If I Had Died That Night

If I had died that night, the one thing no one would have known is that I still needed something I couldn’t name.

I didn’t get back to Cairo. I stayed in Barcelona.

The apartment was a penthouse, directly across from the Facultat de Medicina hospital. From the terrace, I could see doctors and nurses in white coats standing outside, smoking under the pale afternoon sun. A surreal, deeply Catalan scene. They looked like actors between takes. No one seemed rushed. The hospital didn’t feel like a place of urgency from where I stood. And I, feeling increasingly unwell, never once thought to walk across the street and ask for help.

That detail still troubles me. I think it always will.

I’d arrived in the city with a dull pressure beneath my sternum, a weight that grew heavier by the day. The ache spread across my chest, my left shoulder, and sometimes into my jaw. At times it felt like memory. At others, like warning. But I ignored it.

I told myself I was tired, that the air on the plane had dried me out, that I was just dehydrated. I drank water, took aspirin, paced the room. Then I stepped out.

Each day I woke up and walked. Slowly at first — past the orange trees and shuttered pharmacies, the bakeries that opened early and closed by noon. I walked through El Raval, where murals bloomed on the sides of abandoned buildings, and down to the port, where the sea barely moved. I didn’t talk to anyone, not even waiters. I ordered by pointing. My Spanish had rusted. My Catalan had vanished.

Still, the food was good. I remember grilled octopus with paprika and lemon, slices of tomato rubbed on crusty bread, the olive oil pooling like sunlight. I remember sitting alone in a square as the light changed — long shadows falling over sandstone walls, children playing with a balloon until it popped. No one flinched. It felt like a city that had made peace with small explosions.

Barcelona didn’t blur. If anything, it sharpened. I remember every plate of food, every stranger I passed, every moment I kept to myself. I also loved the city — though I’d spent a long time there years before, this visit felt different. Sharper, quieter. More solitary.

But the pain didn’t leave. It only rearranged itself.

At night, lying flat made things worse. I propped myself up with pillows, listening to the distant noise of scooters and laughter from the street below. Once, I stood on the terrace at midnight and watched a group of doctors under a hospital streetlamp, smoking and laughing. One of them looked up and saw me. We stared at each other for a moment. I gave a small nod. He said nothing.

I never told anyone I was there.

Then came Warsaw.

The flight on LOT Polish Airlines was short but disorienting. I clutched the armrest during takeoff, not out of fear of flying — but of my own body. I imagined headlines: “Passenger collapses mid-flight, unidentified.” I hadn’t filled out any contact forms. I hadn’t even turned on my roaming. My phone was a camera and nothing more.

The air in Warsaw was different — crisp and oddly sweet, like early spring. I stayed in a modest place near the old town, with lace curtains and an antique writing desk I never used. I ate in cafés where nobody asked questions and watched people from behind windows streaked with sun and condensation.

I walked down Nowy Świat, past bookstores and flower stalls and women in red coats. I crossed the river into Praga, where everything felt slightly off-center, and maybe for that reason, more alive. Graffiti bloomed on the walls like wild vines. I passed a man playing violin near a crumbling doorway. The music was slow and wandering, as if unsure of its destination. I stayed and listened. I dropped a coin into his case. He didn’t look up.

Warsaw surprised me. It wasn’t gray or cold, as I had imagined. It was bright. Calm. Kind.

I took deep breaths without knowing if I could afford them. Every inhale felt like a risk. Still, I walked. Still, I stayed.

Everything felt foreign — not in the usual traveler’s way, but in the way life feels when you know you’ve nearly lost it. I kept thinking: Why am I not panicking? But panic never came. Only stillness.

There were moments I stood in front of a mirror and stared at myself, wondering what exactly was wrong. I looked… fine. Pale, but not sick. I placed my hand on my chest and felt the thud of something mechanical. Not quite pain. Not quite peace.

I told no one I was there. Not about the discomfort, or the pills, or the quiet fear I carried in my chest like a second heartbeat. I didn’t even write. That, in itself, was strange. I’ve always written when in doubt. But this wasn’t doubt. It was something harder to hold. Like silence that had been sitting inside me for years, waiting for a crack to pour through.

I think I went to Poland not to die, but to see if life could still surprise me.

And it did. Not with drama. Not with rescue. But with sunlight. With a warm croissant at a café near the university. With a woman singing in a language I didn’t understand in the middle of a bookstore I wandered into without reason. With a single moment of ease — sitting on a bench under a blooming tree, not thinking of time.

Maybe this isn’t a story about death. Maybe it’s about a silent kind of grief — the kind that doesn’t cry out, but builds up like plaque over time.

Later, after I returned home — after I collapsed, after the ambulance, after the hospital gown and the machines and the news of blocked arteries — I lay in a bed preparing for bypass surgery and thought again of that night on the terrace. The smoke, the light, the doctors, the pain I refused to name.

And I realized: If I had died that night, the one thing no one would have known is that I was still searching. Not for answers. Just for a feeling. A reason. A moment that could hold me still.

And maybe — just maybe — I found it.