I woke up with that strange tension in the chest that comes from knowing a bureaucratic errand is waiting. There was nothing dramatic about it, just the dull certainty that the day would drain me. I left early, barely awake, hoping to renew my identity document, the kind of duty that feels mechanical until life reminds you how fragile the system is. The line was already forming under a sky that looked indecisive, half sun, half storm. I remember standing there, watching people repeat the same tired gestures of waiting, faces carved by resignation. I thought it would be quick, maybe two hours at most. Instead, I ended up facing an absurd discovery: after thirty-three years, it turned out I had two identification numbers. Two versions of myself that the system couldn’t reconcile. Not even the clerk could tell me which one was real.
Somewhere between anger and disbelief, I felt a silence inside me, that quiet collapse that comes when the absurd becomes familiar. I wasn’t angry at one person, or even at the office. I was angry at the invisible weight of a country where nothing ever works, where the simplest right feels like a privilege. I spent hours being passed from one desk to another, each with a new excuse, a new paper to find, a new god to please. The clock stretched, the room got smaller, and the air grew heavy with sweat and irritation. I stopped checking the time after lunch. There was no point. I was trapped in a loop that made no sense. It felt like watching the same scene over and over again, just with different faces pretending it would end differently this time.
Later, when I finally stepped outside, the sky had turned dark, not from night but from exhaustion. The streets were wet from a sudden rain, and my clothes stuck to my skin. I walked without direction, half blind from the light reflecting off puddles, half numb from the whole mess. And then I saw it. A simple chair left on the sidewalk, metal rusted, seat cracked, perfectly ordinary. But in that moment, with the world so absurdly chaotic, it looked like something else. The way the water reflected the shape, the way the shadows folded around it, there was an accidental beauty in its loneliness. I took out my phone almost by instinct. My hands were shaking, but I framed the shot anyway. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was honest. Maybe that was all I needed that day, to find one thing that still made sense, one corner where light and ruin could coexist.
Photography has done that for me many times, almost like an anchor in days that otherwise would have disappeared into nothing. I don’t take photos to impress anyone, or to chase aesthetics. I take them because they make me look, really look, even when everything else feels unbearable. The chair was not a symbol, not a metaphor I planned. It was just there, part of the chaos, a fragment of what the day left behind. Still, when I looked at the image later, something quiet settled inside me. It was not comfort. More like a recognition that beauty doesn’t fix anything, but it gives you a place to stand, if only for a second. That’s the gift and the cruelty of it: the world remains broken, but the way light touches it can still be beautiful.
By the time I got home, it was almost evening. My shoes were soaked, my stomach empty, my head full of useless instructions about how to fix a mistake I never made. Yet when I scrolled through my gallery and found the photo, I didn’t delete it. I stared at it for a long time. The day had been a disaster, no question about it, but the image was proof that I was still paying attention. Maybe that’s what survival looks like now, learning to hold on to the smallest fragments of meaning before they vanish. A chair on a wet street, a ruined day, a moment of stillness in the middle of noise. Sometimes that’s enough to remind me that I’m still here, seeing, breathing, finding traces of beauty where they shouldn’t exist.
