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.

She was walking across the site when I first noticed how people looked at her—not with respect, not with the kind of attention a site manager deserves. No, it was that sideways glance, the smirk passed between two mouths behind a half-raised welding mask. I’ve been around this work my whole life. Twenty-three years in construction.

My phone buzzed just as I stepped off the boda. I knew the ringtone—Sharon again. I ignored it. Not because I don’t love her, but because she always calls when something ridiculous is happening, and today, I wasn’t in the mood for her chaos.

There’s a crooked pōhutukawa just outside my window. It leans east, shaped by years of salt wind off the harbour. From my bed, I can see the curve of Evans Bay and, on clear days, even a strip of the South Island floating on the horizon like a distant promise. They gave me this room because of the view. Said I’d earned it. I didn’t ask what they meant by that. I’ve stopped asking for explanations.

The mornings are the hardest. I still wake up at six, like I used to when I had the kiosk. Old habits. I lie there, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the city sounds to swell—collectivo brakes, dogs barking, the neighbor's gate slamming shut. It’s all still there, Buenos Aires, Argentina, moving forward, but I’m not a part of it anymore.

It started with a look. That kind of look boys give each other when there’s already tension, and neither one wants to back down. He shoved my shoulder in the corridor between classes, and I shoved him back. I didn’t even know his name two months ago. Now we can’t seem to pass each other without something happening—comments, elbows, whatever.

The tea had gone cold again. I must’ve poured it an hour ago, but time has become strange since the accident—stretching and folding in on itself like dough. Some days I forget to eat. Other days I eat three breakfasts without realising. We live in a quiet suburb of Islamabad, Pakistan. The streets here are lined with trees that bloom pink in the spring, and the neighbours know each other by name. It used to feel like a safe place, predictable and calm. That illusion shattered the day Daniyal died.

The last two weeks have been totally crazy. I keep staring at my bank account like it's a glitch in the matrix. I refresh the app, and the numbers are still there—still surreal. Two commas. Seven digits. I'm a programmer from a town near Hannover, Germany, and until recently, I was renting a 40-square-meter apartment above a kebab shop. Now I could probably buy the building if I felt like it.

I stood outside the graduation hall longer than I should’ve, watching people take pictures, toss hats, cry. Everyone kept saying “You did it!” but I felt nothing. Well—relief, maybe. Relief that it was over. Four years of lectures, group presentations, colour-coded spreadsheets, and pretending I cared about quarterly profits. I’ve just finished my business degree at 26, older than most of my classmates. I took a year out after high school, thinking I’d figure myself out. I didn’t.

Most nights, I fall asleep with the radio on. Not for the music, but for the voices—soft anchors murmuring updates about politics, protests, rising prices, distant wars, and closer ones. I’ve always been like this. My wife says I carry the world in my chest like a stone. I’m 79 now, and it hasn’t lightened with age.

It all started because of a pigeon. Not just any pigeon—a bold, demonic, pasta-stealing monster of a pigeon that lives in the piazza near our school in Bologna, Italy. Every day after lunch, my friends and I sit on the fountain steps, gossiping and eating snacks. That day, I was halfway through a perfect arancino when it swooped down like an angry feathered missile and snatched it straight out of my hand.

When I woke up the morning after my 50th birthday, I lit a candle instead of a joint. It wasn’t a dramatic gesture—just quiet determination. I’d promised myself long ago that when I turned 50, I would stop smoking weed. Not because I hated it. Quite the opposite. It had been my constant companion since I was 15. In my neighborhood in Portmore, Jamaica, smoking wasn’t a rebellion—it was tradition. At family gatherings, joints were passed like snacks. No one questioned it. It soothed me, gave me rhythm, helped me coast.

The forest has always been my home. I know the scent of each leaf, the whisper of each tree. As a girl, I followed my father’s footsteps through the mists of San José del Pacífico, Mexico. He was a respected doctor, but he also listened to the land. My mother taught me which plants could soothe a fever or a broken heart, and my father showed me the mushrooms that open the soul.

When I started studying business administration in Nanjing, China, it felt like someone else’s life. My parents thought it was the only sensible choice—safe, respectable, promising. But while my classmates memorized charts and formulas, my mind drifted to chord progressions and melodies. I’m 24 now, and for the past year, I’ve finally been doing what I always wanted: composing music.

In our house, the marble floors shine like mirrors, and the air always smells faintly of oud. I’ve never had to wait for anything—drivers, tutors, holidays abroad, they were all just part of life. But something shifted when I turned seventeen and began noticing things others ignored. I saw the men in blue overalls working outside in the sun, sometimes for ten or twelve hours straight. No one ever looked them in the eye. I started asking questions.