I never planned to count the journeys. They simply stacked up like silent dominoes—morning after morning, some dusky afternoons, the odd night when the campus lights still glowed in puddles. Whichever hour I boarded, the route scarcely changed. It left the city’s bricked‑in orderliness, threaded its way past a bakery that released the same buttery sigh at dawn and dusk, and eased into the green hush.
Somewhere between the last suburb and the forest proper stood the stop—an iron pole, leaning as if surprised to exist. The nameplate, bleached by seasons, announced Saklıdurak, though no map I owned translated the word. Around it stretched a distance of pure absence—five kilometers of pine and sweetgum thick enough to muffle the sky. The bus always braked there, pneumatic doors panting open, admitting a soft rectangle of emptiness. No passengers disembarked. None boarded. Even the driver stared ahead, as though the stop were a formality observed for the benefit of unseen inspectors.
After a year or two, I began to treat that pause as a kind of personal metronome. Whenever conversation turned to “the middle of nowhere,” the image slid neatly into place: that shelterless signpost, the road’s faint shimmer, birdsongs folding back into themselves. On exam weeks or holidays, when my schedule slipped, I rode at unfamiliar times—mid‑morning when the sun sharpened every leaf, or late evening when the trees were ink silhouettes. Yet the scene stayed precisely …, as if time elsewhere failed to leak into it.
The catch is that unanswered questions are patient creatures; they sit cross‑legged in the corner, clicking beads, until the day they stand up. Mine stood up on a rain‑smudged Friday in early spring.
We were gliding through the forest, windshield speckled by drizzle, when the bus hissed to its ritual halt. The doors yawned. And she rose from the seat across the aisle.
Her coat was the color of old postcards, the kind whose edges curl in damp attics. She moved without hurry, but with the certainty of someone who’d rehearsed each step long ago. One hand steadied a violin case—thin, black, gleaming like a starry night. The other fingertips brushed the seatbacks, as if reading braille. She stepped onto the gravel, the doors closed, and the driver released the brake. All of it in silence, except for the faint click of her shoes meeting earth that, for years, had welcomed no one.
I twisted round, expecting… I’m not sure what. A waiting car? A hidden path hacked through green density? Instead, she merely stood there, the case at her feet, head tilted back as though listening for a chord only that place could supply. By the time the bus gathered speed, she had already become a dot in the rear window—then nothing, absorbed by trees that no longer seemed indifferent.
That single event broke the geometry of my commutes. Numbers I once trusted refused to settle; the timetable looked like a deck of shuffled cards. I found myself scanning the roadside for footprints, a stray scarf, any proof that she’d been more than a trick of collective boredom. None appeared. Yet the stop grew denser, magnetized, as if the air there had thickened.
I tried to imagine her destination. Perhaps there was a cottage deeper in, invisible from the road, where she tuned to the wind and rehearsed for an audience. Perhaps the stop existed because of her, a single soul qualifying the need for arrival and departure. Or perhaps the station merely honored the possibility that one day someone might press the bell and step into the blur between maps.
Weeks have drifted past since that Friday, and still I can’t decide whether the chill I felt was dread or excitment. The bus keeps pausing—doors sighing open to nothing, or, depending on your faith, to everything. I keep riding, pockets full of folded conjectures. And somewhere beneath the arithmetic of days lies the knowledge that eventually, for reasons yet unwritten, I may rise from my seat, cradle whatever instrument I carry, and let the forest close behind me with its own quiet applause.
Radical Human 