Shadows of the Sands

A psychological drama in a desert city of glass and gold - where sand erases lives, memories, and names, but not the pain.

This city never existed, and yet one day it rose as if from nothing. With towers beside which even the Tower of Babel would have seemed modest. Built of concrete and glass and rimmed with so much gold that even at night it dazzled the countless tourists who flew in to see the eighth wonder of the world. A place where people lived one day at a time, never knowing whether they'd wake up here again or back home, thousands of kilometers away, treating the city as nothing more than a dream. When the city first appeared, no one knew of it, but by the next day the whole world did. A city where the sands erase lives and memories, feelings and pain. The city forgets everything, remaining always the same and yet forever changing, for every time you visit it, you notice something new. Was it there the last time, or did it appear while you were away? Memories, people, relationships-all of it is deeply temporary in the City of Gold, where even time flows differently. The sands bury even the city itself. Which city comes to the reader's mind now?

This story became one of those buried by the sand. The names have worn away, the faces have changed, but the pain... the pain remained. A story that never was, a frightening tale that even its own characters tried to forget, because what happens here, stays here, buried under golden sand... like a cursed treasure that can neither be lifted whole nor handed to someone else. And yet grains of sand sometimes cling to the skin: to the palm, to the hair, to the tongue, unnoticed, until you feel them grinding in your sleep. Then you wake up somewhere other than where you fell asleep: not in your own bed, not in that hotel room, but in the gap between two lives, where the air smells of air-conditioner ozone and scorched asphalt, and the heart remembers what it shouldn't remember anymore. The reader may close the book and call it fiction. Or they may recognize the scent of someone else's happiness, and their own shame. Not because the story is true in its addresses and surnames, but because it is true in its feeling: when you wanted to be a savior and turned out to be only a witness, when you loved in earnest and were still left out in the cold, when 'never' sounded like a promise and turned out to be just another word for 'until tomorrow.'

The city keeps no vows. It only keeps those willing to pay with sun in their eyes and silence in their chest. To everyone else, it offers a sunset as beautiful as an advertisement, and the right to leave as though they'd never been here at all. But if you've read this far, then the sand didn't manage to cover everything completely. Somewhere between these pages, there still walks the shadow of someone who once believed you could build love out of glass and light without getting cut.

One last thing. Don't ask the map-it will lie to you. Ask yourself: what part of this will you carry home, if home turns out to be farther away than you thought. And if the answer comes up empty, don't rush to throw it away: sometimes emptiness isn't an ending, but a place where you can finally set down your pain, so that it at least stops being the only thing you know how to hold onto.