I wrote these lines not with the courtesy of an author, but with the gravity of a defendant standing before the court. The defendant was myself. Man is the cruelest judge of his own life — provided his conscience has freed itself, even slightly, from the cheap comfort zone the system offers. This book is a sharp mirror held up to the vast theater of illusions in the outer world, to the endless shift-work of masked balls, and to that swamp of mediocrity where ignorance is counted a "blessing."
Why this reckoning? Earlier, with Ink and Ember, I gave voice to the rebellion of my poet side. That book was the fire of the ember within me; with images, with rhythm, and with that melancholy all its own, I had dug my own well. But this work is the cold-blooded strategist — the writer, not the poet — sitting down at the table to settle accounts. The poet tries to understand the world through dreams; the writer deciphers what materials, what lies, and what necessities that dream was built from. These texts are not an emotional refuge, but a project to demolish those refuges. Not an attempt to clear my name, but a reckoning — with all my dirty hands, all my unfinished business, and all the pains I gathered from every place I "did not belong."
These pages are written for those who can summon the courage to say "enough," who empty their own stage and begin to hear their own voice in that silent void. The price of being an individual among the gears of the system is always to be excluded, always subjected to those "strange" looks, and always to walk alone in one's own darkness. But let it be known: this is not a declaration of victimhood, but a declaration of freedom.
The full text appears in Tasfiye — August 2026.