I hadn't crossed into new universes for a long time—I'd found a way to escape it. Whenever I felt the energy fluctuations, I'd put on the expensive headphones I bought and start listening to Mozart. It created a kind of shield effect, keeping me anchored in the current universe.

Discovering Mozart was an accident too. Three years ago, in the middle of a crossing—as the city suddenly grew foreign, buildings standing still while the people inside them changed—a melody seeped into my ears from a street musician. Eine kleine Nachtmusik. In that moment, I clung to the melody like a rope thrown onto ice. And miraculously, the crossing stopped. It was as if the notes were nailing down the rifts between universes. From that day on, Mozart became my anchor point. Thanks to this solution, I'd somehow learned to adapt to each universe without losing my mind.

Let me tell you a bit about the universes. Countless nested universes and countless crossing points—a technology so advanced your mind couldn't comprehend it. While walking down the street or traveling by train, you can cross from your universe into another. In nearby universes, the same people have different identities, and when you cross, your identity changes too. But you're not aware of it. That's how the system works. In a single day, you might have crossed into several different universes without ever knowing. The universes you cross into are ones with only slight differences. But when you cross into distant universes, things change. The more distant the universe, the more different time, space, and identities become. You know who can cross into distant universes? The insane. The insane are aware of the universes, aware of this horrific technology, aware of the crossings—that's why they've gone mad. What they say isn't made up, it's true. Thanks to the solution I found, I've somehow managed to stay sane. Or so I think. I'm not sure.

By my estimation, this awareness develops in direct proportion to one's capacity for empathy (whether to call it a gift or a curse, I'm not sure). I remember my first medium-to-distant crossing. I was twenty-three, drinking my morning coffee at a café. When I came back from the bathroom and looked at the logo on the cup, something had changed. Though it still belonged to the same café chain, the logo was slightly different. The color tone, the thickness of the lines... Then I looked at the waitress's face. She was the same woman, but she wasn't. The familiar warmth in her eyes was gone, replaced by a distant professionalism. It was like seeing her twin. That day, I felt the air's scent differently, the way the wind struck, even the angle of the sun. Later, I realized that someone I knew in one way was a different person. Then the rest followed—I won't drag it out. If my analytical ability hadn't been so strong, I probably would've become one of those madmen on the street.

The collapse of one's sense of reality is a profoundly destructive experience. Reality slipping through your fingers, a devastating tremor you first feel in your mind, then in your bones. But the adaptability of the creature called human is truly something else. After a while, these uncontrolled leaps turned into a sickly amusement for me, a dangerous game my mind played with itself. The crossings had a mathematics to them, or at least a pattern. In crowded places, energy concentrates; the weight of collective consciousness thins spacetime, and you can come face to face with crossing gates at any moment.

Istanbul was one of the places where these rifts ran deepest, and I was living there at the time. On one occasion, I know I passed through four different Istanbuls in a single day, leaping into four different distant universes. Getting off the ferry in Beşiktaş, in one universe, massive shopping malls stood abandoned, their broken glass rising toward the sky like metal skeletons. Consumer culture had collapsed in on itself; the city had become a ghost town. In another crossing, I walked through the still-smoking rubble of a massive wreckage. That long-awaited major earthquake had swallowed the city, leaving only debris and chaos behind. The sharp stench of death still comes back to me sometimes. In yet another, sounds and colors had completely changed; the streets were overtaken by black banners and a foreign tongue, the city breathless under the shadow of a law I didn't recognize. The space was the same, but its soul had been stolen, replaced with the prosthesis of another existence.

The most insidious part of these crossings is that the place remains loyal while reality betrays you. You stand at the same coordinates, but the ground beneath your feet is no longer the same soil. You board a train at a metro station; while the rhythmic rumble of the tracks fills your ears, those few dark tunnels you pass through are actually the seams between universes. A few stops later, when you climb the stairs back to the surface, the buildings are still in place, but the alphabet on the signs has changed, the people are slightly more faded. Even if you take the same train back, that tunnel won't return you to the home you left. This is the terrible technology of a universe I still struggle to comprehend. It locks you in a place while always leaving the door open—but changes the lock every second.

In this slippery terrain, there was only one thing keeping my soul from shattering: Mozart. In a world where everything is fluid, a person seeks a fixed point to hold onto, a sturdy stake that won't shake in the middle of a storm. A point of support driven beyond time and space... For me, that stake was the mathematical precision of notes. No matter which universe I slipped into, even if the sky's color changed, that delicate strike at the 12th second of the piano concerto never changed. Cities could crumble, people could never have been born, even history could be rewritten—but Mozart was always Mozart. He was my only possession in reality. Even if the universes I fell into were nothing but lies, the melody seeping from my headphones was the only tangible truth I could hold in my hands. If it was playing, I was still 'me.'

Over time, I'd gained a kind of immunity to this chaos, yes, but this familiarity wasn't enough to stop the erosion of my soul. Every universe crossing was a small piece torn from my being. Especially those ghosts... Seeing people I'd buried, mourned in another universe, alive and well at the next stop, looking in a shop window or reading a newspaper... It was an indescribable existential nausea. Death being absolute in one reality, yet merely an un-lived possibility in another, destroyed one's faith in the concept of 'the end.' Living had become an exhausting act.

So I fled from the crowds, from those cities where energy density burst the seams. I settled in a town by the sea, where time flowed more heavily, where people resembled each other. Here, the boundaries between universes were thicker; maybe once a month I'd shift gears with a slight tremor, but the scenery hardly changed at all. The sky was the same blue, the neighbors equally strange. My mind had finally found silence.

* * *

Until I saw Hayal.

The first moment I saw her, I couldn't even hear the Mozart in my headphones. As my eyes welled up, I felt time lose its usual fluidity and freeze. Hayal... The woman who owned my heart in two previous universes, the woman I'd placed at the center of my life. In both realities, I'd woken up one morning to find her gone from the empty side of the bed, without leaving a single trace. The universe had stolen her from me before I could say goodbye. I thought I'd forgotten. I'd laid thousands of notes, hundreds of new landscapes, and silent town nights over her. But there she stood before me, like a stranger.

In the first universe, Hayal was a painter, and she only worked at night. At three in the morning, she'd sit at the kitchen table, covered in paint, drawing something under the light of a single lamp. Once I asked her, 'Why don't you draw during the day?' Without lifting her head, continuing her sketch, she'd said, 'Because perfect forms don't appear in daylight. Only in silence, when everyone's asleep, can my mind escape the unnecessary traps.' Her voice that night, that strange poetic seriousness, still echoes in my ears. In the second universe, she was a composer. The same intensity, but this time wrestling with musical notes. 'How does music find you?' I'd asked. 'I don't find it,' she'd said, smiling. 'It's always there, floating in the air. I just catch it and put it on paper. Otherwise, it disappears.' In both universes, she had that same passionate, inexhaustible energy. As if she were a warrior trying to save the world from something.

In my previous leaps, the universes were relatively close to each other. Like different editions of the same book. Hayal's hair color would change, her profession would shift, but that sharp, questioning intelligence remained constant. But this universe... This universe was like a distant galaxy. The woman standing before me was a stranger wearing Hayal's face.

Hayal.

We used to debate quantum physics and God's existence at four in the morning. Her intelligence was sharp and cold as a scalpel. I loved being wounded by that intelligence of hers. But this universe's Hayal was looking at the pink quartz stone on the table, smiling.

"You know," she said, her voice so soft that even Mozart's tones seemed harsher by comparison. "This stone's energy opens the heart chakra."

She told me the name of the stone too, but I've forgotten it now. I smiled.

"Maybe," I said simply. "There's so much we don't know."

Her spiritual serenity was actually a defense mechanism, I knew. She too felt that uncanny void between universes like I did, but she'd chosen to mask this horror by loading beautiful-looking stones with meanings and the universe's messages. This was her way of surviving. Mine was Mozart and my analytical ability.

At one point, she looked into my eyes. In that moment, I thought that look—the one I knew so well, the one that pierced my soul—would return. If she'd looked for just a few more seconds, I could've wrapped my arms around her neck and cried, and I was barely holding myself back from doing so. For an instant, I thought that old, sharp Hayal would awaken and say, "Quit this nonsense, what's playing in your headphones? Mozart again?"

But it didn't happen. She just took a sip of her coffee and looked at the notification on her phone. "We're going to a yoga retreat this weekend with friends, I'm so excited," she said.

That's when I understood.

What we call a second chance isn't always getting back exactly what you lost. Sometimes a second chance is looking at someone one last time and realizing they're no longer the person you left behind. The universe had opened a door for me. It had shown me Hayal again, but she was no longer my Hayal. She was this universe's Hayal, this peaceful coastal town's Hayal, these energy sessions' Hayal.

"I'm so happy for you," I said. I stood up.

I adjusted my headphone cushions. That faint dizziness of a universe crossing tested me; I pressed my headphones tight, hit one of the buttons to activate the noise cancellation feature.

"Are you leaving?" she asked, not really curious, just out of politeness.

"I have to go," I said. "Work's been overwhelming lately."

When I left the café, the wind's scent had changed. Maybe I'd slipped into another universe in that moment, I don't know. But this time I took my headphones off and didn't start Mozart. I let the wind blow as it pleased. I'd seen her one more time and this time, instead of resenting the universe that took her from me, I'd forgiven her new, peaceful, ordinary self.

As I walked, I thought for a while. The strangest part was that she remembered me and some of our memories from the other universe too. But these memories hadn't penetrated her mind as chronological realities like they had mine—they'd seeped in like hazy past-life whispers. She probably didn't remember all those things we'd shared, that stormy love and our shared secrets, or she was ignoring those memories. To avoid madness, she'd built herself a spiritual fairy-tale world, convinced herself to reduce all those inter-universal seepages to mystical coincidences. This was her armor; inside that armor, she was healthy, peaceful, and magnificently serene.

I was grateful to have found her; knowing she was breathing somewhere brought my lungs a festival atmosphere. But love wasn't an equation that ran solely on existence. That massive force that drew us together like magnets in the previous two universes had given way to a one-sided chasm here. While the embers inside me turned into a massive fire within seconds, not even a leaf stirred at Hayal's shore. She was still sweet, still had that comforting childlike joy, but that old intelligence that shattered my mind was gone. She no longer 'saw' me. To her, I was just someone whose 'energy matched,' an ordinary man whose path might have crossed hers in a past life. I wasn't a miracle to her, I was a pleasant coincidence. That was the most painful part; I'd crossed all universes but couldn't cross that tiny distance in her heart.

Over time, I came to understand with painful clarity: Coming together doesn't always mean reunion. The universe had offered us a 'repeat,' but this wasn't a sequel—it was a footnote written in a language I didn't speak. Perhaps in those previous universes, the reason for her sudden departures from me was that burning, uncontrolled love between us; the high energy released when our souls collided always threw us apart. Perhaps her 'ordinary' and 'distant' state in this universe was her survival strategy in this reality. Loving her somehow destroyed her. Maybe that's why this time the universe didn't hide her from me physically, but spiritually. It protected her not from me, but from my love.

No matter how much I tried to console myself with these philosophical conclusions, the practical reality crashed down on my ribcage like a sledgehammer. That leaden weight I felt on my left side whenever we were together was cutting off my breath a little more each day. I couldn't stand even her casual conversation with anyone, her simple smile at a stranger. What I felt wasn't petty jealousy; it was more like watching your only homeland on earth being occupied by others without anyone noticing. I couldn't walk any further with this burden. What was sustainable wasn't pain, but peace.

This time it was my turn; this time I disappeared. But I didn't search for a portal or turn down Mozart's volume to slip into another universe. I just took my jacket and left her range. This was the only 'crossing' I could control, entirely on my own terms: willingly turning myself into a ghost.

I can't say it was easy. I know how many nights this tall man curled up in a corner, knees to chest, weeping for the sum of all those universes I'd lost. Some evenings I couldn't resist and watched her from a distance, like a shadow. Just seeing her breathe, still pushing her hair behind her ear with that same hurried gesture, eased the pressure inside me for a while. Knowing she was okay gave me the sense I'd completed my only mission in this universe.

But then, I surrendered to that old lie's wisdom: Out of sight truly did mean out of mind. The object of love faded with distance, giving way to a sad but finally bearable emptiness. This was my real second chance: I hadn't won her back, but this time I'd managed to save her from my own existence.

* * *

I couldn't carry all of this inside me forever. At some point, a person wants to transfer the weight of truth to someone else's mind to avoid being crushed by it. But I couldn't do this with ordinary sentences. To avoid mixing with those madmen muttering in incomprehensible languages in back alleys, to prevent people from lumping me in and locking my soul in a hospital room, I had to use art as a shield. That's why you're reading this story.

Right now, sitting at this keyboard, I don't know if I'm still in the same universe. Maybe by the time you read these lines, I'll have already slipped into another reality. Maybe there, in a completely different version, Hayal will remember me. Or maybe she'll never have known me at all. But at least I'll know that in one of the universes, she's doing well and healthy... As fair as it can be.

Some of you will probably ask whether what I've written here really happened. Maybe even those who don't ask will carry this question in a corner of their minds. And I'll smile and say 'it's all fiction,' I'll say 'That's my style.'