What I Found in Twelve Hours Without Electricity...
After the power went out I felt the weight of silence filling every corner of the house. The refrigerator stopped its low hum, the fan froze mid turn, and suddenly the only rhythm left was the uneven tapping of rain on the windows. In that silence I realized how quickly we adapt to noise, how unnatural it feels to be without it. I stepped outside to find the streets washed in gray, water reflecting the clouds as if the sky had collapsed onto the pavement. The air carried that heavy perfume of wet asphalt, both suffocating and refreshing, and I knew I would not spend those hours waiting but noticing.
Between the heat and the rain there is never a middle ground here. The storm had broken the afternoon, leaving a humid warmth clinging to the skin while the wind still held the cool edge of the downpour. I walked with my camera and felt that mix of discomfort and fascination, the sticky air and the sudden clarity of colors sharpened by water. The mountain stood darker against the restless sky, antennas sticking out like thin needles. Cars passed slower than usual, as if even traffic was stunned by the blackout. I took pictures not to capture beauty but to hold on to proof of what those powerless hours looked like, a reminder that this was how life insisted on going forward.
Crowds always show their raw face when electricity disappears. Outside a market I found people standing in the shade of brick arches, speaking in lowered voices or just staring at the rain as if it might bring the light back. An older man leaned on his umbrella, resigned yet curious, while a woman in a spotted coat seemed to measure the bicycles lined up beside her. The absence of power had stripped away distractions, leaving only the posture of waiting etched on their bodies. I pressed the shutter and caught that fragile moment when strangers unknowingly shared the same pause.
Dusk arrived with no guarantee of light returning. I sat with a notebook, something I rarely use when the laptop is alive, and wrote down fragments: the sound of dripping water, the smell of damp clothes, the way time stretches when you cannot cut it into digital minutes. There was a quiet rebellion in writing by hand, as if denying the failure outside the walls. I realized then that these twelve hours were not stolen from me, they were given, unwrapped from the artificial glow and placed raw in my lap. Even the discomfort of heat became a kind of presence, reminding me I still belonged to the pulse of this place.
Every blackout is a mirror of the country, both its negligence and its resilience. We are not warned, not protected, yet somehow we go on. I cannot pretend it is noble, it is mostly survival. But in those hours I found a strange tenderness for the city as it stumbled in the dark. The rain, the faces, the empty wires crossing the sky, all of it became part of a story I had not chosen yet needed to tell. And so twelve powerless hours became a confession I carry with me, not as tragedy but as evidence that even when the current dies, life insists on burning its own light.
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