
Maybe to find the piece of me I had lost.

But no one came.
And I...
kept losing parts of myself inside.