He wakes at 6:55. He checks his phone. Forty-three notifications. He reads them while brushing his teeth — the toothpaste falls once, lands on his bare foot, cold. He dresses: trousers, shirt, jacket, the leather shoes his ex-wife chose, still cold from the hallway, the heel still slightly wrong against his left ankle the way another person's choices always are. He steps outside. Beşiktaş is empty but he is reading a thread about a football transfer. He walks to the ferry terminal. The ticket machine accepts his card. The ferry is there. He boards. He sits in his usual seat — third row, starboard, the one that faces the Asian shore but has never once required him to face the Asian shore.
He opens Instagram. A friend has posted a photo of the sunrise over the Bosphorus. He likes it. He does not look at the actual sunrise over the actual Bosphorus, which is three meters from his face, doing the thing it has done for twelve thousand years: turning the water into a lit page, the way it did before the city was here, the way it will after, patient and indifferent and gold in a way that would break you if you saw it, which he does not, because he is watching a video of a man explaining why mornings are the most productive time of day. The ferry docks. He walks. The streets of Kadıköy are empty. The çay seller's cart is there but no one is behind it. The simit cart is there. He walks into the office building. His floor is empty. He sits at his desk. His lower back finds the same ache it left there yesterday. He opens his laptop. He eats lunch — a sandwich he brought from home, consumed in four minutes while reading the news. At 18:00 he closes the laptop. He reverses the commute: elevator, lobby, street, ferry, street, home. He undresses: jacket, shirt, trousers. The shirt is damp at the collar. It has been damp since morning. The trousers hold the shape of his legs for a moment after he steps out of them — a body that remains when the body has left, which is the definition of a ghost, which is what he has been since he stopped being touched nine months ago. He reheats soup. His hands shake when he holds the bowl — not from cold, from the particular tremor of a man who has held nothing but a phone and a sandwich and a laptop all day, every day, for longer than he has counted. His stomach has been clenched since morning — not hunger, something tighter, the body's way of holding a fist around something the mind won't look at. He eats standing up. The soup burns his tongue and he does not notice. His neck has been locked to the left since Tuesday — a knot the size of a walnut below his ear that a physiotherapist would call tension and that his body calls the shape of not looking up. He charges his phone. He sets the alarm for 6:55. He does not look out the window. If he did, he would see a city with every light on and no one behind them, a Bosphorus carrying no ships, a sky with no planes, a silence so total that the cats — the only remaining witnesses — have stopped pretending to be indifferent and are sitting in rows along the waterfront, their fur flat against the wind, watching the place where the humans used to be, waiting for someone to look up.
No one looks up. The city notices. The city always notices.