Snow covers the dirt road outside our kitchen window, dull and unmoving like the days here. When I was small I raced the first flakes, convinced the forest behind our house whispered secrets meant only for me. Now I pull the blinds down before breakfast. The village sits an hour from Vaasa, Finland, yet it feels farther than the moon. I am fourteen years old, stuck between pine trunks and my parents’ silences.

Surf breaks against the seawall outside my workshop, lifting the smell of salt and motor oil into the open door. The sign above reads “Sea Glass Dreams,” letters once turquoise, now faded like everything this season. Inside, trays of conch-shell pendants and frosted bottle shards catch the light, but no footsteps follow it in. I am fifty-four, born in a clapboard house in Nassau, Bahamas, and I have shaped jewelry longer than some tourists have been alive.

Seagulls cry outside my flat as dawn paints the damp roofs of Stokes Croft. I switch off the loop pedal blinking on my desk—last night’s bass riff still echoes in the headphones—and step onto Gloucester Road to fetch coffee before the city fills with buses. Bristol, England feels like a giant backstage: stickers on lampposts, venue doors scarred by years of load-ins. I’m thirty now, old enough to remember when open mics were cash only and no one livestreamed their heartbreak.

The orange buses groan along Setthathirath Road while I sweep dust from our tiny kiosk next to Wat Ong Teu. Each sweep draws a new pattern, then the wind scatters it again, like the plans I keep making and losing. My mother fries sticky rice cakes behind me, humming an old court song; tourists film her hands but rarely taste the food. She thinks the smartphone lens is harmless. I know clips can travel farther than we ever will.

Frost clings to the railing outside my flat when I step onto Ilica before dawn. Streetlights flicker, catching tiles loosened by the earthquake three springs ago. I weave past scaffolding toward the newspaper office, my satchel knocking against my knees. I edit obituaries now, a job nobody fights for, but it steadies my nerves. At forty-five, I’ve spent my life in Zagreb, Croatia, except for two restless semesters in Ljubljana that ended when Father slipped from a roof and I hurried home to share night shifts in his bakery.

The shutters creak when I raise them each morning, as if they, too, feel the weight of these times. My shop sits on a side street behind Kızılay Square, Ankara, where the tram bells used to compete with the chatter of customers. Now the bells echo off empty pavement. Shelves once packed with cotton towels from Denizli look like missing teeth; I fill gaps with folded paper so the place won’t seem so bare.

Morning salt drifts through the open window as I sharpen my knife, its steel mirroring the alley below. The shutters across Via Roma, Italy, rattle, and someone washes the cobblestones, sending thin rivers toward the harbour. By noon my trattoria will glow, and tourists will order pasta alla Norma as if it were a passport stamp. They will not taste the doubts hidden under the basil.

Sunlight filters through the slats of my veranda, drawing thin gold lines across the sacks of cocoa husks stacked by the door. I inhale their bitter–sweet scent before stepping into the dust of Bantama Road. Market women are already shouting prices, though half their crates sit untouched. Since the mine layoffs, even tomatoes move slowly. I weave past them toward the workshop I opened eleven years ago, a small space where discarded fabric becomes bright baskets and footstools. The sign outside wobbles in the harmattan breeze, paint flaking like tired confetti.

The gym was almost empty when I finished my second set. Outside, Frankfurt, Germany, stirred slowly—cars humming in the distance, cafés dragging open their shutters. I pulled my hoodie tight, avoided eye contact, and walked home along side streets where no one would greet me. Two years ago, I was still deep in it—cocaine, pills, late-night clubs, days lost in a fog of noise and light. I’m twenty-three now, and those days feel like another lifetime.

Rain stuck to the tall mango tree outside my window while I watched the city stir below. Buses coughed on Calle Palma, vendors unfolded blue tarps, and the smell of chipá drifted up six floors. I have lived in Asunción, Paraguay, all my life, but today the familiar rhythm felt distant, like a song remembered more than heard.

The message came through at 3:42 a.m. One word: “Gone.” No name, no details. I threw on yesterday’s shirt, grabbed my keys and my knife, and stepped into the thick night air of N’Djamena, Chad. The humidity felt like a second skin. By sunrise, the streets around Dembé were already tense. A fuel riot had broken out two blocks from our warehouse. My boss, still drunk from his cousin’s wedding, stood barefoot in the gravel yard, staring at the broken padlock on our main container.

Sirens pierced the quiet corridors of the Budapest Zoo office just after dawn. I had been sipping coffee, scanning stock orders, when the alarms howled through the thick stone walls. Screens flashed red: “Breach in Vet Wing.” I grabbed the master keys and a radio, running past exhibits in morning haze. Outside, keepers waved frantically toward the quarantine barn. A young keeper said two dart frogs were missing, the lock picked from inside. My mind, trained by decades of paperwork, jumped to numbers: black market values, conservation fines, the balance sheets I guard every day.

Every morning, I take the same train from Andheri to Churchgate, squeezed between half-sleeping commuters and students murmuring formulas under their breath. I plug in my earphones, not for the music, but to dull the noise in my head. I'm in my final year of computer science at one of Mumbai’s top colleges. I just turned 22 last month. Everyone assumes the path ahead is already paved: finish university, move to the US or Europe, find a job at Google or some hot startup, and make my parents proud.

The first thing I notice about a client is how they walk into the room. Some move softly, with curiosity. Others come in like they already own the place. Two weeks ago, I had a client from the second group. An American. Big man, loud voice, restless eyes. Something in his energy told me it wouldn’t be easy. I’m 28 now and have been working as a professional Thai masseuse for six years, four of those at a luxury retreat center in Bangkok, Thailand.

I was prepping fish at 4:30 in the morning when the pain started—tightness in my chest, like someone pressing down with a stone fist. I’d ignored the warning signs for months. Aches, fatigue, headaches I blamed on stress or bad sleep. But this wasn’t something I could shrug off. I dropped the knife. My sous-chef rushed me to the hospital. That’s how I learned I’d had a minor heart attack. That I needed a bypass. That something had to change.

At 8:32 that morning, everything changed. We were just opening the bank. I had just settled into my desk, logging into the system, when I heard shouting from the front. At first, I thought it was a customer arguing—people lose their tempers over the smallest delays. But this wasn’t that. The moment I saw the man with the scarf pulled up to his eyes and the gun waving in the air, something inside me went completely still.

Sometimes, when I fix a light in someone’s home and they smile like I’ve performed magic, I remember why I chose this path. I’m an electrician in Antananarivo, Madagascar, and at 26, I consider myself lucky—lucky to have learned a skill, lucky to be able to help others, and lucky to be working in a country where electricity still feels like a luxury.

The physio looked at me this morning and said, “You could squeeze out another year if you really wanted to.” But that’s the thing—I don’t know if I do. My body’s tired, sure, but it’s not just that. It’s the noise in my head, the feeling that the fire’s cooled. I’m 36 now, and this is probably the last year I’ll lace up as a professional footballer.

When I was a boy, the sea was still honest. My earliest memory is of standing barefoot on the wet sand in Władysławowo, Poland, holding my grandfather’s hand, watching his boat disappear into the morning fog. He was a small man with shoulders shaped by storms, and I never saw him hesitate—not when the sky turned black, not when the catch was thin, not even when his best friend was lost off the Hel coast.

Most nights, I dream of silence. Not because I love peace—which I do—but because silence is a luxury where I come from. In our village, the quiet never lasts. One minute you’re hearing birds or kids laughing, the next it’s yelling, gunfire, and the smell of smoke in the air. We’ve had fights break out during weddings, even funerals. Ask someone why we’re fighting and no one really knows. Land, pigs, pride, payback—everyone has a different answer. But the truth is, it’s just always been like this. Absurd and terrifying.