The city moves around you, alive, indifferent, unaware of what it leaves behind. Its streets carry stories that never reach the light. Walls hold echoes of screams, laughter, deals made in shadows. People walk past each other, brushing against memories they will never share. The scars are everywhere, yet invisible—etched into pavements, into the rhythm of daily life, into bodies that learn to carry weight silently.

These marks are not always from obvious violence. They come from waiting too long for justice, from promises that dissolve in the heat of corruption, from systems that offer opportunity only to withdraw it again. They grow in spaces where hope is rationed, where the normal becomes hazardous, and survival requires constant negotiation.

Some scars are personal, intimate: the look in a neighbor’s eyes, the way someone folds their hands to protect a secret, the careful measurement of trust. Others are collective: neighborhoods abandoned to decay, patterns of neglect, generations learning to expect less. They accumulate, layering onto one another, shaping the way people move, speak, and inhabit the city.

Walking through such streets, one becomes attuned. The city speaks in silence, teaching lessons of endurance, resilience, and quiet despair. You learn to recognize danger in patterns, to read absence where others see normality, to carry the invisible alongside the visible. And yet, there is a strange beauty in knowing these scars exist: they are proof of survival, of memory, of humanity persisting in the spaces that refuse to bend.

Perhaps the real question is not whether these scars will ever disappear, but whether we can move through them with eyes open, carrying awareness without losing ourselves, and whether a city, in all its harshness, can ever be more than the sum of the wounds it leaves behind.