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What’s Left Behind

Nancy's Notes 🖊️♬

Written for Sadje’s weekly question:
 What Do You See?

© Ebahir @ Unsplash

Deniz had been gone eleven years, and the apartment still smelled of cardamom and dust.

She found the books stacked exactly as she remembered …. no, not exactly; someone had rearranged them, spine by spine, into an order that meant something. On top, a novel about a man returning home. Beneath it, one about fascism creeping into ordinary rooms. Beneath that, a travel book, its cover a sun-bleached road she recognized from childhood summers.

She made coffee the old way, thick and dark, the foam rising like it used to when her grandmother stood at the same stove. Then she sat at the table and opened the book to the page someone had left waiting …. a passage underlined in a hand that wasn’t familiar.

We convince ourselves that hatred is patriotism, and cowardice is caution.

Her grandmother had never underlined anything in her life. It had to be Aunt Nur, then. Or Aunt Nur wanted her to think so.

Deniz flipped through the other books. A bookmark, blue and foreign, tucked into the travel guide, a bus ticket stub from a town she’d never been to. A second bookmark, wooden, carved with a symbol she almost recognized from a place that no longer existed on maps issued after the war.

She was not looking for a person. She understood that now, watching the coffee cool in its glass. She was looking for the version of her family that had stayed …. the one that had watched the country change and chosen, deliberately, which books to keep visible and which to bury under travel guides about beaches no one visited anymore.

The bus ticket meant someone had gone somewhere. Recently.

She picked it up, and for the first time since landing, she felt the shape of a question sharpen into something she could actually follow.

NAR©2026
#WDYS

This is “Istanbul’ da Sonbahar (Autumn In Istanbul)” by Teoman

What do you see # 352- 3 August, 2026

Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.



27 thoughts on “What’s Left Behind”

      1. Your most welcome my dear friend, 8.00am and I’ve had more than 8 hours sleep, maybe I’ll be able to catch up a bit today … I’ve been doing some submissions this week as well … they are so time consuming … oh well, time to get up and look after Frankie 🥰🌏🎶🤗🐶💕📖

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              1. “This Man”

                I am who I am
                I’m an old man
                And I do the best I can

                My dreamworld plan
                Is out of my hands

                I remember how it all began
                And here I am
                Between Cannes and scans
                Still walking this land …

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