The Body I Never Got To Be

I don't wear bright colors anymore. I never have, not since then, lest I be a target. Or maybe I wore them once, deliberately, so I could be the target. So he would see me. So I would see me.

I ask myself one question: Did I shoot or did I get shot?

I go back to this city repeatedly as if I am polishing the statue of an apology. Leaving flowers on the tombstone of shame.

I walk the streets with the name of a different dead man each decade.

Markale, the roses, the monument to the children—there is no shortage of grief to borrow. The statue falls, the dictator falls, but the guilt doesn’t fall with them.

I have the scars. That’s certain. But scars are no longer reliable.

The time between wounds was too short to tell which came first—entry or exit, me or him.

I should have died there.

Instead, I wrote. I wrote like a coward, like a thief. Fragments. They piled up into a manuscript I didn’t authorize. They were already collecting it while the city burned. I was still deciding whether I was the sniper or the one within the crosshairs.

If I survived, I must have been the sniper. That’s the logic.
Victims die. Snipers walk away. That’s the rule.

Sometimes I remember a shot from the Holiday Inn roof. Protestors running like cockroaches scattering in a sudden light. I see a figure in yellow, or maybe red, spinning. I remember that. Or maybe I only imagined it.

Because I might have pulled the trigger.

And I might not have.
The shame isn’t that people saw, it’s that no one did.

But maybe I died. Then. Or later. Or now.
If I was the target, where is the story that proves it?

No one ever told me. No one will.

There’s no trial. No accusation. Just me, and the version of me who keeps trying to disown it. The one who writes poems about the victims, even while fantasizing about the clean mechanics of a sniper’s logic.

I write these fragments to reconstruct the moment.

Not to remember, but to corner the truth like a rat in a corridor.

If I stop writing, it disappears again. The breath in cold air.
The red in the snow.

Every death is already justified. That’s how you live with it. The shot is the verdict. Man, woman, child; the body answers before the mind does. I watched them drop and traced the thoughts they didn’t get to finish. Bottles of milk shattering. Smoke rising. The obscene fragility of people.

If anyone knew, they’d hang me.

The shame isn’t in the killing. It’s in the remembering.
It’s in the repetition.

I walk these streets again and again. The same cracks in the sidewalk. The same balcony. The same question.

Am I haunted by the sniper or was I always him?

But no one knows.
Not even me.

And if I was, who wrote all these fragments?
Who keeps leaving behind the body of a man I never got to be?