We can send a nude to someone we have never touched, then fail to write three words to someone who has slept beside us hundreds of nights: I miss you. Apparently, taking off our clothes has become easier than taking down our defences, and exposing the body requires considerably less courage than exposing a sentence. So we invented or at least perfected the use of one of the most sophisticated instruments in the history of emotional cowardice: the hidden message disguised as a social media Story.

You post a song for perhaps five hundred people to see, although in reality you only want one of them to hear it. The rest are set dressing. You scroll through songs until you find the words you have been unable to say yourself, then cut out fifteen seconds with the precision of a surgeon trying to extract a confession from the body of a song without leaving fingerprints. You choose the right image, perhaps add a small heart if you are feeling particularly brave that day, then throw the whole thing into the internet like a message in a bottle, except you know exactly which shore you want it to reach.

After that, very little remains of your dignity. You open the viewer list and search for one name among all the others. You close it to prove to yourself that you are an adult with more important things to do, then reopen it less than a minute later, just to make sure the internet has not mysteriously stopped working in the neighbourhood where that particular person lives. When the name finally appears, the timing of the view becomes an entire field of study. Seven minutes. Why seven? Did he watch it to the end? Did he replay it? Did he stop at the lyrics? Did he understand? Your body, which was never consulted before you posted anything, declares a state of emergency: your heart accelerates, your stomach suddenly remembers that it exists, and your brain opens a full investigation into a story that will disappear automatically in twenty-four hours.

The funniest part is that we designed the emergency exit before sending the message. If we get the response we hoped for, the song instantly becomes an exquisitely coded message between two souls whom the rest of humanity could never possibly understand. If the response goes wrong, or the other person commits the unforgivable mistake of asking directly, “Is this about me?”, innocence returns at astonishing speed. What meaning? What message? God, you are so narcissistic. I just like the song. And just like that, a fully grown adult can say “I want you,” “I miss you,” “You hurt me,” or even “It’s over,” then leave the singer standing alone at the crime scene and walk away carrying their phone.




This game requires a good musical memory, and a little cunning. Every emotion has its own drawer in the head: longing in one, reproach in another, anger in the drawer we do not open when guests are around, and desire somewhere closer to the bed. We know which song says “I want you” without humiliating our dignity, and which one says “You hurt me” in a tone that makes us sound deeper and more eloquent than we actually were during the argument, when the most sophisticated sentence we managed to produce was “Okay.” Sometimes a new song comes on and a person immediately enters your mind, as though Spotify has not recommended music at all, but ammunition. You save it. You are obviously not going to post it now. You are an adult. Then two in the morning arrives, and the advanced stage of adulthood begins.

Even choosing the right section requires engineering. The first verse is too direct, the second makes you sound needy, the third is perfect except it contains the word “forever” and you are not trying to look insane. So you return to the second. You listen to it three times. You put it over a photograph of the sky, a cup of coffee, or a train window, because a confession becomes somehow less dangerous when it passes behind a cloud. Then comes the audience selection. Everyone? Close Friends? Would adding only that person to Close Friends be too obvious? Of course it would. So you add three innocent people who have absolutely nothing to do with the case, just to create diplomatic cover in case the operation fails. These people have no idea they have been recruited as civilian witnesses to an emotional confession.

We have singers working for us around the clock, without contracts, salaries, or health insurance, each assigned to a different department in our unofficial Ministry of Feelings. We rent their throats for a few minutes, load them with everything our own throats failed to carry, then send them toward the person we are too afraid to face.

We call Adele when we need sadness to enter the room dressed in black while somehow keeping its dignity. Taylor Swift takes over when the entire relationship file needs to be reopened: dates, evidence, old messages, tiny details, and all the things the other person once swore “didn’t mean anything.” Billie Eilish handles the feelings we cannot quite identify somewhere between love, dread, desire, and the urge to disappear beneath a blanket and answer absolutely no one. Lana Del Rey arrives when we want our suffering to look beautiful, slow and cinematic, as though our emotional collapse were happening in a convertible at sunset.


When we need a kind of love that has never heard of restraint, we summon Whitney Houston from somewhere in our memory and let her raise the feeling all the way to the ceiling. There is no such thing as half a longing or half a heart with Whitney. Fadel Chaker is who we send when nostalgia needs to sound as though it has been sitting alone on a balcony all night, beside a cup of coffee gone cold, waiting for someone who is not coming back. Al Shami takes care of a newer kind of ache: love fresh out of messages and Stories, with the other person’s fingerprints still visible on the phone screen. And Cigarettes After Sex are for when everything becomes more blurred and intimate: three in the morning, a half-dark room, skin close to skin, and a memory you still cannot decide was romance or a beautiful mistake you will eventually have to pay for.

Sometimes we need all of them because a sentence as small as “I miss you” somehow feels too large for us to say ourselves. The singers become an international network of professional emotional smugglers. We hand them our luggage at the border: one suitcase filled with love, another with jealousy, a third with longing, and whatever remains of our dignity tucked into the side pocket. Then we walk through customs empty-handed, wearing the innocent faces of people who know absolutely nothing.

And if the other person intercepts the shipment and asks who it belongs to, we raise our hands immediately.

I know nothing, officer. Search the suitcase if you like.

I just like the song.

More embarrassing still, sometimes sending the song is not enough. You begin monitoring your relationship with it after you have sent it. You listen again, imagining how the other person will hear it. You reach the line you selected and think, This is where he’ll understand. Then you listen a third time and discover another line that could be misinterpreted, so you regret everything slightly, before reassuring yourself that normal people do not analyse songs this way. Then you remember that three weeks ago you spent twenty minutes analysing a song that same person posted, and you return to silence out of respect for the evidence.

I often think about how strange music is in the first place. A stranger stands in front of a microphone in a city I may never have visited, pushes air from his lungs through his throat, two tiny vocal cords vibrate inside his body, and somehow those vibrations reach me twenty years later and interfere with my stomach. There is something almost supernatural about it. Air leaves one human body, becomes sound, enters another human body and wakes something that had been sleeping there. We call it a song, as if the simplicity of the word explains how three minutes can demolish a wall you spent years building.




Some songs carry keys. They do not need to knock. They walk straight in. The first two seconds can unlock an entire apartment in your memory: the colour of the curtains, the smell of a pillow, one particular summer, the road to someone’s home, a train station, a small restaurant, a body whose moles you once knew better than you now know the lyrics themselves. Sometimes a song begins playing in a café and your hand instinctively reaches for a phone that is not there, as though you could press Skip in the air. Sometimes it appears on Spotify and you swipe past it with the speed of someone who has spotted an ex on the opposite side of the street, then mentally glance over your shoulder to make sure it has not followed you. The song is completely innocent. It just happens to know where the body is buried, and which flower you left on the grave.

And sometimes the opposite happens. You hear a song you once shared with someone and suddenly realise, years later, that it has regained its independence. It belongs to you again. You can hear it in the kitchen while chopping onions without feeling that the universe is delivering a personal message. This is a small victory no one celebrates, although it probably deserves champagne. A song occupied for years has finally been liberated. Your flag is back on the building. You can dance to it with someone else, or alone, without an old face appearing halfway through the chorus like an advertisement you cannot close.

Music also exposes our emotional narcissism. We fall in love and quietly behave as though nothing of this magnitude has happened before, as though poets spent thousands of years conducting preliminary trials while humanity waited for our particular relationship to arrive and finally explain love properly. You look at someone and think that this exact feeling could not possibly be understood by anyone else, then you hear a song written in 1984 describing your situation with irritating precision, probably performed by someone wearing shoulder pads of questionable proportions. Suddenly you discover that your broken heart is not a rare museum piece. It is an old product. The factory has been manufacturing the same model in enormous quantities for centuries.

There is something slightly humiliating and strangely comforting about that discovery. The betrayal that felt like a cosmic event has happened to millions of people, and the planet continued rotating. At the same time, finding someone who wrote exactly what you could not say makes the pain less lonely. It is like standing alone in the rain, trying to cover your head with your hands, then discovering a huge umbrella under which human beings have been gathering for centuries. Some are crying, some are singing, and some have probably posted the exact same song on Instagram and are currently waiting for one particular name to appear in their viewer list.



Music can compress hours of conversation into a few lines, which may be why we turn to it when direct words become too heavy for the throat. We talk all day without difficulty. We discuss the weather, work, food, cats, politics, what needs to be bought from the supermarket. Some of us can deliver a thirty-minute lecture on the correct way to load a dishwasher. Then we arrive at three words like “I miss you” and the throat closes as though we are attempting to push a wardrobe through a keyhole. The strange thing is that some of us can send photographs of our bodies to people we have never met, then become shy about saying “I love you” to someone who has slept beside us hundreds of nights. Two people can share a bed, a bathroom, electricity bills, viruses, family members and perhaps a Netflix password, but the sentence “I’m unhappy in this relationship” suddenly turns face-to-face conversation into a hazardous activity requiring protective equipment.

I do not know when we became convinced that a screen makes things lighter. Rejection does not lose weight simply because it arrives inside a white WhatsApp bubble. Even the little word Seen can generate an astonishing amount of human activity. You send a message, see that it has been read, and half an hour passes. Negotiations begin inside your head. Maybe he is working. Maybe he fell asleep. Maybe he needs time. Maybe an organised criminal gang kidnapped him immediately after he opened my message. At some point, every possibility becomes easier to accept than the most obvious one: he read it and does not want to answer right now.

So we place the phone face down on the table in a theatrical gesture intended to demonstrate emotional independence, then turn it over seventeen seconds later. Technology developed quickly. Our bodies have been less cooperative. The phone became smart; the stomach still responds to rejection as though a tiger has entered the room.

I can understand, to some degree, sending a decisive message to someone with whom you do not share a close life: a confession, a rejection, love, hatred, and then both people continue on their separate paths. What I find harder to understand is how two people can live together for years and still treat confrontation as though it were contagious. I cannot imagine a long, intimate relationship without conflict. Even people who emerged from the same womb, shared the same parents, home, food and childhood can argue over something so trivial you would think one of them killed the other’s horse in a war two hundred years ago. So how are two people from different families, with different childhoods, fears and ideas about love, money, sex, privacy, cleanliness and the correct way to load a dishwasher supposed to spend ten years in the kind of perfect harmony normally seen in mattress advertisements?

Some people only want the honeymoon version of a relationship. Clear skies, twenty-four degrees, good food, beautiful bodies and not a single insect in the garden. Then the first wasp flies onto the balcony and they jump from the third floor. They do not open the window. They do not wait for it to leave. They do not ask where it came from. The existence of the wasp itself becomes evidence that the garden has failed. Over time, I have become more wary of someone who runs from every disagreement than someone who disagrees with me openly. A conflict that is spoken has a shape. You can look at it, name it and perhaps work with it. A conflict buried alive begins digging underground.



It comes out through tone. Through “Fine.” Through a door closed slightly harder than necessary. Through a message answered eight hours later despite its sender being Online the entire time. Through dishes left in the sink with such apparent innocence that eventually the plate itself begins to look like a political statement. Things we refuse to say do not disappear. The objects around us begin saying them on our behalf. A cup on the table becomes a message, a towel on the floor a manifesto, and the way someone loads the dishwasher turns into a referendum on the future of the relationship.

Delayed problems are like dirty dishes. On the first day there is a cup and a spoon. Fine, we will wash them later. The next day there are two plates and a frying pan. After a week, you need civil engineering just to add another glass without collapsing the structure. After three months, the kitchen has developed an independent ecosystem and one of the fungi may already qualify for permanent residency. Every “This isn’t the right time” adds another plate. Every “Let’s talk about it later” places another pan on the pile. Eventually someone explodes over a towel on the floor while the real problem has been living beneath fifteen dirty plates since February.

Conflict itself has a worse reputation than it deserves. We sometimes treat it like a hole in the hull of the relationship, although it can also be the light that allows us to see what is actually inside. Conflict reveals boundaries, fears and needs. It reveals how we listen when we dislike the answer, how we apologise, and whether we actually want to understand the person in front of us or are simply waiting for our turn to attack. Some people argue to win. Others argue because they want to reach the other side of the river and still have the person they love beside them. Some conflicts repair things. Others reveal that the road has ended. Both can hurt, but at least they tell us where we are.

We can also drown in conflict until it becomes the main character and we forget why we entered the relationship in the first place. A friend becomes the last bad thing he did. A lover becomes the last cruel sentence he said. A sibling becomes an argument that happened ten years ago. A relationship that once contained hundreds of meals, jokes, journeys, messages, illnesses and embraces collapses into one red file that we carry into every internal courtroom.

Memory can also perform the opposite trick. It polishes the past until it resembles a show apartment where someone carefully hid the mould before the potential buyer arrived. We remember the laughter, the trip, the way someone held our hand, and forget why we used to cry in the bathroom. Nostalgia is an excellent interior designer. I would never hire it to inspect a building for damp.



Perhaps that is why I like the image of doors. Sometimes there are many open doors in front of us. Sunlight pours through one. Jasmine drifts from another. Behind one there is an entire sea; behind another, oranges, apples, green fields and mountains. And still we stand in front of one closed door because we have become used to knocking on it. We knock until our knuckles swell, then give the behaviour respectable names: loyalty, patience, faith, fighting for love.

Eventually the door may open and reveal nothing but a cold, damp cave. And sometimes, because life has an extremely dark sense of humour and apparently no one supervises its creative decisions, we find an entire sex dungeon when what we had been looking for was emotional safety.

Fear of change can make the familiar cave more attractive than the unknown garden. At least inside the cave you know where the rocks are. You know where you will hit your head, where the floor becomes slippery, which scream is followed by which silence. The new door offers no guarantees, and human beings have a touching devotion to guarantees, even when the only thing guaranteed is misery.

More painful still is discovering that some people understand all of this only after the relationship ends. You spend years telling someone: talk to me, tell me when something bothers you, do not disappear at the first disagreement, tell me what you want and what you do not want. Then the relationship ends. A year later, you see them again or hear about them and discover that they have become excellent communicators. They sit with their new partner, discuss problems, establish boundaries, express anger, stay in the room until the conversation is over. For a moment, it feels as though you spent years funding a private school—buying the books, paying the fees—only for the student to graduate with honours and immediately go to work for a competing company.



Perhaps this too is part of relationships. Sometimes we learn from a person the very things we will never manage to give that person. We arrive late to the lesson, and by the time we understand it, the person who was waiting has already left the classroom. The next relationship receives the updated version of us. The previous one paid for development.

And for all my criticism of these indirect ways of communicating, I know perfectly well that I use them too. I send songs. I write. I reach for a metaphor when a direct sentence feels too heavy. The difference, for me, is that a song gives me someone to hide behind. I can always say the words are not mine. Writing slowly removes those shelters. I choose the sentence. I delete it. I put it back. I live with it for days. Then I put my name above the text.

A reader might finish an essay in five minutes, but those five minutes may contain a week of thinking, voice notes I sent to myself, observations written while walking, photographs I saved because they reminded me of something, sentences that appeared in the shower, and memories that may have needed ten years before they agreed to become words.

Writing, like music, compresses time. It can place a week of thinking inside one paragraph, ten years of love inside one line, or the collapse of a relationship inside the image of a dirty plate no one washed. Perhaps that is why art matters so much to me. Ordinary conversation sometimes reaches a certain edge and stops. Someone puts a melody underneath the words, or arranges them differently on a page, and suddenly they can carry more weight.

In everyday life, we often talk a lot and say very little. We explain, defend ourselves, circle around the subject, then go home and realise we never said the one thing we came to say. In a song or a piece of writing, five words placed correctly can open an entire room. You hear them or read them and feel as though someone reached into your chest, pulled out something you had assumed had no name, and placed a small label in front of it.

Still, sometimes I wish we needed fewer intermediaries. I wish we could say things while they were still small enough to carry, before they grew in the dark and required an entire song just to approach them. I love you. I miss you. I am angry with you. What you did hurt me. I want to stay. I want to leave. Short sentences. No soundtrack. No sunset. No Instagram Story addressed to one person in front of five hundred witnesses who have no idea why they were summoned to the case.

Real confrontation is much less beautiful than the version we create in our heads. You may stutter. You may use the wrong word. The person in front of you may cry and you may have no idea what to do with your hands. They may say “no” and you will have to remain on the same chair, in the same room, while the word falls between you like a glass shattering on the floor, with no Delete button capable of putting it back on the table. Perhaps this is what frightens us most: saying something we cannot take back, then having to watch what the words do to the face of someone we love.

I will probably keep sending songs. I have no intention of suddenly pretending to be a person completely liberated from drama; that would be an unconvincing lie, and there is undeniable pleasure in choosing a song that is almost frighteningly appropriate and posting it while acting innocent. But I am trying, whenever I can, to say the sentence too. Without an intermediary. Without making a singer who has never met me carry my emotional explosives across the border.

I am a little tired of making other people say things for me.

So I write. Perhaps writing is my way of finally standing in front of someone with no music between us, saying the thing before I become afraid of it, before I search for a song to say it for me, before I leave myself a small door through which I can escape if I do not like the answer.

I love you.

I miss you.

This time, I said it myself.