When I stepped outside, I had only walked a few steps before I felt something moving behind me.

At first, I thought it was a dog.

But the sound following me wasn’t the sound of footsteps.

It sounded like pages turning inside a book.

When I turned around, the dog was gone.

Only its leash remained, floating in the air, dragging several names behind it. My name, and the names of a few of my friends. The names hung weightlessly in the air, as if the leash itself had captured them. And all of them kept following me.

I started walking faster. They moved faster too.

I didn’t know why those names frightened me, but they felt like confessions. As if, the moment they reached me, I would be forced to admit something about myself I had spent years trying to escape.

Eventually, I reached an old street vendor selling secondhand books on the pavement. I stopped there and looked behind me again. The leash was still coming closer.

Then I noticed a book by Rumi.

The moment I picked it up, the leash fell from the air onto the ground. The floating names slowly dissolved into the pages of the book.

When I opened it, for a brief moment, I felt the names moving between the lines of the poem, as if they had been hidden there for years.

And suddenly I understood that those names, those friends, and even myself, were never trying to hide.

We were only searching for a place where we could finally be understood, accepted, and spoken aloud.