Selin rewrites her column after walking through the old station square

Selin thought she would write a fairly simple column about the square in front of the old station; in her view, the newly opened café, the renewed stone pavement, and the constant stream of passersby offered enough details to build the text.

However, while arranging her notes on a bench at the side, she noticed that almost everyone she spoke with described the same place in a different language: some saw it as a center that could finally breathe, while others felt the loss of the old irregularity almost as a personal diminishment.

While the owner of the small eatery said that the square was now more open and usable, an older woman who had lived on the same street for years maintained that the new arrangement had erased the little bends and unexpected corners that had made this area recognizable.

At that moment Selin understood that the task of the text was not to decide who was right, but to find a mode of narration honest enough to show the disagreement without closing it into an easy conclusion.

For that reason, when she returned to the editorial office in the late afternoon, she deleted the striking opening she had prepared in the morning, because she thought that opening remained too certain, too self-assured, compared with the complexity she had truly heard in the square.

She entered the text again by beginning with the sound of suitcases dragging over the stones, with the hand movement of the man who shifted his chair a few centimeters every day, and with how the evening light silently divided the square between those waiting and those passing through.

In this way, instead of delivering a rushed judgment, the piece began to show that a place can be both orderly and fragile, both inviting and uneasy; moreover, it did so without taking refuge in a single explanatory sentence.

When she sent the piece late at night, she was not sure that she had resolved all the tensions, but at least knowing that she had not hidden them behind a comfortable conclusion seemed more important than all the notes she had collected throughout the day.