A story about loving someone who cannot love you back, and learning that letting go can be an act of love for yourself.

BEFORE THE SUN SETS

Isn’t watching the sunset easier than waiting for a wound to close?

Clutching the cushion beneath my hand… I lifted my eyes to the ceiling, with sighs bursting from my chest like arrows released from a bow. I shook my head. Unable to stop that single warm tear from slipping down my cheek. The warm breaths escaping my lips, the words, the reproaches, the moans. All of it...

I was the one who chose to love alone. I knew in advance that I would come to a crossroads where two different paths lay before me. And yet, I wanted so badly to see where this road would lead... Even if no one saw me. It was like trying to warm the cold wall beneath my hand when I pressed it against the surface. When I pulled my hand away, the hollow grew cold again. It was a one-sided force. A push.

At first, I thought I simply couldn’t reach him. Then... I noticed the differences in his behaviour. For one thing, his gaze was never the same: when he looked at me, his eyes shone with tenderness; when he looked at someone else, he seemed to be trying to take them in. That was when I understood. But just as words can carry different meanings, I chose to turn a blind eye. These were my feelings. I knew what I felt.

Like that night at the restaurant.

He was looking at me in a friendly way, as though we were on the verge of a conversation. I leaned forward as if studying my hands and cleared my throat. I pushed the words to the tip of my tongue, words that would take over my life if I didn’t let them out. I told him I liked him. That it wouldn’t change.

He clasped his hands together and rubbed his mouth. He shook his head. My fingers walked back and forth across my knee. I didn’t want to put pressure on him. This was simply how I was. I folded my hands together and turned towards him, giving a small nod. He smiled and nodded. He said he understood.

But it wasn’t like that night at the bar.

His head shifted slightly as he looked down at his hands resting against his chin. I think... he liked someone else. He turned towards me. He saw me as a friend he cared about. He hadn’t been able to feel anything more.

I set down the glass in my hand and brought it up to my hair. I ran my fingers through it, untangling the knots as I went. I nodded, standing one step away from the point where I had to take the leap. I told him he couldn’t force himself to feel something. Feelings claimed the place they belonged to. I pressed my lips together and lowered my chin. He looked at the table, then at me. He said he would keep it in mind.

Sensing the blow before it came was easy enough. Watching it approach, though, was scorching. It was like imagining the pain of falling before I could even put out a hand to break my fall. And once I hit the ground, there was no getting back up. It felt so warm...

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I felt it all in a single night.

As we walked, he kept one hand in his pocket and looked towards me. Suddenly, he stopped. He stopped me, too. “Let’s stay friends,” he said. “I don’t want to lose this.” He said it would be a great loss. I let my arms fall to my sides and swung them quickly. “I don’t want to lose this either.” I felt as though I were ruining our relationship. With a smile that brushed past me so closely, he told me I wasn’t ruining anything. “I’ll always love you as my friend.”

At the spot where the wind blew hardest, I turned my head. My eyes closed. The sting of strands of hair blowing into my eyes made my eyelashes flutter. I could see my hands, clinging to the wall, loosening one by one. I rested my chin on my shoulder and clenched my aching teeth. I swallowed and opened my eyes. Folding my arms across my chest, I turned to face forward. I nodded like a drop of water trembling at the edge, afraid to fall, yet with no choice but to let go. I kept walking.

I let go of the cushion. With every breath, the thorns of love, tightly bound to my skin, rose to the surface. Rubbing the skin throbbing beneath my fingernails, I slowly pulled the thorns out. I leaned forward and picked up the glass on the table. Listening to the sound it made, I took a sip. I wiped away the last tear in my eye with my fingers. I rubbed the droplets in my palm between my fingers until they disappeared. I shook my head sharply. I sniffed. I stood up and shook the grief off me.

Nothing was ever the same after I ran into him on the street.

I walked slowly towards him, carrying the copper sunlight that made my eyes shine. I narrowed one eye and smiled, raising my hand. He raised his hand, his mouth opening and closing. As my vision narrowed, he seemed to appear and disappear. By the time I stood before him, I had become nothing but myself. I told him we should stay friends. Let’s forget what I said. It was a misunderstanding, and it had passed. I sealed my smile onto my face.

He seemed to dissolve into the air, like a bird fading from sight against the sun. Squinting hard, he asked, “Are you sure?” I nodded. Not everything stays as it first felt. I widened my smile and held out my hand. His lips curled upwards, and he nodded once. He clasped the hand I offered.

And just as I learned to reach out my hand, I learned to draw it back.

༺☆༻

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For those born in 1999 and 2000, Harry Potter is a bedside book you always return to; a warm carrot cake scented with cinnamon; the sweet chocolate left at the bottom of a mug of hot cocoa; the familiar scent of a favourite sweater when you pull it out from where you tucked it away.

Of course, when something becomes a classic, there are always people who resist it. I’ve definitely heard people say things like, “Harry Potter? You’re still talking about that?” But if you look a little deeper, you’ll realise it’s not just a movie, you Muggles!

The real reason Harry Potter feels so much like home to me is actually very simple: my childhood.

Harry Potter meant my childhood. I remember the nostalgic feeling of sitting in front of our old fashioned television. It was the one thing I could watch until bedtime, the little ritual I never wanted to end. It was lying awake because my imagination had chased away all the sheep I was supposed to be counting. Whenever I remember it, I find myself back in the delicate lace of the curtains in my childhood home, the tiny golden dust particles sparkling in the light, and the old, scratched wooden floor.

Everything I had as a child is like a night insect I once placed inside an unbreakable glass. Every time I open the lid, it brings back the comfort of closing my eyes and recognising the sounds that blend into the darkness of the night.

As I grow older, I find myself missing the past, my childhood, and especially the gentleness of being a child. The things I was only just beginning to experience became some of the most unforgettable memories of my life. Those first experiences lingered in the light of the rising sun, smiling down at me from there through every moment of my life.

I’ve realised that the longing I feel isn’t always rooted in my own memories. Sometimes, I catch that sweet scent of nostalgia in a melody, a scene from a film, or even a person. I close my eyes and stay there for as long as I can hold on to it.

Now, I open my eyes and reach out towards the peace I find in the golden light that fills everything around me. With a little smile on my face, I open the door to the fairytale world I’m about to enter.

Let’s see what memories are on display in the museum of my life.

Looking back at my early childhood through the opening in that golden light, I find myself caught up in the energy of play. Suddenly, I remember all the different games my sibling and I used to make up together. Our favourite was building a house.

We would drape our favourite blanket over the arms of two sofas pushed close together. Then we’d prop big pillows against the open sides and crawl inside. We’d sleep there and watch television. And we’d act as if we’d already moved into our own apartment, drawing our own little boundaries.

Even at that age, our imaginations were already growing at a rapid pace. I realise that we loved making up games and creating worlds of our own to go with them. I think that, despite being so young, we liked the idea of creating a world together. That way, we could bring different lives into existence, lives in which we would always be together.

As children, the reality we experienced in our imaginary worlds was the very essence of life. Perhaps this was where that feeling of nostalgia came from: the naturalness of the things we created with our innocent childhood minds.

As I grew older, I could never quite reach the white walls of my mind again. They began to take on different colours; sometimes pink, sometimes red. But I could never keep that white in my mind for very long. And that is exactly what I miss.

To imagine freely, untouched by anything, in pure white.

The opening into the period when I first started school reveals a rather big change. This sweet girl, slowly turning from a child into someone else, didn’t feel all that unfamiliar.

When I started school, I was eager to establish a routine. Although I was never one to enjoy getting up early, I was open to developing new habits, thanks to the discipline school brought into my life. At weekends, I would get up early and head straight for the television. That way, I could watch my favourite cartoon from the very beginning, without missing a single minute.

As I grew a little older, I remember starting to watch Disney Channel’s teen shows. I especially remember waiting for the time slot to come around so I could watch Wizards of Waverly Place. Waverly Place was such a childlike, fun world. It opened a door to the kind of world every child was bound to love, one that offered the quiet little comfort of a world with a little more love in it.

Suddenly, I found myself remembering all those days spent at home, doing absolutely nothing. It was a soothing kind of emptiness, like sinking my head into a soft cotton pillow. I found myself longing for that freedom again.

As I thought about those days, I realised that what I missed most was the time before I started school.

Once I started school and got my first grades, I was introduced to the little rituals of reward. Each of those gifts held a special little world of its own, opening a window that seemed to look back at me.

I loved receiving gifts. And as a child, being given one felt almost magical. That’s why I treasured the gifts I received for my good grades, keeping each one carefully. Most of them were plush toys, so I saw no reason not to arrange them on my bed and sleep beside them. I grew up with them, loving them dearly and never letting them leave my side.

I think I saw them as an extension of the love I was given. By taking care of them, I was nurturing that love and helping it grow. I was adding something of my own to the effort someone had made for me, making sure it wasn’t wasted and that I lived up to what I had been given.

I realise now that I was returning the care someone had shown me and developing a sense of loyalty that felt fair. The care someone showed me deserved to be returned in equal measure.

I miss that time when even the smallest things could make me happy, when everything meant so much to me.

I miss the past so much!

It has started to go beyond just my childhood. As I’ve grown older, I’ve found myself pausing wherever I catch the scent of nostalgia. The people and events that have entered my life during different periods have only deepened this feeling. They have their own places in my life, like stars I love to look up at.

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Princess Diana. I may have missed out on a childhood that coincided with her time, but she became someone I often came across during high school and university, and whose story immediately sparked my curiosity. I was instantly fascinated by the glimpse of a world that opened up through her radiance.

I think I’ve watched all the documentaries about her. The royal family itself evoked a sense of nostalgia. That’s why watching Princess Diana’s life unfold on screen, as if she were the star of a television series, and getting to witness the era she lived in felt so surreal.

She was a fashion icon. Her sense of style stood apart from the royalty she represented, making her someone the biggest names in fashion eagerly looked to for inspiration. Every outfit she wore had a harmony of details, colours and accessories that I couldn’t take my eyes off.

She made me think of my mother. Looking through old photographs, I realised that the clothes she wore and her hairstyles had a familiar feel to them. They seemed to show how effortlessly cool people could be back then. Every era comes only once, after all. Trying to imitate it is like living life backwards.

Looking back, I find myself missing the timeless, distinctive elegance of those days even more.

Towards the end of university, I became completely obsessed with Madison Beer’s Silence Between Songs album. I remember listening to it for almost a year. Especially when the song “Ryder” started playing, my eyes would immediately begin to fill with tears. I’m not even joking.

Grew up in the same house
So I know why you lash out
Oh, I understand you
More than you think I do

It’s a song written for her sibling. It begins by telling the story of two siblings growing up in the same house and building a fortress of their own. And there I am, leaping over the gardens of my entire childhood, standing still and looking through that little opening. I listen as the song describes two siblings growing up together, sharing the same feelings and being able to feel each other’s every sorrow and joy.

It also brings back the hardships they went through and the moments they lost. She carries the pain of knowing that she can never go back and make up for any of it. But it ends with the understanding that, as the years pass, we will always know how much we love each other. And perhaps that is where healing begins. Oh, we’ll be alright.

I felt as though I were watching through the window of the childhood I spent with my own sibling. The world we created together is etched into my memory. The childhood I shared with my sibling shaped me and became the foundation of my entire life. Perhaps life is simply a matter of shared memories multiplying as time passes, bringing us back to the very place we started from.

I realise, deep in my heart, just how much I miss the childhood I spent with my sibling.

Ahhh, In the Mood for Love. I adore these photographs; they capture the film’s entire feeling and texture. It gives us one of the most beautiful yet heart-wrenching love stories of the 2000s.

The clothes, the settings, the colours all had that quality of drawing back the curtain and inviting you inside. I can say that I admired every single outfit Mrs Chan wore.

Of course, what I loved most about the film was its love story. The warmth of waiting for someone by an old payphone and the feeling of finally being reunited would wash over me almost immediately. The way the joy of meeting in the streets and seeing the person you loved standing right in front of you was expressed without ever quite giving it away felt so moving. Through letters, they could share the words, feelings and even scents they couldn’t express aloud.

The idea of making a physical effort for someone, of putting your strength and hard work into it, moved me deeply. Reading their needs through their gestures and finding ways to meet them with the means available back then. That kind of willing determination felt more attractive to me. Through it, I witnessed the honesty of a love that felt more intimate and genuine.

I realised that, without even knowing it, I had been missing the warmth and gentle effort of love in the old days.

In primary school, there was an apple tree hanging on the wall. Those who learned to read and write could choose an apple from the tree and colour it red. I would look at those apples and imagine turning the roundest one, the one with the smoothest shape, red straight away.

I am still sitting before the wall where the apple tree hangs. I fold my hands together and rest my face on the desk, watching the apples blush pink in the soft golden sunlight, long before they turn red.

༺☆༻

A short story about looking, being looked at, and the strange feeling of wanting to be seen by someone you can’t stop watching. It starts with a bowling game, a stranger, and a few little coincidences and somehow, they begin to feel like something more.

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WHITE SWAN, BLACK SWAN

I don’t want to be loved through touch. I want to be loved where your gaze has fallen and never left. I don’t want to be loved through desire. I want to be loved where the fire rises, where pain burns.

One, two, three.

Lean slightly, gently bend your foot back, reach forward, and throw.

12 pins, knocked backward, left behind 12 delusions.

His hands rose into the air, turning toward us. He moved forward and reached out his hand to each of us in turn. The girl with long black hair was first. She reached out first. They slapped hands. My teammate, short and solidly built, his hands in his hair. He turned and quickly slapped his hand against his. Then he turned toward me, smiled, and lowered his shoulders.

My turn. He didn’t see me. His hand brushed mine. He doesn’t know yet.

From the moment we first walked in, the girl with black hair, Gab, sat beside him. He was Sam. With the same cheerful expression he showed everyone, he joked with Gab beside him. He helped her put on her shoes. Oscar, short and solidly built beside me, asked if mine fit. I couldn't tell him that where it fit perfectly was where it began to dig in, where it started to hurt.

I lifted my head and struck the shoe I was wearing against the floor. Oscar got up with me. “What should we do about the teams?” he said. Gab moved her hands back and forth between us and them. What if we kept going like this? Sam nodded. Oscar nodded. I struck my feet against the floor and nodded.

Oscar stood with his hands on his hips, in front of the balls where the two holes had fallen into a black hollow. We haven't decided what the loser will do, he said. What if the loser bought us a meal? His eyes moved over us. Gab said, “The loser should say three nice things to everyone else.” She drew her head toward her chin, widening her eyes as far as they would go. Sam looked at her, turned back around, and said, “Sounds fun.” Oscar pursed his lips, looked at me, and said, “Why not?” Why not, I said.

Oscar stepped forward. He slipped his fingers firmly into the two holes and ran quickly. Sam whispered from behind Gab's shoulder as she fidgeted in front of him. Laughter. 12 pins, 11 fell, 1 remained mournful. Oscar took a deep breath, reached forward, and threw. The ball went straight, touched the pin, and wobbled. Point. One hand raised in a fist. He ran toward me with the other.

I walked, the ball heavy in my hand. Pulling me down. I stopped. You can do it, Oscar said. He brought his hands together. With both hands, I repositioned the ball. I reached forward and threw. The ball sent me and itself flying. 12 pins, shook the ground, left behind 12 pieces of wreckage. The sound of clapping. I looked at my hand. Shook it.

Sam went over to Gab, her black hair like a thread around his arm. He bent down to her level. He bent his foot, reached forward. “All you have to do is bend slightly and reach.” Rhythm. The girl bent and reached. Threw. The ball bounced and went straight. Farther ahead, it veered right. 12 pins, remained standing, 12 moonlights rose. Before the ball could see the sunrise, it disappeared into the dark. Sam pressed his lips together, raised his eyebrows, and spelled it out; next time.

Sam reached forward and released it quickly. 12 pins. Fell. 12 addicts sighed.

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When we reached the car, Gab immediately got into the front. Oscar headed for the back, opened the door, and gestured for me to come in. I got in and sat down. Sam placed his coat on the driver's seat and sat down. Soft voices came from the front. Laughter. Gab told Sam he was very good at driving. Sam, visible in the rearview mirror, grinned. “I love driving.” Murmurs. Sam glanced at Gab. “You make people smile. That’s lovely.”

The trees reflected in the window parted. A circle of light appeared, narrowed, then turned dark again. The seat in front of me shifted, swayed. A shadow moved toward Sam's ear. Stopped, pulled back. I placed my hand on my arm, stroked it up and down. I threw my head back. Oscar looked at me and asked if I was tired. I couldn’t tell him that tiredness was simple to say, heavy to hear.

The road stretched out. Curved. Sound was swallowed. Eyes lowered. The melody of an old song came through the radio; Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps. I rested my head against the window. “I love this song,” I murmured. One of his eyes appeared in the rearview mirror. “Really? One of my favorites,” he said. A light passed before my eyes.

I lifted my head from the window. I interlaced my fingers and looked at them. “Actually, I heard this song in a movie,” I said. I looked into the rearview mirror. “That movie, right?” he said, and began to laugh. He tilted his head. “I started listening to it after that movie too.” A pair of his eyes in the rearview mirror. “This is crazy,” he said.

He asked which other singers I liked. I straightened my back. Looked at the ceiling. I named a few singers. He turned around in his seat and said, “Incredible.” He turned forward. “I like the same ones.” He looked back again, turned around, and tightened both hands around the steering wheel. “It’s incredible how many things we have in common.”

He lifted one hand and placed it on the arm holding the steering wheel. “What do you like to do in your free time?” Looking into the mirror, I said I liked going to museums. A pair of eyes gleaming in the mirror. “I go to museums quite often too.” After watching me in the mirror for a while longer, he asked who my favorite painter was. I said Yoshitomo Nara. He brought the hand resting on his arm to his mouth. In the mirror, the first gaze of the rising sun, piercing the eyes. “Me too.” A tilt of the head. A laugh.

“It’s strange how familiar you feel. I’d bet you are the sum of all my lives,” he said. His arms stayed still on the steering wheel. Tensed. A laugh. Two pairs of eyes in the mirror.

Eyes down, then up. Right in the middle. A hit. He waited for a while. Swayed. Trembled. Turned again. Settled. A sudden shift. Another hit. Rhythm.

A burst of fireworks appeared beyond the windshield. A deep sound filled the air. 12 streaks of light spread across the sky. Drifted. Softened. 12 sparks caught fire.

༺☆༻

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A short story about new beginnings, meeting people you instantly admire, and the kind of pain that slowly moves from the outside in, somehow making room for new friendships along the way.

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PAIN IS ONLY A BEGINNING

MORNING

When my pupils are exposed to light for too long, they widen, widen again, and begin to blur.

And then…

I turned toward the window, lifting my gaze from the emptiness it had been fixed upon for so long. The sky, announcing the arrival of a new season, seemed to have begun looking at the world from another side. As I watched the pale yellow traces left behind by the cones that had fallen to the ground, the door suddenly opened. I lifted my eyes from the steady light and turned them toward the darkness biting into the room.

Moving to the city alone feels more like a nightmare than a dream. Like standing still in a crowd one evening, feeling nothing but the wind closing in around you. What else could you possibly think of but throwing yourself into a shop and getting away from it?

She was a young woman. As she took off her boots, her long, slender figure, only her right profile could be seen from behind the few cardboard boxes at the entrance of the room. Her bare heels rubbed against the floor, and with the strap of the bag she held tightly in her hand, she turned toward the light. My eyes, watering as the light broke and reflected across her face, began to narrow, opening and closing. A little while later, the light was right in front of me.

You know how they say that, in some people, the beauty inside them shows on their face… Her thin, evenly spaced eyelashes opened and closed in a shade of gray that matched the light. Her thick black hair wrapped around her arms like a thread. Her cheeks were in a newly reddened apple orchard. The radiance gathered on her face could not go unnoticed, like a speck of glitter flashing in the light.

My gaze, like a claw clinging to her face, cast the risk of seeming improper aside. I straightened my skirt, stood up, unsure whether I had managed to make the movement look effortless, and greeted her. And suddenly, like a rainstorm retreating, I sank back into my place. My roommate across from me glanced around the room, sat down, pulled her head back and checked as though there were one last thing she had forgotten. Suddenly, she turned her head and said hello. Hello.

One of the greatest difficulties I fear when moving to a new place is the fear of having nowhere to stay. In such a situation, the orange shutters of the human mind come down, and you may even find yourself thinking that you could end up on the street. Luckily, fortune came to me like the first light of day escaping from the mountain. An empty room in a shared house listing. A roommate to share it with. It was like finding someone waiting for you inside the shop across the street while you were standing in the middle of the city. Smiling from across the way and waving energetically.

I reached my hand toward her, wanting to learn her name. My eyes alert, eagerly awaiting every movement she would make. She immediately brought her hands together and said her name was H*. I said B* too. Nice to meet you.

She leaned forward a little, revealing her hesitation, and said I looked quite young. My lips forming a small O, I briefly nodded my head. My mouth relaxed for a moment, opened, then curved upward. Looking toward her, I told her she was really beautiful. She smiled, nodded, and said, “So are you.” I turned my body toward her and leaned in, starting to laugh. Looking at her, I said I was serious. Trembling like electrical wires touching one another, our reflected laughter began to spread outward. The shadows of our heads cut across the walls.

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EVENING

To be enchanted was a simple act; it would ignite sparks of admiration. The pupils would grow larger, the whites would recede, and the black would gleam like a bright talisman. Even as you realized that you had looked away, you would be drawn back toward it. Surrendering to it was the only act you could perform that would earn you merit.

We had finished settling our belongings into our room and gone out to the market to shop for what we were missing; we had moved from more everyday questions to more open-ended, daring ones. We spent our first actual night together in our room, keeping the darkness outside and the light trapped inside. H* was lying on her back in bed, one hand on her forehead, the other playing with her hair with the other as she complained about her boyfriend. He never hesitated to help everyone; his lack of a sense of boundaries bothered her.

Sitting where I was, bracing my hands behind me, I said that my ex-boyfriend had also caused misunderstandings for this reason. She took her hand away from her forehead and said, “Exactly, but I don’t like that either.” She added that she knew helping and attending to others was part of his job because he worked as a sports instructor.

I pulled one hand from behind me and tucked my hair behind my ear. “Mine was a sports instructor too,” I said, then pulled my other hand from behind me. “I understand.” From where she lay, she asked where he worked as a sports instructor. “At the *university he attended,” I said. “Mine was there too,” she said. She asked his name. I told her.

As I looked at my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend sitting across from me, my lip opened and burst like a bubble.

She pulled up the blanket and covered herself with it, her feet hanging out from either side. Her almost transparent eyelashes cast a shadow over her eyes. The small, match-shaped movements of the shadows, going back and forth, parted. A quiet sigh spread between us. I wanted to lean over and blow, to send that air out through the window. Just like blowing an old page into the trash after tearing it to pieces.

I asked her why she had sighed. Her shoulders lifted and lowered the blanket. In the end, I went over and sat beside her. I told her not to be uncomfortable around me. I am someone living in this room with you right now.

She threw the blanket off herself. She straightened up and said, “I want to get along well with you.” I nodded and said that was what we should do. What matters is us; the other things should not bind us to them. She interlocked and squeezed her hands together as if trying to create a pattern, and asked if I was sure. “I would really love to see you happy,” I said. She took my hand and thanked me, looking down at the floor. Let it be just us, and let us be well.

When the rain first begins to fall, water slowly starts to gather. As its force grows, it stretches, twists. If it wishes, it turns right, then left. There, it finds a pool and merges into it. Together, they withstand the drizzle and swell. Then they become a river. The bed that forms beneath them can now hold a sea within it.

༺☆༻

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A story about the impatient, consuming, body shaking thrill of coming together again.

THE WAVES ARE STILL IN THE SAME PLACE

Why are these waves so still?

Getting excited feels like an experience so close to an illness. My heart melts and turns into a nectarine. Thousands of them, falling from above, gather inside my stomach. Ah! My breath rushes upward from my throat. Such an uncontrollable rebellion... It allows nothing but surrender, with the sainthood of a living angel.

As I follow, the waves playing their games without moving, hiding the mischief of a well-behaved child... A pang twisting its way from inside me outward blurs my vision. It was exactly the right hour; the afternoon, that sleepy, tranquil stretch of time resting on the softest carpet. Sitting at my desk, I straighten my back and awkwardly strike my feet against the floor, not knowing how to use them. As my heart climbs upward from my throat, tickling its way up...

It quickened at the sound of one step, drew closer to its doom with the second, and with the third...

“Why is the sea so still today?” With his face turned toward the sea, he sat down across from me; like the wing of a calm butterfly, he lowered his head before me. On his lips was that smile he always wore, the one that seemed to say, I can handle it, what else could there be? Then he turned back toward the sea, as though he might keep his laughter from escaping toward me. The corners of his mouth tightened, curled upward, and settled there, and he quickly turned his head, as though he needed to see me as soon as possible.

As if angry at the lip I was smiling with, I caught it between my teeth, quickly lifted my head, and watched him. I began to remember him without forgetting the places his eyes had touched. My heart darkened like the night longing for the languor of the sun left behind by the day. And all I could do was turn my head toward the sea.

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” Whatever he had wanted most to see in his life was before him, in the air, in the sea, in me… He leaned forward and watched for a while, then shifted slightly and said, “You haven’t changed at all.” The simple movements of his eyes pulling from side to side, his mouth opening and closing involuntarily, began to tremble. I heard the sound of a deep breath. He folded his hands across his chest and let his eyes drift into the distance. Tears glimmered on his black lashes, touched by the still waves.

Six years had passed. He was a dry flower that had emerged from the blind corners of my youth, the oldest one, and the one whose scent I loved most. With the storms I had been allowed to pluck apart, the wild winds whose blowing made me happy, the fortune slips he opened and closed on one side. A glass that shattered after I wanted to fit inside it, after he was afraid to fill it. Was it a wildly consuming game, filling the old moments again, or making that glass together once more?

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Caught in the gaze that fell before me, I tried to balance on the rope like a timid tightrope walker. One corner of my mouth lifted; my eyes, rising from the table with a pain that sank, fell, then rose again, met the turmoil of the sea. With my voice mingling with the sound of the waves, I told him I had always wanted to come here. I had always wondered what it would be like to come back and visit a few years later. I turned to him.

He warmed his eyelashes with me. He looked at me, at somewhere, then at me again. His eyes moved from a point of surrender to a point of command. “This place was always on my mind,” he said. He trembled and swayed like a candle pleading without falling silent for even a moment, then straightened like a wind that could not ease his pain. “We used to love coming here.” I placed my hands on the table and waited. “I remember,” I said. “Everything.”

What happens when you wake from a dream you loved more than anything, a dream more beautiful than you ever wished for? You want to close your eyes again and continue from where you left off. But once the hook has been torn from its place, you can never go back. What would it be like to dream the same dream again? Would you want me back with that same reckless, unruly desire?

Can a person forget the basilica they love most, the one they painted?

He leaned back with a trembling smile, then straightened, lowering his head. I was thinking of how much I had missed. What would it be like now? Could trying again become possible as we grew older? His chin moved, wavering along a taut line. “But when I look at you, I still feel the same,” he said. As his head kept nodding like a paper cutout, he pursed his lips, straightened, and looked toward the only direction he was going, his eyes blinking softly.

“Me too.” As my head nodded, my body was moving wildly; I looked at him with the most disheveled, lost grin. His gaze, completing me like an illusion, and his laughter, multiplying like a patch, spread across his face. He took a deep, unsteady breath and leaned toward the table, bringing the smile on his lips closer to me.“What are we going to do now?” I gently lifted one shoulder and let it fall. He kept smiling that small, pursed, narrowed smile of his.

He leaned forward completely and stayed at the level of my eyes, like a sun that never set. The part of me that had seeped into everything fell into him and stayed there. “You’re very beautiful,” he said. When I quietly fell before him like that, who could have dared to make the sun set?

We were still, once again, in the same place.

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Imagining the future was only beautiful when the sun was setting, when soft pink clouds appeared in the sky, when the full moon rose at night and lit everything around it like a mirror. But when all of that disappeared, the thought of the future that crept into my mind was terrifying.

I can’t imagine myself as an adult. I feel like I’m still a little girl who is supposed to keep growing, no matter how old she gets. And the thought that I could lose the personality I’ve spent all these years building, like bark peeling away from the body of a tree, troubles me too.

I spent a lot of time wondering where I was supposed to begin becoming an adult. The methods I was supposedly meant to follow didn’t appeal to me; they simply didn’t align with the reality beating inside me. After graduating, I decided to give myself the freedom of a long year of rest and relaxation! (Of course, Otessa Moshfegh had something to do with that.)

So, during this long holiday, I focused on discovering myself. I met my deepest desires, my passions that had long been hidden beneath the surface. It turned out I had a talent for writing. It was like finding a great, broad-trunked tree on a trip I had taken simply to fill an empty afternoon. Then I began to imagine making money by writing, living by writing. It felt like giving this reality the first water it needed to grow.

With it came the idea of a life and a future surrounded by art. I wanted every form of art to touch my life, to surround me completely. I followed it in the simplest way I could: through films, paintings, and books. Slowly, the stories beneath them and the complicated emotions within them began to walk their way into me, curling up somewhere deep inside.

And through them, feelings of adulthood I had never known before began to fill me, feelings that lingered like a drop of water yearning to fall onto dry branches.

What were the feelings slowly making their way toward adulthood, a planet I knew nothing about?

Lately, while reading, I’ve found myself lifting my head from the page and staring at the walls, at the stains on them. There were places where I needed to pause, sit with certain feelings, and let them sink in. Han Kang became the writer who made me feel this more than anyone else.

The first book I read was We Do Not Part. I read it like a black-and-white film revolving around a single axis. There were trees screaming inside it, shadows mourning. I discovered that even something as simple as following the shadows of trees could press against your heart with a lingering ache. Whenever I watch something set in Korea, I feel my eyes searching for those trees.

I finished Greek Lessons this year. The book held a sensory world of pure love, of how two people could communicate without seeing or speaking. I was deeply moved by the way speech came to represent not merely a form of perception, but a way of living. In a world built from words, being left without words was her way of speaking. It made me think about the helplessness of standing at a threshold in life, not knowing what to do next.

There was one page in particular; the part about the tangerine. The woman looked at a tangerine. The tangerine was there, in her memory. But how could it come alive in her memory without her even seeing it? I found myself looking around, simply stunned.

It brought back moments in my life when I questioned reality. Moments that felt like waking from a light sleep while still being awake. Moments when I thought, I am alive right now. That was it: even what turns in the air is a life. It feels like a dream.

Keep dreaming. That was the first lesson I learned. If even a tangerine could always remain there, then in the world I dreamed of, it would always be there too. If I could carry it into my mind simply by imagining it, then one day, perhaps, it could exist in reality.

Death in Her Hands. I stared at the ceiling for a minute over this title. At first glance, it seems like nothing more than a name. But when you enter the forest and find that note, you look down at the book in your hands. And you too find yourself holding a death in your hands.

The mysterious unease of the dark, damp birch forests was, in fact, the whole story. Yet it never frightened me. On the contrary, I loved how gripping that detective like atmosphere was. Following Vesta as we searched for Magda and pieced together clues of our own was genuinely fun. She was chasing the possibility of trading the death before her for the loss of her husband and the truth of all the mistakes she had been forced to endure throughout her life. That was the thought that stayed with me after I finished the book.

The moment death was shown to me as something slowly unraveling like lace, something waiting for me, was when my back straightened. The idea of death slowly making its way toward you, while life stood at the door like a creditor come to collect.

As a slow process that must be absorbed, we spend our lives at the edge of this idea of death. Death was close. It was even in our hands. We are holding it in our hands right now, aren’t we?

Sometimes, whenever I felt a cut or a pain somewhere in my body, my mind would start running. I would look through the red-lit corridors of the internet, through all the information that could make a person sick for no reason. This was my second realization: to value my health and my youth. To remember what I have while I still have it.

An author I feel proud of as a Turkish person is Elif Batuman. She is someone who blends and balances Turkish culture and experience beautifully with the world she writes about. I felt this so strongly in The Idiot. The family trips back to Turkey. For us, a summer holiday means returning to the family home. It means stepping back into society with all the experiences you’ve gathered in life, with a new version of yourself.

Selin carries a different, fresh energy at first glance. I loved how, after starting university, she decided to try all the things she had never done before, simply because she thought, why not now? She made unconventional friends and spent time with someone she had met online (that’s how I choose to see it). What affected me most was the way she treated life like an experiment, yet remained gentle and accepting at the same time. Through her, I experienced all the foolishness of youth like a horror film.

What stayed with me most was the moment she looked back at the past and said that perhaps she would have cried. That moment of coming face to face with the past as life keeps moving forward. Especially the thought of meeting your past self.

If I could go back, what would I say to myself? I would probably wrap my arms around myself and hold on tight. So tightly I could hardly breathe, until my tears soaked my shoulder.

My third realization was this: the difficult or easy years we lived through in the past were only a period of our lives. The same things would not always happen to me. I would not always be living through the same chapter. It passed. Don’t be afraid anymore.

Lately, I’ve found myself gravitating toward longer feature films. I especially love the aesthetic sensibility of Chinese cinema, and the way its stories can unfold through every possible form of communication. Ash Is Purest White was one of them. The film tells the story of a woman and the love and power she has built over many years with her lover, a gang leader.

There comes a point when I watched her make sacrifices for the man she loved. It was heartbreaking to see her carry the weight of those sacrifices, only to be left halfway through, and to live through that sadness. And yet, I admired the way she got back on her feet and rebuilt her old life. The way she established her own power without needing anyone.

For me, the turning point came when she became the only person the lover who had left her could turn to for help. Even with her heart broken, she was able to set it aside and reach out a hand to the person she could never bring herself to abandon. That moved me deeply.

There is a line in the film that stayed with me: when a volcano erupts, isn’t the ash it leaves behind, after burning through all that fire, the cleanest, purest thing? I kept repeating it to myself long after the film ended.

And I had earned my fourth realization: making mistakes wasn’t a bad thing. Even if we take the wrong path in life, aren’t the ashes that make us who we are the truest thing about us? We burn, we cool, and we become a perfect piece of rock; fertile, rich, and full of possibility. Wasn’t there, sometimes, a pure pleasure in the growth that comes from burning?

Sentimental Value is a film I only recently had the chance to watch, and it immediately became one of my favorites. It opens with the idea that every house has its own voice, and slowly turns toward the notion that its sentimental value is held within.

Watching the daughters and their father come together after losing their mother was quietly devastating from beginning to end. When they looked at one another, there was something in their eyes that reminded me of the way you might ask where something in the kitchen belongs, almost pleading for an answer. Like catching a glimpse into the home of the neighbors next door and recognizing its atmosphere even without being able to smell the air inside. What stayed with me most was the fragile texture of coming together again after growing up and leaving home.

The moment that affected me most came during the reading rehearsal, when the actress asked the director: But did we already know that the character was going to take her own life in this story?

A long silence. Distant, unfocused eyes.

Later, after Nora read the script, she fell apart. In a conversation with her sister, she asked, “How did Dad know that I had tried to take my own life?”

I think fathers have an instinctive ability to sense their daughters’ feelings, to understand them somewhere deep inside. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that my father is the person who understands me most. Even when he cannot see them, he knows our wounds. He knows where we hurt. I suppose that is a kind of power given to them.

My fifth realization was this: growing older doesn’t mean our relationship with our parents has to change. I didn’t need to approach them differently or judge them simply because I had grown up. I only needed to introduce them to this new version of myself and build a relationship with them through a better, newer experience.

Lately, I’ve been fascinated by getting lost in the textures on paintings. I’ve had a soft spot for painting since childhood, but now I find myself wanting to understand their lines and colors. The girl-child figures Yoshitomo Nara creates seemed to be calling me toward exactly that.

I became fascinated by the little girls with their enormous eyes in his paintings. Looking into those eyes, I was overtaken by the fragility of a little girl. No matter how harmless, small, and sweet she seemed from the outside, there was an unknown world living inside her. That was why her eyes were opened so wide, as if they were holding an entire universe inside them, or so unhappy.

As if she were angry at something, caught in a deep fit of rage. Was it because she thought about too much, or because she carried too much inside her? Whatever it was, in a strangely unsettling way, she felt like she belonged somewhere inside me.

My sixth realization was this: ask for help. It made me think about letting go of the need to carry everything on my own and allowing myself to ask someone to listen to me. If I couldn’t carry something, or if it was more than I could bear, opening up to someone was a good choice.

I’m completely a “let’s eat and watch something” kind of girl. I especially see putting something on while I eat as a way of life. Michelle’s channel is basically built around exactly that.

I realized I was drawn to her way of living: good Asian food, shows to watch while eating, being a dog mom, living like a homebody. They were all things I had already added to my list. She lived entirely within the innocence of shy girls, and that made me feel strangely close to her. She wasn’t a particularly social person, but she had a small, close circle of friends and people around her. Watching her spend time with them, I found myself wishing that my own adult life could look like that too.

A close-knit circle of friends, a dog, an apartment made warm from the outside by the glow of the lights, and meals I could share with everyone. I decided to build my entire adult life around this scene.

My seventh realization was this: get up and work toward the life you want. If I wasn’t going to work for my own life, then what was I going to do? That was when I found the determination to work for it within myself. If the things I wanted were right in front of me, I had to go and take them.

There are so many planets in the sky. Each one moves along its own orbit. Some move more slowly, some more quickly. Some travel around the sun faster, while others take their time. Yet they all live in perfect order within the solar system.

Maybe being late, no matter how late, is the beginning of reaching Saturn.

Big Love, Berna

Life's better on Saturn
Got to break this pattern
Of floating away

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What Remained Hanging in the Sky

Make a wish.

The little girl has never liked birthdays. On her birthdays, she blows out a cake with no candles. She lifts her wide eyes and waits for the fireflies hidden in the dark. A great branch lashes against the window. The darkness multiplies, clustered like a flaking anthill. She eats the cake. She has to smile as though shards of broken glass were piercing her face. Her body is coated in foul-smelling wax. She is buried among the other plastic dolls.

Do you dare play this game?

That was what the cold, unfriendly message on my phone said. I didn't know courage was something people could simply ask for, like sugar. Messages had begun appearing out of nowhere on the app from unknown numbers with Asian country codes. That’s what people were saying. I deleted the message. Locked my screen. Feeling the grimy warmth of my phone lingering against my hand, I slipped it into my pocket and kept walking.

Do you have the courage? I lifted my head toward the sky as it faded from blue to violet, then into a deeper blue. I wasn't someone who had been given handfuls of courage to gather into the folds of my skirt. But I wished for courage all my life. At every moment that was right for making a wish. Just enough to take that first step into the crowd while crossing the street. Don’t you have courage? As the navy-blue sky cast everything into shadow, the pedestrian light flowed red, painting the streets like sand.

One tick. A second tick. I immediately pulled out the phone that had grown warm beneath my hand, sticky as chewing gum. New notification bubbles fluttered before me like the spotless sheets of ghosts. Pursing my lips, I let out a warm breath through my nose. The same number. I watched the crooked, crossing footsteps of the people passing by. As my impatient fingers walked across the message, the bubbles opened. Below them was a photograph of a cake, and the location of a bakery.

Evening. The voices lingering in the air whispered their stories down from the sky. The dim, trembling glow of a carefully placed candle swelled, then faded. Arms and legs, arranged with perfect order, flailed about. The fresh evening chill spilled my hair across my face and tickled my skin. The red velvet curtain drew open. At the edge of the last light, the bakery glowed. I looked from my phone to the lone cake standing at the very front of the display window. I went inside and asked them to place it inside its castle.

As I walked on with the cumbersome box brushing against my leg, my phone rang from inside my pocket. I stopped in the cool wind stretched taut across my face like a wire and closed my eyes. This much insistence was a bad idea. Hadn’t people been taught not to bother someone they didn’t know over the phone? Even so, my fingers got there before I did, lifting the phone to my face. A location. Just ten kilometers ahead. I looked toward where the wind was pointing. A light drifted down past the stars. Then another took its place. I tilted my head back. I looked at the star in the sky, and at the falling star.

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The little girl never sees shooting stars. “Look, a shooting star,” the people around her say. “Make a wish.” But she never sees one. Were there really any stars meant to fall from the sky? “Then I can’t see them,” she says. Nothing is falling. She keeps looking at the stars for a long time. Every one of them is a star still hanging above its home. They brush against her transparent face, as though there were no air between them.

As I placed one foot after the other, the air above the pavement lifted like a giant fan. I walked a little farther, and the flowers along the road lifted with them. Before me, a great wheel turned, its seats flying from the edges like the crystals of a chandelier. An amusement park. I walked toward the entrance. The ticket booth was empty. Inside was darkness. I circled it once and looked up at the sky. The moon, lighting the darkening road, tangled itself among the leathery darkness of the trees, among their branches. Ancient trees, weaving their own black lace.

Come in.

I lowered my phone. I climbed over the ticket gate and walked on. Only the Ferris wheel and the moon lit the way. Everything around me carried the mystery of a gift being saved for later. Should I wish to unwrap it, or leave it unopened? I walked on, stealing glances over my shoulder, as though someone in the dark were watching me through blinking eyes.

I looked into the eyes of the sculptural, stuffed horses I passed. They were hard, yet there was a gaze beneath it all, one that quietly saw you. Then it began to smile. It walked. It ran. I looked at the horse turning in the lights, then closed my eyes and looked at the stars forming beneath my eyelids. I took out my phone.

Keep walking until it tells you to stop.

That was too much. I stepped backward and looked at the horses from a distance. Don’t stop.

The little girl never rides the Ferris wheel. Too high. Then back down. Then high again. She doesn’t want to ride it alone. There are many things you can do alone. Around her, people stood hand in hand, forming a circle. “Yes, there are,” they said. Doing some things alone is wonderful. Not the Ferris wheel. The shadow of someone leaning over you was greater than the Ferris wheel itself. Shadows were warm capes meant to be draped over your shoulders.

I rubbed the sole of my shoe back and forth against the ground. I narrowed my eyes and looked up at the top. Quietly, I drew a breath. I wrapped my arms around my shoulders and hung there for a few seconds. Do you have courage? Once I took the first step, the rest followed. I kept walking without stopping. Until I reached the haunted house. I leaned my head forward and stepped inside. I walked on, with nothing beneath my feet. Until the whole body of a corpse with its bones laid bare began to glow.

Surprise!

My eyes flew open like a rabbit caught in headlights. My hand pressed against my heart, catching the sparks spreading through it in widening circles. There was a weight leaving my body. When I looked down, I saw the castle inside the box. It was lifted, opened, a candle was placed on it, and it was held out before me. I looked at the faces gathering around me. I knew them. There weren’t many, but they knew me too. One familiar face was worth every unfamiliar star.

Happy Birthday! Come on, blow out the candles. I rested my hands on my knees and let my hair weave a net around me. Every laugh, every sorrow, every fit of hysteria, every joy caught in it, and I fastened them to its threads. I straightened up. Leaning toward the candles glowing before me, amid fluttering hands, my lips blew out the candles. We've rented out the amusement park for you. Choose your own gift.

The horse spun, shimmering with joy, and the Ferris wheel screamed. Colored lights burned behind my eyes. Our shadows stepped one after the other, overlapping as they moved. At the shooting gallery we passed, dolls hung all across the wall. Our shadows came to rest upon them. With the rifle placed into my hands, I took aim at the doll in the middle, the one with the large eyes, veiled lashes, and a smile glued into place. Its skirt flew wide open, and it fell to the ground laughing. I looked around me and grinned. I walked to the wall and gathered the doll into my arms. I hugged it. This is the gift I want.

We watched the Ferris wheel rise, one step at a time. We climbed into the first carriage that came down. Then we rose. It was like taking the first great step of your life. The brave were always the first to live life. That's what they always said, didn't they? As my hair brushed against my face, I wondered if there had ever been anything in all the life I had lived that felt this real, that made me feel this alive. At the very top, the carriage came to a stop. Holding my gift, with the warmth of a shoulder resting against mine, I stayed there, watching the darkness.

I had never seen daybreak. A sky that thinned the night and deepened the morning. Suddenly there it was before us, like an unexpected guest someone had been waiting for. A moment when a rare shade of blue, one belonging only to itself, could be found. The Ferris wheel dissolved into the air like a glass balloon growing larger with every breath blown into it. We were the stars left hanging in the sky.

I wished to become the most beautiful shade of blue the sky could wear.

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An essay on saying goodbye to your first love, to moments, and to the memories that stay long after they are gone.

GOODBYE, MY LOVE

When you thought it would never end, your heart knew.

I raise my hand and wave it in the air. My arm tightens where gravity feels strongest. Would it end? I let out every breath like a child afraid of staying underwater. It had to. My hand is still suspended in the air. It moves like an arrow, as though it were incapable of missing the target before it.

First love was a bone fused into your body, one that grew alongside you. It belonged only to the two of you. Subject only to a single time that slipped past every other. That was enough. Whenever your hearts fell into alignment, you would be there.

By the time I got off the bus, I was about fifteen minutes late. I ran toward Platform eleven, where she was waiting with a gray suitcase in her hand. The threads of dust I had stirred into the air seemed to reach her; she turned to look at me. It felt the same. She greeted me with a warm smile, her lips gently pressed together as though it were something released in limited quantities. "Don't worry," she said. "I just got here too." Standing in front of her, there was only one place I could fix my eyes: her face. But my heart was being picked apart by a bird of prey, forcing my eyes toward the other platforms.

“I’m not someone you’ll toss aside once you’re done with me.” Those were the last words she ever said to me. The version of herself that could never become part of my life couldn’t bear the people who eventually would. She felt like peeling paint, the old layer scraped away and painted over with a new one. Could I scrape her away too? I wanted to catch those fragments of words circling around me and hurl them away. I couldn’t bring back the past. I couldn’t bring us back. “Yes,” she said. “Live with this pain.”

I couldn’t make out her face through the veil of her windblown hair. She stood staring straight ahead, as though she could summon the bus just by waiting for it. As though she would board it, tuck away every mile she left behind into her bag, and disappear. With every passing second, my heart saw, thought, and breathed. The wind blew hard. Even so, she would glance back at me now and then, squinting through it. My directionless gaze drifted toward hers for a moment.

Us. The melody of a song. The chance to find the same feeling in the chorus each time it returned. When she turned her head, the scent of her hair lingered beneath my nose like an orange tree. I breathed in the last blossom of spring.

“I’m leaving.” A message made up of a single word. I stared at the ridges and curves of it for a while.

Leaving. A void.

My sense of time disappeared. My sense of space scattered. The strange thing was that there was still the emptiness of a half-finished heart. Thoughts you never imagine having. One day, they would leave you breathless.

The red intercity bus pulled into the platform. The passengers who stepped off ran toward the people waiting for them. Amid voices saying, “I missed you so much,” we stood facing straight ahead. It felt as though we were standing by the side of a road, with the wind wandering between us. A moment in which we could hear nothing but our own breathing, and even without looking, could reach the presence of the other. My hands stirred. After a moment of hesitation, I took the hand beside me. I searched the lines of her palm for the last words left behind.

Three lines. Short, long, then short again. I traced them. Back and forth.

The lines in your palm were my first piece of writing. The words I deciphered became my vocabulary. There was no need for anything more. You would recognize a heart pulling away. The silence you had been taught. No matter how many words you laid on top of it, the first alphabet you ever learned was your mother tongue.

I pressed lightly into her palm before letting go of her hand. There was nothing left on the face that turned back toward me. In a silent exchange through our eyes, we bartered the past. She blinked at me, then reached for the suitcase beside her. She had already started up the bus steps when she turned back, as though she had forgotten something. She raised her hand. I raised mine and curled my lips into a smile. There was no response. Yet her eyes remained fixed, reaching forward, then drawing back again.

Saying goodbye to her was like digging up the grave of an ant I had buried as a child.

With the fogged breath against the window, she said goodbye. I said goodbye. I watched the red mass tremble in my eyes as it drifted away. I stood where I was, looking around me as though the air pressure had suddenly dropped. A breath kept rising inside me. But it would crush my throat on its way out.

As I walked along the pavement, my steps wandered, slanting to the right, straight to the left. The ground tilted beneath me. The wall beneath my hand was cold. Today was cold. A cold that gnawed at me from within. I folded my arms across my chest, rubbing one against the other. I kept walking. Until I couldn’t.

A sob escaped my mouth. I tried to hold it back, but another slipped free. Before I could understand what was happening, tears burst from my eyes. I reached for the wall again. I gripped it. Tighter with every sob. My breathing quickened. One tear after another slipped from my lashes. I clutched my heart. I held onto the wall even more tightly. Slowly, I let my breath out. The rise and fall of my chest began to slow. I swallowed. Drew in one deep breath. Wiped my eyes with my sleeve. And kept walking.

Maybe, someday, it would heal.

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Dear gentle reader,

We’re in a season that’s warm enough to wander through, humid enough to sit in, and generous enough to give us endless things to talk about. As the sun quivers above us like an excited eyelid, we’ll stretch our hours of idleness until sunset, letting the hours drift by with a book in one hand. If we’re lucky, we’ll savor the laughter and the cool summer evenings that linger long after the sun has gone down.

Wait. This isn’t a Bridgerton world. This world has wicked wolves, monsters, and ghosts, too. This is the world of fears.

Fear.

When fear sets an ambush for my mind, the sky loses its color. My skin grows cold. My heart swells. I try to swallow it, but it tears at my throat and churns my stomach. It seeps into my pores; it settles there. We become one body.

Sometimes, you wake up afraid of simply opening your eyes. Or of never opening them again. Sometimes, you’re afraid of what you have, and of what you’ll never have. I’ve realized that once something I long for finally becomes mine, I rarely feel excitement for very long. Because almost immediately, the fear of losing it settles over everything, and suddenly, it becomes the villain of the story. I think, if I had to name one of my greatest flaws, this would be one of them.

Sometimes, the things I’m afraid of keep me awake. When that happens, I force myself to open my eyes and think about that fear. I clear a space in my mind for it alone, then slowly, almost stealthily, I try to trace it back to its source. It grows, spreading until it fills every corner of my mind. Then, all at once, it shrinks and disappears. I’m left staring at the ceiling with nothing but an empty mind.

So, can I ever lead it out of the dark forest?

Other times, our fears aren’t as big as we think they are. They hide in the smallest details: inside a mirror, on a wardrobe door, or in a piece of laundry left on the floor. They are shadows that grow over us through the ordinary moments and little games of our everyday lives. I want to walk into the forest, follow that little shadow, and hunt the wolf.

So, which little fears will I be following into the forest?

Everyone has three great fears they can name honestly:

They’re the fears you assume you’re afraid of, the ones you’ve convinced yourself are your fears. The kind that come up among friends, when one topic leads to another during an easy conversation. They’re simple. Plain. They’re not frightening. They simply become something to joke about, something people dismiss as an innocent thought.

When I think about my first fear, my mind always goes back to the journeys I’ve taken. I remember gripping the car door handle every time we hit a bump. The sun keeps falling on me as if I were the only one in its path. Yet, somewhere in the middle of it all, I suddenly pull my hand away from the door. The moment I look at it, I picture it tearing off and flying away. Was it because I watched too many thrillers? I can never stop myself from wondering what I would do if it happened. My mind immediately begins drawing up different scenarios, along with a list of everything I shouldn’t do.

So what is it that turns a thought like this into fear? Dying? I don’t think so. No one dies because a car door comes off. Then look at the sun a little longer. Pull that bright ring a little closer to yourself. What’s really there?

The fear of causing something bad to happen. The fear of drawing every misfortune toward myself.

When I think about my second fear, I go back to my childhood. I’m holding my mother’s hand. The escalator is right in front of us, and she doesn’t want to get on. When she finally does, she squeezes my hand and tells me to be careful. Don’t move.

The first thing I always look at in a shopping mall is the escalator. The automatic steps, going down, coming up. I pretend to look at the sale signs to my right, while quietly fussing over where to place my feet on the escalator. Every toe has to land exactly where it should. Take a breath. Then step onto the next moving stair. It was simple.

The top is nothing more than the same concrete building seen from below, yet little by little, it begins to offer a different view, like a Ferris wheel. Now I have to get off. What if I miss my step? What if my feet get caught in the mechanism, going back and forth, back and forth? No. Stop. You can do this. One last step onto solid ground. I’m safe. With my eyes drifting across the shop windows, I follow my own heavy, unbending reflection. So what was this fear really about?

The fear of becoming incapable. Of no longer being able to do the simplest things right.

My third fear is a little more specific. More personal. Maybe it should have been something I kept to myself. I love those two-minute trips to the grocery store. Especially wandering through the aisles one by one. Sometimes I buy only what I need and leave. Other times, I wander through the towering shelves with the feeling that I’m about to discover something.

The snacks I suddenly start craving. I always loved eating those during family visits. They carried memories. But what if they seem like something only old people eat? What if no one else would ever choose them? A mug from the new arrivals shelf. Completely my kind of thing. But has anyone else ever bought one? If I buy something no one else has noticed, something no one has ever picked up, will I end up drawing attention to myself? I took out my wallet and slowly followed the line in front of me.

The fear of being judged. The fear of becoming the one weed that doesn't belong.

If you had to give them names, what would your three greatest fears be?

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These were the habits of the fears I’d lived with for years, only recently recognizing them. The forest had opened up, the wolf had been driven away. Time to wipe my forehead and flick away the tiny drops of sweat.

And yet, even a film I watched, something I saw, or a song I heard could still plant a fear inside me. Some feelings grow deeper and deeper, then trail behind me like a tame ghost.

The Japanese literature marathon I started shows no sign of slowing down. This year, I finally met the famous Convenience Store Woman. Knowing that Keiko's years working as a convenience store clerk were inspired by Sayaka Murata's own experience behind the register made the story feel even closer to me.

From the very first page, my skin prickled. She was really there, and yet she wore a shell. It was like handing someone a sweater that had never belonged to them; like asking them to wear stolen property. And yet, all she really had was her own white-glass aquarium. She loved the person she became inside it, and the reflection that looked back at her through its glass. Wasn't that enough? I felt my first fear seeping out of that aquarium. The fear of not being allowed to be myself.

The way she played with the relentless questions about marriage, the prejudices people carried toward a middle-aged, unmarried convenience store worker, and all their barbed remarks was nothing short of brilliant. It was absurdly entertaining. At the same time, I found myself realizing that the worries and fears I thought I felt for her were lashing at the ghost of my own fears. If that society existed everywhere, would it change me too?

By the time I finished the novel, what stayed with me wasn’t the fear of prejudice anymore, but the fears that would one day be imposed on my freedom.

I stumbled upon a film that had been sitting on my watchlist for a long time: What the Day Owes the Night. Now, I'm telling you this with swollen eyes. Later, I learned it was adapted from a novel by Yasmina Khadra. It follows the difficult childhood and identity conflict of a young Algerian Arab; along with the sorrow of never being able to reunite with the woman he loves.

As the breeze from the Algerian coast brushed against my face, I found myself standing in its landscape, my arms wide open. Then, all at once, I had to turn back: Someone had decided that a man would never be allowed to spend his life with the only woman he had ever loved. And he follows that decision with such unwavering resolve, even while the woman he loves is begging him to let her love him. Would you really allow yourself to be kept from the person you love, when they were still within your reach? I found myself asking that question again and again.

“A man who lets the love of his life slip away is left alone with his regrets, and all the sighs in the world will never quiet his soul”. It’s a line from the novel and the moment I read it, it broke my heart. What more could have been said?

When the film ended, there was only one thing beating in my heart: The fear of letting true love slip through my hands, and the fear of all the precious years that could have been lived, but were forever lost.

There’s a song that came out a few months ago and has stayed with me ever since. Every now and then, I like letting it play over and over in my mind, humming along to it. It’s the opening track from Gracie Abrams’ latest album, “Hit the Wall.” I just hit the wall.

I'm a crack in the pavement, I'm a slip knot.

From the very first line, it tied my throat into a knot. Feeling, so directly, that quiet sense of being a flawed piece was deeply unsettling. The voice in the song belongs to someone wrestling with their own mind, thrashing through emotional instability. They sing as someone trying to heal from their illness, yet never quite able to heal themselves. It felt as though I were listening to a story I had always known. As though this story existed everywhere, and every word was quietly finding its place inside me. “I’m not a problem you can solve.” That was the line that stayed with me the most. Had I been nothing more than an emotional burden in some people’s lives? There's no need to fix me. This is simply me, the song seems to say. One day, you'll have to understand that. “And then you’ll lose me to the crowd.”

Quietly, emotional burdens began settling onto my shoulders: The fear of being left alone inside silence. The fear of not knowing where to begin unraveling a knot that needs to come undone.

Fears. I see their traces on the wall. I recognize them. I give them names, then turn my head. Behind them, a dark face appears. A monster. A wolf with sharp teeth. I can make it home safely.

I’m a sunset person. I know that every sky holds a thousand different sunsets, each with its own colors. I want to see every single one of them.

You owe me every sunset.

With much love to my dear reader,

Berna

༺☆༻

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HIDE-AND-SEEK

I don’t know exactly what this feeling is...

I opened my eyes to the sound of my head hitting the window. After a few minutes of rabbit sleep, I realized we were passing through a forest. The hazy warmth of the sun filtering through my eyelashes burned against my face. Beyond the patch of glass my forehead had fogged, the tops of the pine trees disappeared beneath dark clouds. I had never imagined such a deep blue could shine so brightly.

Of course, for the festival, I had chosen the cheapest and longest way; the hot, low-ceilinged town bus. With its swaying seats, its patience in waiting for passengers at every stop. My arms folded, I would move the bag beside me to make room for the passengers getting on. I watched the bus fill absentmindedly, then put my bag back in its place. From somewhere came voices, very close and yet very far away; festival songs, people speaking in low voices. I leaned my head against the window: I was ready to lose myself inside the dark forest.

I liked getting lost. Walking somewhere without anyone knowing, lingering. Feeling, every time I looked up, that they were looking for me, and taking a cold joy in it. I would let myself experience all the excitement of that moment, all its mystery, without rushing. When I came back, they would ask where I had been, a few heads would shake without much concern. A moment later, life had already become something more than that.

I watched the darkness erase the rubber pores in the ceiling. As the bus turned into the gas station, I placed my bag on my swaying knee. When I got off, the cool, pleasant air touched my hair. I stood staring into the depth of the sky closing over us like a sheet of paper covered in writing. It was like night. Far away, the sun’s veiled brightness lingered. As if it were waiting to be rescued from the grip of a sorrowful abandonment. In the restroom, I washed my hands and wiped the back of my neck with the dampness that remained. Looking at the dark ring in my eyes in the mirror, I dried my hands.

Navy blue, veiled in dark twilight shadows. By the time I reached the middle of the market, it had already begun to rain. There was no bus left, no passengers either. Had they not seen me? Listening to the automatic doors sliding open and shut, I slowly ground my teeth together. With every opening of the doors, heavy raindrops skipped inside. Beyond them, a dirty yellow glow spread across the distance. It hovered above the pine trees. Beneath it, in the forest below, a walking path caught my eye, gleaming as though lit by an enchanted mirror. I turned around; everyone was talking among themselves, drifting off in different directions. I opened my phone and learned that the path led to a nearby village, one neighboring the town I was headed for. I looked at the falling rain, then at the light. Tightening my grip on my bag’s strap, I stepped outside.

Summer rain. It was a careless, mischievous child. There was no knowing where it would play, or for how long. I walked to the intermittent wail of passing cars. The pine trees stood stood out against the dark gray sky, drawn in deep navy ink. Then, not too far away, came a sound like a hiss. A shiver trembled at the back of my neck and spread through my body. I looked at the wet earth, already beginning to turn to mud, at the white drops striking the ground like needles stitching the soil. With a rapid heartbeat, I took one step after another. With the rain striking my face, I ran without faltering.

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I kept running, staring at the damp, dark tree trunks. Once more. From a sound I couldn’t place, coming too close to guess, I suddenly turned fully behind me. Four or five bicycles sped past me in a row. Muddy water flicked from their wheels onto my shoes. With a wheezing rising from my chest, I looked up at the sky and saw light breaking through the dark gray clouds. I pressed myself against the base of the pine beside me and lowered my head. Swallowing, I looked at the wood shavings on the ground, at the short grass among the tangled shrubs. Until I began walking again.

I loved playing hide-and-seek. Especially in the blue of the night, looking up at the sky while counting. More than anything, I loved hiding somewhere no one would think to look. A secluded place to crawl into, a tree hidden deep enough to disappear beneath. Alone, with my back turned, I would listen to the echoing voices. Were they getting closer? At last, I would hear my name, and a few minutes later, their voices would echo among themselves. Then, all at once, I would spring from my hiding place and run for my goal. Behind me, they had only just opened their eyes; they watched me, unable to catch me.

The glow ahead had become like a nightlight someone had forgotten to switch off in the daytime. The rain had already stopped. The scent rising from the earth beneath my slow steps reminded me of the smell that comes with something newly bought, of the stained pages of an old book. Between the pines, fresh steam rising from the warm, well-traveled path brushed against my skin with a pleasant shiver. Before long, I entered the forest. The pines began to thin, giving way to a path lined with low shrubs.

A gravel road stretched out before me, dry and dusty. It was so dry, so loud beneath my feet, that I found myself wanting to return to the forest. Above, the sun scattered crystal-like light through the last of the mysterious clouds. I left the gravel road and followed a strip of asphalt downhill. The moment the pale blue water caught the yellow light behind it, my eyes fell shut. Who would have thought I would find a beach here? Shielding my eyes with one hand as I walked along the dirt road, I looked over the small family-run restaurants. I made my way toward one with a coffee cup painted above its entrance.

Safe. The burning of your cheeks, the wetness of your hands. A heartbeat like thunder. Sometimes, when I suddenly ran into someone inside the house, I would startle. I took an indescribable pleasure from that feeling too. Here I was. And you had appeared before me at the most ordinary moment imaginable.

A quiet sea stretched out before the wall of interwoven stone. It was a small inlet, set apart from the open sea. I walked over to the seating area outside the restaurant, in front of the wall As soon as I sat down, I realized the sun had begun to sink to the level of my eyes. Who had stirred the steam rising from inside a jar and thrown me here? For a while, I lost myself in the sunlight that forgot not a single drop of water. Looking toward the shore, I noticed someone swimming breaststroke beneath the surface. Or perhaps it was a jellyfish. Though, judging by the hair drifting on the water, I suppose it couldn’t have been.

I turned my head and looked at the mostly empty tables. The waiter was having a heated conversation with the elderly men beside me: They kept asking one another where they were from, and I found myself listening to the surprisingly deep conversation that followed. I looked at the waiter, and when I saw that he still hadn’t lifted his head, I pulled out my chair and climbed down from the stone barrier. I looked at the hair floating on the sea; every movement drifted in harmony, as though it were part of the water itself.

One by one, the grains of sand shimmered without losing their order. I wanted to plunge my hand into them and catch as many as I could. The more I held, the more they poured through my fingers, like a storm rising from below. I wanted to hold on to more; more slipped away. I opened my hands and let the rest fall. Among the moss clinging to the stones, I noticed a frog. I watched its throat swell with every breath, just like a piece of gum you cannot resist popping.

As I was turning back, I heard you say it was poisonous. I noticed the long, steady shadow falling over me. When I turned my head, I saw you brush the hair away from your face, revealing your clean-lined features. You were standing before me; for a while, looking straight into my eyes, you said it could kill with nothing more than a touch. I kept shaking my hand and wiped it on my clothes. So kissing was forbidden. Through the shadow of your hair, I saw your smile. It was as light as a feather. You said your name. I said mine. You raised your hand. I raised mine.

You put a towel on the chair across from me and sat down. I touched my bag and hesitated at the table where I had been sitting. Did you know where I had been? You raised your eyebrows with quiet seriousness, as if to say, if you don’t mind. The innocent, childlike expression in your eyes was answered by my smile. I sat across from you and cupped my warm cheeks in my hands. You asked what I was doing here and waited. Instead of answering, I looked back at the road I had come from: “Long story,” I said. Hearing my reply, you nodded and looked toward the sun. I lowered my hands into my lap. I noticed your hair wasn’t that long. It was a lovely length. You turned to the waiter and ordered two coffees.

As I drew in the foam of my coffee, I closed my eyes at its bitterness. The smile spreading across your face was gentle, almost caressing; you wanted to hear my story. I watched you set your coffee down, watched the muscles in your face shift. What was my story, anyway? You listened quietly, with interest. You told me you could drop me off wherever I was going, if I wanted. I watched the bright ring in your eyes and realized the air inside me was no longer enough. We talked until the sky above us turned orange, then deep red. While the light behind you dazzled my eyes, I watched the shifting outline of your figure. You weren’t all that close to me, but the way your eyes looked straight into mine made it feel as though you were.

You closed your eyes and turned your face toward the sun. When I nodded, you did too. The sound of the waves began to fade, the distance between their coming and going to shrink, until it disappeared. At the moment the sun met the sea, there was only the sound of held breaths. You opened your eyes. You turned your head toward me; your gaze was still where it had been. I saw you smile. I smiled. When I turned my eyes away, whatever it was I had just witnessed, I stayed fixed on that point, enchanted, eyes full. We kept sitting there in the orange of the setting sun.

However long it would last, I wished it would last.

༺☆༻

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CHICKEN BROTH SOUP

The recipe for a Friday evening: a starry night, cool air, hide-and-seek played after sunset, and a holiday at grandmother’s house with no knowing when we would return.

When I think of Friday evenings, I think of childhood; of holidays we left for in the evening and Sunday mornings spent returning home. Somehow, the feeling carved itself so deeply into my mind that I remember Fridays almost like a holiday of their own.

Now, when I look at it, Friday evening feels like the moment when everything is finished; when the sun sets in its most assertive hue, as if carrying a promise. It is the hour when everyone slowly retreats into their homes one by one, hurrying back with bags in hand. Friday evenings are also for discovering newly released songs. Or a new film or series added to the library. Friday is my Monday for new discoveries; my Saturday for resting.

That is how Friday somehow became my favorite day. I call it my own personal holiday and spoil myself by making the most comforting meal for myself. I especially love chicken broth soup; as a child, the steam warming my face would remind me of long winter holidays. Afterwards, I lean back and watch the people of Friday evening, as if an orchestra were playing a concerto just for me. I button myself up, look into the bright, gleaming eyes of Friday evening, into its joy-spilling laughter, and greet it.

For the chicken soup:
(attention: the exact same measurements used in this recipe will be given)

1 chicken thigh

1 chicken breast

1 large onion

2 carrots (one of them will always be eaten directly as natural retinol)

1 whole celery root

1 generous tablespoon of butter

1 regular tablespoon of flour

1 bowl of vermicelli

(oil, salt, and spices in this recipe will, as always, be measured by eye)

Sniffling, I watch the water running from the tap I just turned on. First thing: turn on the water. They say it is the most effective way to chop onions. Besides, I do not want any onion tears mixing into the food. The celery stalk I had leaned against the olive oil bottle on the counter toppled over. I fixed it, then washed my hands first. I look at the chicken boiling on the large burner of the stove. Bringing my face closer to the pot, I fanned the smell toward myself with my hand and, closing my eyes, judged the umami rising from it. The scent of black pepper and parsley stems was already inviting the inside of my mouth into a good meal.

Rubbing my hands together, I turned around and reached for my phone. I skipped to the next song in my playlist (playlist name, how to became a dua lingo?). The song that should be listened to at this stage: Bad Bunny – NUEVAYoL. Playing my own tiny drums, I watched the orange of the sunset spill into the kitchen through the window.

I started by pouring enough olive oil into the pot to wet the bottom. When the first warmth rose against my hand, I added the onion I had chopped for piyaz. Soon, it began lifting from the corners, swaying its belly to lively reggaeton. I stirred it and rolled in the carrots sliced into rings. The sunset was inside the pot now.

The sweet pores of the onion touching the bottom of the pan slowly began wrapping themselves around the carrots. The carrots deepened in color, as though they had absorbed all the oil in the pot. I brought the matchstick-cut celery stalks waiting on the board into the pot as well. Green, orange, and white… it looked like a hanging garden painted in pastels. My mother’s vines; the sun above, with clouds.

Whenever I got sick, I would immediately ask my mother if she could make me soup. She would rush to make it warm right away; the smell of the soup would straighten my back, and with its warmth, take the fire from my throat. The effect of that soup would show itself within a day. My mother made this soup with tomatoes and tomato paste. Especially with fresh chicken broth, or from the extra she had frozen away in containers. She would squeeze plenty of lemon over it too, taking away the heaviness of the broth. Slightly sour, the kind of taste that makes your mouth water.

As the heads of each vegetable, facing in different directions, began to glisten, I added a slice of butter so they could tan properly. The moment it touched the pan, it sizzled as if to say, all that was missing was me. I added a spoonful of flour too and stirred until it found its thickness. This was one of the little tricks I had taken from my mother’s recipe. For soups that cling a little more, I, too, found myself returning to my mother’s way. Then, using the small bowl, I added a bowl of vermicelli.

I took the chicken out of the water and placed it on the board. I strained the broth and set aside as much as I needed. I usually do half chicken broth, half tap water. All chicken broth feels too heavy to me. Slowly, I let the crackling sounds of the vegetables and vermicelli disappear beneath the water. From below, I must have looked like a giant. The oil from the chicken broth wrapped around the vegetables and rose to the surface in rings. Those oils seemed to pull it inward, as though vacuum-sealing it.

At wedding meals, it was tradition to make this soup thinner and oilier. Large pieces of chicken would be added from the beginning and cooked that way. The broth and oil blended into one another more easily, and the flavor turned richer because of it. As a child, the soup cooking in those cauldrons, inside that lake of oil, never really stirred my appetite. My throat would burn from the very first spoonful, and my hand would immediately reach for water. The rice they added would fall apart too quickly, and I could never quite understand what it was I was eating.

I watched the bubbling surface pop one small bubble at a time. Smacking my lips, I tasted it while it was still hot, just from the tip of the spoon. The real secret of this meal is taking a spoonful of the broth like this. There is nothing better than that tongue-burning taste while the steam still rises from it. (Between us, this is exactly how I always tasted my mother’s soups too.) I cut the now-cooled chicken thigh and breast into tiny pieces with a knife. I pulled the rest apart into strands with my hands. The vermicelli had swollen and drifted across the surface of the broth like thin strips of dough. While it still had some bite to it, I let the shredded chicken fall over the top.

The meat, the sharp-edged vegetables, the shining yellow oils, the vermicelli… all of them kept changing places inside the broth, like something rearranged by a current of air. I turned off the heat beneath the soup. I went into the other room and browsed through my computer for a while. A good meal deserved a good background; you had to choose something you could eat with your eyes closed to, something that would also keep you pleasant company. At this stage, reality shows and K-dramas are recommended.

Locking my hands behind my head, I got up from my seat. I placed a slice of bread beside a deep bowl and slowly filled it with soup using the ladle. I sat down at the table, dipped in my spoon, and pressed play. I felt the warm passage of a vermicelli strand caught on a piece of meat, resting over carrot and celery, slide down into my stomach. When an involuntary little oh escaped my mouth, it meant the recipe had worked. Looking at the crowd and lights outside the window, I let the soup dampen my face.

Come now, wouldn’t everyone take a bowl of chicken broth soup?

༺☆༻

A short story on the quiet and small rebellion of Being cast aside.

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FIRE IN MY EYES

The splintered ends of the floorboards, frayed and bristling, were staring back at me. I had never seen my own handiwork look this harsh and full of character. As I swung my foot back and forth like a cradle, I almost let a small exclamation slip from my lips when I realized I was stepping on a creaking board. I kept my gaze fixed as low as I could.

From his voice, it was clear that the one standing in front of them was the “big man.” It was not difficult to guess from the shapeless form of the large shadow leaning over them. The shrill ring of his voice, rising now and then, was a sign of how angry he was, and how ready he was to explode at any moment. There was hardly any need to even notice the small man who never left his side. With his tiny, trembling shadow, he occasionally let out a weak, unpleasant sound, like a cough. Whenever he grew bored, he would always moan so pitifully like that. Just like our old Wolf.

In the house we stayed in, there were me, my little one, Berry, and my mother. We moved on the tips of our toes, our heads always lowered, living together without ever letting the “big men” sense the slightest stir. We would only go up to the upstairs room after the kitchen work was done and the cuckoo bird had sounded. I hated that bird. Once, I would have thrown the glass in my hand if little Berry hadn’t warned me. We all stayed in the same room. On some nights, my mother would go up to the attic. Her old shoes gave her away -if they could even be called shoes, they were more like wooden soles wrapped in cloth. Only I ever heard them.

I was responsible for the housework. Clean the floors, they would say, change the sheets, do the laundry… everything passed through my quick fingers that knew their work. Berry, meanwhile, followed behind me, copying whatever I did. Outside of work hours, she never let go of the rag doll I had given her. I had loved that doll dearly. It had been the only thing I truly owned in this life. I could never bear to part with it; I had even given it some of my own clothes. My mother had handed it to me first -she never said where she had found it. But once I grew older and was sent off to work, I left it in Berry’s care.

We only went outside to visit our dear neighbor, Ruth. Whenever our barren hens stopped laying eggs or our cow gave no milk, we would run to her. Once, she gave us a candle. I had run quietly back home to show it to my little Berry. Look, this is a candle, I told her, I’m going to place it on the sweet bread I saved for you. Her large, innocent eyes simply stayed fixed on the candle. I sat by the fire and lit it with great care. Then I lifted it and placed it on top of the tiny piece. The fire burning in her eyes kept growing, until at last it wavered, no longer clearly visible.

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To avoid stepping on and crushing the splinter of the floorboard, I hooked one foot around the other. The light coming in through the door was making the middle of the floor gleam, right over my lowered gaze. In that brightness, a dark spot caught my eye, like a mole. I don’t like moles, in that regard, our Ruth really disgusted me. Pursing my lips, I looked closer at it and realized it was a tadpole. Who had come inside with such dirty feet? It must have been those ugly shoes of the little man -no one even knew where he got them from.

Pointed shoes, square shoes, or open-toe clogs. I hated the open ones. Especially those thin, crooked, dirty big toes sticking out. My favorites were the ones where two letters seemed to curl into each other inside the shoe. Ah, when I saw someone wearing them, I would think I wished there were a way I could touch them. Such beatiful taste! I couldn’t even stand seeing the big man’s sharp, pointed shoes. He wore them so often that the toe part had curled and shriveled, like an old man no one could stand. They also stank terribly; you would run away from him just for the sake of your own dignity. And when he lifted his foot, the poor thing would squeak and groan angrily, as if screaming. God forbid.

I used to wonder about the letters I saw, but there was no clever soul to ask. If the little man were there, he would play with every letter he saw without a second thought. Ah, if I had been in the little man’s place, they would never have listened to him as if he were a person. But thank God, when it was time for work, he would clear off, and I would not have to see that insect in the house. During work hours, what I heard most was the revolting sound of the big man’s shoes. Where he went, where he came back from -I could not even spell my own name, yet this much I knew. Most of the time, he would come crashing down from upstairs and, with a sound worse than little Wolf’s, howl in the kitchen before heading outside. Sometimes the racket came from the outbuilding, sometimes from the barn. Whenever that happened, I would not let little Berry leave my side, and I would spend the whole day beating the laundry with the washing block in my hand.

He took a step forward and stood in front of little Berry. He shouted at her, pressing the full weight of his shadow onto her, telling her not to go into the barn again to secretly feed Wolf. Then he began, as he always did, listing how he had nothing -how there wasn’t even a single bite he could give to anyone. After that, with a sudden heavy motion, I realized a shadow had fallen across Berry’s face. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, and when I opened them, I saw drops falling to the ground. I watched as one drop spread and grew, while one edge of it slowly began to dry.

Last year, I saw Egean, the beautiful girl who lived at the end of the street, crying like that. Oh, those beautiful coffee-brown eyes, lashes like black pepper grains, and the tears falling from them. As I reached out my hand, wanting to catch those tears, they draped a white veil over her head. God forbid, like she was dead. Terrified, I kept looking at that shape from time to time, watching her standing there like a wall. Was she even breathing?

I kept staring at the wooden floor until not a single trace remained. Then I saw the shadow move and noticed it was holding something in its hand. I strained my view a little, watching the object that felt strangely familiar. Suddenly, my head was pulled upward, and I realized it was my rag doll. The doll struggled in the creature’s hand, then suddenly went still. I could only stare at its smiling face as I watched it fly and fall into the fire. Its pink face slowly turned red, swelling like a piece of red candy. The dress I had sewn for it, its hem edged with lace, its body made from pure sheep’s wool, turned pitch black. Like those filthy ravens.

I fixed my eyes deep into the floor. I let every swallow passing through my throat gather thickly in my mouth. I shook my head to keep my eyes from reddening. Then, with an involuntary suddenness, I lifted my head. I looked at that unfamiliar face before me. I looked at the fire burning inside his eyes. That fire kept burning, until he turned his head away.

It was such an inhuman face that I gave thanks for having never truly seen it all this time. I fixed my gaze on its flat, empty eyes. I wanted to burst those strange eyes of his like a rotten egg. There was a darkness filled with a hatred and rage I had never seen before. First, he shrieked, then hissed. When he saw that I kept going, he screeched like a rotten, predatory animal. Then his gaze shifted beside me. I realized that our Berry, too, had followed my example and was staring back at him with her reddened face. And then, beside her, our mother’s grey face.

Before us stood the gleaming eyes of a wicked-hearted wolf. Then, behind him, a forest of little hooded girls appeared. The wolf knew his teeth well, but when the forest grew thick and dense, he shut his mouth. He let out one final howl, then fled back down the mountain to his den.

On the way out, he ripped the door off its hinges. The other followed, running after him. I rushed to the hearth at once and looked at what the fire had left behind, what was close to becoming ash, the remains of scraps of cloth. I reached out my hand and stirred through the embers, as though gathering the shattered pieces of a fallen vase. I caught them one by one in the air before they could hit the ground.

༺☆༻

Most of the time, I live with thousands of thoughts inside my head. I could even say that I feel the idea of “overthinking” the thing so many people experience in every part of my body. There are moments when I feel overwhelmed, unsure of how to cope with this state of mind. As a small way of dealing with so many thoughts, I developed the habit of writing. Through it, I found a way to pour what was inside me into my imagination and create a world I had never discovered before. In this way, the thoughts that arrived as either a burden or a gift slowly calmed down and found a purpose. Sometimes, it even helps you face and accept the deepest version of the thoughts living inside your head.

I have always loved art. Because of this, most of what I wrote and shared naturally remained within a literary space. But over time, I realized that knowing myself only through this side of me did not make up the whole of my thoughts. There were other ways I could place and understand what was going on inside me. By taking a few underlying themes from the things I wrote, I slowly found myself turning toward those subjects. In a way, it became easier to understand who I am and make myself more visible. The people, moments, and things I currently find myself drawn to are helping me uncover the elements that define me. They feel a bit like building a bowl of ramen; the main ingredient is there, but so are the vegetables and sauces chosen alongside it, quietly shaping the whole dish into what it becomes.

So then, what is it that I truly think about?

I started writing by keeping a journal. In the beginning, I discovered how comforting it could be to express my thoughts, even through something simple. But after a while, it slowly moved beyond ordinary journaling. What I wrote began to take on a literary tone, and somewhere along the way, I found myself watching it unfold with admiration. Watching my fingers move across the keyboard, I found myself realizing that literature had always been the main source feeding my thoughts. With the sense of relief that writing brought me, journaling slowly gave way to something more, and I began sitting down to write with real discipline. Somewhere along the way, I found myself inside fiction. I fell in love with the blurry edges of imagination, its associations, and its quiet secrets. Most of the time, spending time there living inside that imagined world, became one of my greatest comforts. That is why I see the time I spend there as my own Alice in Wonderland. Because of this, I often return to Alice to reinforce and make sense of my inner world.

Reading is my number one activity, my favorite life routine, in a way. Simply put: morning, afternoon, evening… I read. I also see books as my greatest textbooks. They offer the practical and tangible side of what I learned while studying literature. Whether in terms of technique or language, the best examples are often already there, living inside their pages. For a long time now, I have been especially drawn to Asian literature. I find myself constantly returning to Japanese literature in particular. There is something about its simplicity, and the way the intensity of ordinary life can suddenly strike you, that deeply moves me. And the unique, simple way of expressing every subject immediately draws me in.

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A few years ago, I discovered Haruki Murakami, and suddenly, my world changed. The spaces woven together with music, a nostalgic sense of time, quiet moments of self-discovery and emotional states in his novels all felt dizzying. His world itself feels confusing, filled with a twisting, aching sense of curiosity, and at the same time extraordinary, like being on a roller coaster you never really want to get off. (I am especially thinking of Sputnik Sweetheart here.) Sometimes, I find myself nodding along in agreement, and other times, feeling as though I am on the verge of tears. The way love exists in his novels, melancholic, yet deeply attached to life, keeps me from putting the pages down. He lays bare both that quiet feeling of love that somehow lets you keep breathing, and the whirlpool of its greatest pain. Whenever I finish one of his books, I find myself feeling strangely lost, not quite knowing what to do next.

Meiko Kawakami and Kazuo Ishiguro are my other favorites. The way Kawakami approaches the naked truths inside her now-classic works feels flawless and complete to me. I often think, half seriously, that I want to be like her when I grow up. And Ishiguro… Never Let Me Go. I find it impossible to shake off the effect his work has on me. The moment I see his name, I can almost feel childhood longing and the world of memories hitting me like a slap across the face, leaving my eyes full of tears. These three are, without question, my own Japanese big three.

This also led me to develop an interest in elements of Asian culture and mythology. I wanted to feel connected to the energy and culture that nourished those worlds. One of the first things I explored was Chinese astrology. Through this, I learned that the year I was born was the Year of the Rabbit. But later, I discovered that beyond this general classification, my actual Chinese zodiac sign is the Tiger. Apparently, the combination of these two is sometimes described as a transitional spirit. I also learned that this year is considered especially lucky for my Chinese zodiac sign. Because of this, I decided to embrace this year as my year, to live it as my own Rabbit Year.

Although my love for Japanese literature is still very much alive, lately I feel completely consumed by the classics. Right now, I am reading Jane Austen’s short story collection Marriage, and I realized how much I had missed the sharpness of her style, her language, and its energy.

I had previously read Pride and Prejudice during my high school years, but looking back, I realized I could barely remember it line by line. Because of this, I feel genuinely excited to pick it up again. It feels like a fairy tale but at the same time, there are mothers trying to marry you off, and large eyed neighboring wolves quietly waiting nearby. I admire the way she looks at English high society and aristocracy through the witty, outspoken voice of a young woman, at times carrying a fierce elegance, and at others, an almost enviable sense of defiance. There is something fearless and unbendable in that temperament. The way themes like pride and prejudice, things we still recognize in modern love, were written with so much intelligence, charm, and almost fairy dust in the past feels like something to envy.

Sometimes, I simply want to have a good cinephile experience. The very first thing I do after finishing a film is open Letterboxd, log it, and give it a rating. It is both entertaining and, admittedly, a little pathetic in a way. The film I finished this weekend, Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness), created exactly that kind of feeling. I can say that it stayed with me. I later learned that it is based on Françoise Sagan’s novel, a work that became a French classic and had previously been adapted before this recent version.

Our young main character, who lost her mother at a young age, shares a very close relationship with her father. The warmth and sincerity of their father-daughter bond was the first thing that kept me completely drawn to the screen. But the arrival of a woman -someone who used to be part of a close trio with her parents in their younger years, and one of their closest friends- slowly begins to create tension in their relationships. The second thing that stayed with me was the cinematography and the camera work. It felt so visually comforting. The warm texture of the Mediterranean scenery reminded me of the warmth of home. And the third was the feeling of summer love blending into the sea. I loved the tenderness of girlhood, first love, and the intimacy of the father-daughter relationship. It felt as though I was quietly witnessing something unfolding at the next table.

The visual atmosphere of the cinematography reminded me of Andrea Serio’s paintings. I had discovered his work while looking for paintings for last week’s piece, and his images, ones that somehow made me feel at home, had quietly stayed with me ever since. His drawing style, made up of lines that almost look as if they were sketched in pencil, carries something deeply familiar. At first glance, the way my eyes wander across them takes me back to the shimmer of childhood. The Mediterranean painter’s color palette and luminous light awakened so many feelings in me; like painting the walls yellow or bringing home a blue hydrangea.

I had taken a long break from YouTube. For a while, I could not find the motivation to sit down and watch anything at all. But recently, I opened the app again and slowly returned to my subscriptions. That was when I realized how much I had missed watching Birta Hlin.

There is something very warm, sincere, and effortlessly cool about the way she lives. I often find myself looking forward to seeing her desire to explore life more deeply, her travels around the world, her recipes, and the small touches she brings to decoration. I love the way she makes life feel fun and optimistic in her own unique way. I also admire her approach to fashion; dressing according to what she truly likes and feels comfortable in, her distinctive style, playful accessories, and the way she turns bags into part of her own little fashion game. Every week, I enjoy seeing Copenhagen through its changing seasons, the atmosphere, the colors, and the quiet liveliness each one brings. (This might also come from the fact that I’ve been watching a lot of Scandinavian crime series.)

Lately, I’ve developed a habit of finding just one song I like and putting it on repeat. Olivia’s new song is one of those. It has had me completely obsessed ever since it came out. It is the first single from her upcoming album, and despite its very long title, it carries such a refreshing and bright feeling. The song holds the intensity and permanence of a young girl falling in love for the first time. From immediately checking their social media to creating endless little scenarios in your mind… to the feeling of a first date that somehow makes your whole spirit want to dance. That very first moment when you believe this feeling might last forever. It feels so fresh and carries so much of that first youthful. At the same time, I deeply love the dramatic and melancholic atmosphere quietly running beneath it. I find myself imagining that I’m living in the Palace of Versailles, dancing freely and getting lost in daydreams.

One night I was bored in bed
And stalked you on the internet
It's feminine intuition
'Cuz I always had a vision of us standing like this.

Big love

Berna

A short story about longing for childhood, memories, and every moment once lived in the past.

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THE HANDS I WANTED TO HOLD

The sun’s small circular halos were on the verge of placing a crown above my head. We were busy climbing upward from the house where we were staying. The olive grove we passed stretched along a line as narrow as a goat path. When I lifted my head, the first arch of the ancient structure came into view. It was the only eye left of what was once known as Tralleis. After years spent constantly fighting for space, remaining upright was a virtue worthy of applause.

Against the backdrop of the city, the structure climbed upward like a giant. Sunlight slipping through its single eye blurred the moment, making its boundaries uncertain. It was as if splinters would lift from the blue of the sky and ancient life would seep through. Stepping where people once lived made me feel as if I were watching a midnight screening of a black-and-white film inside my mind. Filling my lungs with the dusty air, I turned to my sibling, trying to read their mood. Beside me, my sibling said how staggering it felt to stand in a place that had heard the first note of history. I walked, imagining this moment before my eyes. On the way out, we examined what remained of the site and walked across the empty asphalt in slow, wide steps.

Below, the stream flowed with a quiet rush, a place most people did not know. We slowly made our way down and settled into the shaded sitting area. The cypresses, gliding like birds, rustled above my head with a gentle lullaby. If I closed my eyes, I could return to the cypress-filled garden of our grandmother’s house, where our childhood had passed. I could sit in the wooden arbor with the leaves carried by the wind and watch the evening sun. It was like standing in one particular spot, waiting for a phone signal to appear. Last year, the storm knocked down all the cypresses. Afterwards, they cut their remains into firewood.

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The silhouette of my sibling sitting before me seemed to evaporate beneath the sunlight falling from above. I blinked and fixed my gaze on a spot on their shoulders. They had widened considerably and abandoned their former shape. Even if not now, there had once been a time when our shoulders matched. I never once stopped to think that shoulders, growing by rubbing against one another, could turn out differently. At some point, when the numbers no longer added up, my mouth had fallen wide open. As the years passed, it became something that happened without our souls noticing, something we simply lived through as it happened.

I walked down to the stream and dipped my hand into its reflective surface. I could feel the glimmers on the water shining in thousands of mirrored fragments behind my eyes. I lifted a handful of water and splashed it onto my face. When I opened my eyes, his shadow covered me. In the summers, I used to make him walk behind me to shield him from the heat. It seemed the duty of taking shelter in his shadow had passed on to me. Tilting his head away from the sun, he said this year’s heat felt unlike any heat before. I said that, because of global warming, we would miss the old heat even more.

The most beautiful images of our childhood holidays appear in my mind as if in a photo album of every age I have lived. I watch them with half-closed eyes, while sunburn marks linger on their upper corners: I am sitting in the very back of the bus, waiting for the coastline to appear. My favorite moment in life is the merging of blue and white, chasing each other as if in a race, sweeping one another away. I want to open my nostrils wide and fit all the air into my chest. I try to catch the foam of a sudden wave with my hands. I open and close my arms wide, as if passing through a freezing sieve. I lie back in the sea so my lifted gaze can meet the vast halos above. We gather our things, and with a final touch of farewell, we return to an old white bus. I do not want to step inside it, already heated like a turtle roasting under the sun. I look at the ripples of the sea left behind, to take them out again during the year and watch them. A tradition I brought back from the purest layers of my childhood. A feeling that makes me curl up warmly, like a kitten seeking its mother’s lap.

We walked side by side along the road in a quiet, slow-moving air. I was tearing off the heads of the ears of grain that brushed against my hand and rolling them in my hand. Walking ahead of me, my sibling was telling me that people used to come here in search of gold. I nodded, looking at the golden-yellow color of the ear of grain turning in my hand. I watched his joints, wriggling as he moved calmly ahead of me. I turned my head and glanced at the olive trees around me. From one of the branches, the shed skin of a snake was hanging down. In the old summer days, seeing snake skin was a common thing. Now it only recalled something from before time itself began. If I lifted my hand, could I reach it?

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SHOULD THE WORLD MATTER TO ME?

Above, the fan lifting my tiny hairs blows ice-cold air onto my face. In the line I entered, I hear the chorus of the song heard most often this summer -the one whose refrain means apartment in its own language. After making the payment, I passed by two young girls looking at the clothes in their hands in front of the mirror.

They turned to look at me as if I were a glowing ember mixed into the store’s cold air. The more assertive girl said, if I wouldn’t mind, that what I was wearing looked very nice on me. My face flushed at the unexpected compliment, and I thanked her with a short movement of my head. Listening to their voices fade away, I turned back to the mirror. On top of my wire-like legs, I watched the whole body of my torso tremble back and forth like a tiny semicolon.

I have a physique like a carved bear carefully shaped out of a log. My height is one fifty-nine, and my weight never strays far from around fifty-five to sixty kilos. Over many years, I developed miraculous tricks to balance out my physique: shoes with raised heels to appear taller -loafers and boots extend my height by nearly ten centimeters through illusion.

Clothes that fall at stomach level without cutting across my body make me look slimmer and more slight-built. Like today, with my loose trousers that added height to me like the poles a circus performer stands on, I looked taller and thinner. With every positive reaction I receive from people, I think I possess the famous mirror of Snow White’s stepmother.

I hung my ID card around my neck and took my place at my desk at work. My colleague beside me glanced at me from the corner of her eye and then said the manager was calling me. I tapped the sharp edges of the papers in my hand against the desk and stood up. Turning her whole body toward me, my colleague said, I looked like I had gained weight.

I had put on the new cardigan because I felt cold. It was a slightly thick, dense cotton. I told her it must definitely be because of the weight of the cardigan. Without really paying attention to what I said, she turned back to the front. As my colleague quickly composed her face and started walking, the sharp edge of the paper cut my finger. If she was bringing up my weight to my face like that, she must have been suffering from her own weight too. But my weight would not dissolve into dripping oil just because of her words.

I dug my nail into the cut on my finger and got into the elevator. The giant mirrors on every side seemed to hold a kind of magic. In one of them, my cardigan-clad body floated like the plump, oversized piece of a pin. In another, my stomach stared back at me like layers of a cabbage baby stuffed in rings upon rings. I had never seen such a wide-leaved, abundant mass of leaves. I wanted to strip all those cabbage leaves and give them to the rabbits.

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Spring weather had an unpredictable audacity. Knowing what tomorrow’s weather would be like was no different from knowing what would be written on a tea bag’s paper. It was cool outside, but I was too flushed with heat to put on my cardigan. On the bus, I tried to read what people thought of me by scanning the expressions on everyone’s faces. Was anyone noticing my very fat, awkward protrusions? I shielded my stomach with my hands and crossed my arms. In this way, I drew a boundary between people and my belly and stood upright.

I like it when my plate pleases my eyes while I eat. The chicken breast -glossy with fat, dark red and brown, crispy texture… the rice beside it, grain by grain, falling over what remains with each spoonful… the blend of green, red, and purple tones that bring color to the plate… They say a person must first feed the eyes so that the stomach can be fed too.

As soon as I arrived, I put on the tightest corset I had. Because no oxygen was reaching my brain, I couldn’t even think about eating. In the end, I pulled back the serving tongs in my hand and only watched the silver ring on my plate. My father, watching me from across the table, said no one can stand on an empty stomach, and that I was already as thin as a string. But of course, one’s own child always looks like a goose.

I leapt over the crumpled bundle of the cardigan I had bought today on the floor. During tea time, I served the guests who had come to us, then returned to the kitchen, covering my stomach with the tray in my hands. My mother, who had just heard me joking with the guests, stared at me and said that when I laughed with my mouth wide open, my face looked strange.

There was no end or limit to what my mother had to say about me. It was as if they wanted to play by pulling at a string belonging to their children who were a part of them. I turned my back to her face and ran to the bathroom. In the mirror that cut into my waist, I washed my face until it was dripping wet and looked at the mirror, now covered in water. I placed both hands on the sink and lifted my small mouth between the droplets upward.

The large smile that formed reminded me of a crocodile’s jaws. How had so many teeth fit into my mouth? I tried to smile in small, controlled movements. Holding my cheeks with both hands, I gathered the excess parts in. Like making a final bow with a needle and thread.

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The mannequins in the shop window, standing in strange and meaningless poses, made my skin tingle. It was as if people were trying out acrobatic movements on mannequins that they would never be able to try in real life, and satisfying their curiosity through them.

During lunch break, my colleagues and I decided to eat outside. While we were waiting for our orders in a café together, one of my friends suddenly turned to me, her hands under her chin. She said my nose, from the front, looked like a pig’s snout. “From this angle it came to my mind for a moment,” she added. I replied, pressing my lips tightly together into a small smile, and covered the two thin holes of the salt shaker in front of me with my hand. Until the end of the meal, I watched everyone at the table like a bull with its eyes covered with a red cloth.

In the evening I took a mirror in my hand and carefully examined my nose. It really was wide and plump from the front. I wanted to take a large eraser and erase my nose from my face as if ripping the paper. I put the mirror back and picked up a book instead. As I followed a page with my eyes, those two wide holes kept forming in my mind. I took the mirror again and looked closely.

I wondered how much cosmetic surgery would cost. I put the mirror back down and continued reading from the middle of the page I had stopped at. At the first sentence of the next page, I looked at the mirror again. Was it really that big? I found a nose strip in the drawer and pulled it until my nose formed a triangular shape.

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Every time I closed my eyes, pigs grunted. Every time I opened my mouth, crocodiles showed me their teeth. Everything I wore curled up in ringlets like a lamb’s fleece. One night, when I opened my eyes, everything around me was stripped of its casing clear, bright and luminous. As I shook off my drowsiness, I heard a sound in the distance, like that of a fairground. It was getting faster and faster, screaming.

I followed the sound with cold, calm steps. When I opened the bathroom door, I saw the washing machine running with an even louder noise. It was spinning furiously, over and over, as if it wanted to push everything that angered it through a hoop of fire. I sat down opposite it with my hand touching the ground.

With every turn, I felt my eyes roll back and rise again. In the glass at the center of the machine, a shape appeared on top of the spinning laundry. A bright, glowing, balanced face. My small nose, with its straight, boneless appearance, was supported by a fuller lift. My brown eyes shone beneath the spiderweb of my lashes.

I stood up and went to my room. I walked toward the mirror, gleaming where the light fell. I took it in my hand and opened the window. The night’s cold touched my cheeks. I lowered my hand and let it go. I watched the mirror flutter like a butterfly, letting out a thin, piercing sound as it fell. Below, it shattered into a thousand pieces scattered across the ground. Drawn by the sound, a few night wanderers gathered nearby.

From above, I watched their large faces, their bulging eyes, their meaningless fragments of noses and lips. I stepped back and closed the window over them.

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THE CABIN

A white-grey movement was enough to make Peach dart from where she stood. As a result of her excitable nature, the source of the movement began to bounce rapidly through the grass with its long, upright ears. While running with the dull thud coming from my shoulder, I watched the long ears fold back and disappear in an instant. Peach stopped at my feet, almost at the risk of being crushed. In the plain that opened before us, she stuck out her tongue and caught her breath, facing the shed warmed by the sunlight.

Mid-May. There was a suffocating heat, like the inside of a cup gently warmed and held against the body. As I descended from the plain, a sharp tipped, red-orange tiled roof -typical of Mediterranean houses- appeared between the cypress trees. When I reached the flat ground, a shed resembling a vineyard house stood before me, with green iron railings. At first glance, the strong green accents of the railings gave the impression that life was present there. But up close, they were rusted, their paint peeling away like the scabs. In the garden, shrubs I guessed were once oleanders were staring into my eyes as if pleading.

Peach is a hunting dog. She has caramel-colored fur, white patches on certain parts of her body, and a tail that looks as if its tip has been carefully dipped in paint and left that way. We adopted her in the first month of my relationship with my boyfriend. In a new relationship, by adopting a pet, we were going to share our happiness with her and make it grow. It was also an opportunity for two people to bind themselves to each other in every way. It was as binding as a ring, and required as much love as a child. The image of the three of us still stirs beneath my eyelids whenever I close my eyes against the sun. For the past six months, I have been the only one taking care of Peach. It was only a burden -it was crushing me, like crushing a slice of tomato to make tomato sauce.

I pushed my hand into the hollow of the shed’s keyhole. As the door opened, the dust laden, dense air burned my nose sharp, like the sting released after frying peppers. I perched on a tall single armchair -sturdier than the others, with fewer stains. After a while, a tall man and a woman who barely reached his navel came in, talking. They were the young teacher couple. Behind them came a fisherman brother and sister who supplied a local restaurant. They placed various snacks on the round, wooden coffee table whose edges shed tiny splinters. As the smell of fish on their clothes quickly filled the room, they let themselves drop onto the sofa with enough force to break it.

Staying at the center felt like a saucepan lid coming down on me; there was no hole above me to let me breathe and keep me from suffocating. The moment I saw an ad for a summer house in the forest, away from the coast of the town of Kusadasi, an hour away, I came here. I had been here a month, and had already decided to spend the entire summer in this place. In these forests, along the paths, Peach and I wandered to our fill. It didn’t take long, on our walks, for me to meet local couples who had pets. We all had companions we loved more than our lives, and forming a bond this way was easier than ordinary friendship. We islanders said let’s go for a walk together today, and a group formed. One day, thanks to my rabbit hating dog, we found ourselves looking out over this plain. We stood transfixed before the view that had enchanted Herodotus, as if it had been circled in fluorescent green ink. The mother-of-pearl afternoon sun from Ancient Greece striking the plains… the cypresses blending into yellow, sharpening the line of dawn… the vast green grass gliding with a harmony like that of long-haired people… and at the center of it all, the tremor of the shed’s red tiles… We went up to the window and, as much as the beads of dust on it allowed, peered inside. Everything was besieged by white dust. We would stop by here in the late afternoon or early evening, easing the fatigue of the road. Inside, I preferred to listen carefully to our echoing conversations: the high price of vegetables and fruit on the island, the strong smell of our neighbor’s goats’ manure, who killed Diana?

Just as they had asked when they first saw me, they asked whether he had called. From between my crossed legs, I lifted my head and shook it side to side. The sound of sighs spread through the room. The shorter woman, the teacher, leaned against the arm of the chair, her hands in her pockets, and said he would call soon. After following her words with my eyes, I went back to watching my feet. Since we had separated, he had not said a single sentence to me -not even about Peach. How tyrannical it was to keep a person waiting in uncertainty. It was like not knowing whether the bread you had set to rise would swell soft and full, or turn into a dull slab of marble. The fisherman brother suggested that if I was struggling this much, I should be the one to call. I started to nod, my eyes following the sway of Peach’s tail as she slept on the floor.

My ex-boyfriend had received a new promotion at the company where he worked. He was constantly out, occupied with celebrations of it and with his colleagues. When he found a spare moment, we could meet in the evenings. Our word count never passed a hundred. In my mind, questions about what kind of priority and importance his work and colleagues held over us began to knot into one another. In the important developments of your life, weren’t you supposed to draw the people closest to you nearer, rather than push them away? One day, I sent a message -half reproachful, half angry- saying he couldn’t make time for us. I remember waiting for the three dots on the screen to come to an end as soon as possible. He wrote that he no longer knew what he was supposed to do. Not being enough for someone was tearing him apart. What did it even mean, not to be enough for someone? I had not asked him to lend me one of his arms. I had refused to wait while the early commitment and sincerity of our relationship was being withheld from me. Saying that we no longer imagined the same future, I ended it with a message. Ending things by message was a poor way to finish. In a moment when emotions couldn’t be handled, it stood before me like a patterned bandage.

A new topic was opened by the arguments that had broken out because some Greek tourists, not knowing the way, had entered and sat down inside certain houses. The teacher couple agreed that even if someone was a guest, no one had the right to enter another’s property without permission. The fisherman siblings said that as long as people paid for the time they spent sitting there, there would be no problem. With my eyes locked on the bag of sunflower seeds on the table, I sipped now and then from the can of cola in my other hand. The silence that follows the settling and closing of a topic, the door opened. Startled by the sudden movement, I dropped the can in my hand. The sound of the cola foaming on the carpet rescued the room from the silence of that abrupt motion. From behind the door emerged a medium-built, gaunt man with hair on every part of his head except the centre. He was moving with one step, then a second step dragged unwillingly behind it. The tall male teacher asked, “Were you passing through here?” The man whispered, “Who killed my wife?” Within the circle of brief glances exchanged between us, he extended something like a straight stick -at the end of which was something resembling a pair of binoculars. He shouted again, “Who killed my wife?” When the tall teacher stood up, a sudden acceleration surged through the air, and the dull sound of a box that wasn’t mine was heard. I concluded that what the man was holding was a rifle.

A patch of red spread across the man’s T-shirt, like a hollow in the shape of a shooting target. His wife ran to him and pressed her hand against the wound. Crying, she shouted at the man with the rifle, “What have you done?” From my seat, I tried to cover my eyes with my hand, watching what was happening through the gaps between my fingers. For a moment, I looked at Peach, as if to test whether this moment was real. She had sprung up from where she lay beside me, her tail held rigid. With this movement, like a warning flare, I straightened my back and looked at the fisherman siblings. The brother suddenly stood up and ran toward the man in fury. A second dull thud followed. The man grabbed his arm and fell backward into his sister’s lap. I jumped to the ground and hid behind the chair. I pulled the barking Peach into my lap and stroked her tense body. Now the room smelled of mold, fresh iron, and dust.

Outside, a siren that kept rising in volume began to echo through the shed like a stone thrown into water. Among the cut-off screams and groans, I lifted my head. I listened as the approaching sound came to a halt in front of the shed with a violent force. The man shouted again inside the room, “Where is my wife?” The footsteps that had begun to gather in front of the door entered the cabin, took hold of the man, and led him outside. His rifle fell somewhere near our line of sight. Our group, content to watch what was happening with quiet sniffs, remained still for a while longer.

The red lights of the ambulance mingled with the haze of the setting sun, in which yellow, orange, and pale blue blended together. I saw off the wounded who had been loaded into the ambulance, along with their companions. I crouched beside Peach, who had sat down on the ground. I watched her pale pink belly until my eyes burned. I reached into my trouser pocket. I slid the lock screen and went to speed dial. The phone was answered on the third ring. Sniffling, I asked if he could come and pick me up. After a few seconds of silence, my ex-boyfriend quickly asked where I was. Looking around, I gave him the address I could remember: please, come right away. “Stay there, I’m coming,” he said, his voice already in motion. Holding our dog close to me, I waited as the yellow drained from the sky and slowly gave way to deep blue.

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UNDER YELLOW LIGHTS

What filled the room was the sound of the April rain that had begun outside. Loudly. I sat alone, watching the raindrops tapping against my window. Large and small drops. They pushed their way almost inside. The room is dark. The objects hidden in the corners did not reveal their identities at first glance. Like waves hitting the shore, folding back over themselves. And in another corner of the room, there was me. I was in my place, like a coat always thrown onto the same spot.

On days when the sky is overcast, I notice different corners of the house. The inside pulls you in, as if wrapping you in a long cardigan, warm and close. My small, self-contained stove glows under a yellow fryer light. I place my pan on one of the burners and prepare my meal. At the same time, from the window visible from the kitchen, I follow the rain outside. I scan around me. There is not much in the room. A bed. A nightstand. A table for eating and studying. A small wardrobe. The walls are a pale yellow. In this state, they resemble the wrinkled skin of old people, their folds hard to make out.

When the rain pauses, I get ready to go outside. I put on my coat, waiting alone on the hanger. I take nothing else with me. It is cold outside. I feel each strike of the air against my face. Fine, feather light drizzle slips into my eyes. I keep turning my head upward, toward the windows. The brightness inside the houses stands in contrast to the outside. Fireflies. I walk slowly. The shop windows I pass are wet and fogged. I can barely make out my own face. I look at the sky. Layers of gray-black clouds piled on top of each other. They move quickly, as if trying to rid themselves of their burden.

As I walk along the road, I notice someone ahead of me, moving slowly. A middle aged woman, walking with a strange rhythm of her own. I rub my eyes. I can tell she is short and stocky. Her hair is the same color as the clouds above. Streaked with gray and white. What draws my attention most is the way she walks. Uneven, hesitant steps. Like the struggle of an insect, fallen onto the surface of the water. She stops briefly and checks her left side. When I turn my head in that direction, the empty, wet road shines. Slick. When I look forward again, she has moved. A second later, I realize my own feet are moving too.

In the streets she enters, her head tilts from one side to the other, as if busy with something. As if she were obsessed with finding traces of a lost city far away, walking endlessly, who knows where. As I follow her at a distance, the sky seems to call the dark clouds back, and the rain begins to fall lightly again. The entrances of the shops and buildings we pass grow emptier. She leads me into a park. She stands still, without sitting anywhere. Everything is wet. Though her stillness spreads into the air and reaches me, I keep shifting my weight from foot to foot. To the right. To the left. I scan around, trying to remember the streets we passed. Misty. I turn my head at a sound she makes. A full, resonant voice. She is no longer just standing. She is watching two doves perched on a roof close to the sky. Their melodic cooing echoes through the park. I realize she is repeating their sound. My mother used to tell me a story when I was little. A small girl enters the kitchen while her mother is away and pours out all the olive oil. All of it. As it spreads before her eyes, it keeps spreading. A yellow lake. The girl shuts her eyes tightly. Very tightly. When her mother returns, she cannot find her daughter. There is only a dove outside, singing. In the rain.

Suddenly, the woman begins to move. A dark mass. I remain looking after her. But my feet take the next step. At last, familiar streets begin to appear. As I go on, her steps become my steps. The streets she enters are in my mind. The foot she lifts into the air is my foot. The streets we walk turn into dead ends, the avenues grow empty, the shops fall into darkness. Everywhere I look becomes invisible. As I keep walking, I see the first shop I had passed before. I stop. It was there, still lighting up the outside. Light. Everything around me turns in a circle. I hold onto a pole beside me and look at the empty street. My street. The drops hitting my face sharply make my skin bristle. When I turn forward, the woman is gone. I look around carefully but cannot find her. She has mixed into the song of the rain.

Without looking back, I step under an awning to shield myself from the rain. The glowing display in front of me darkens my eyes. The circle is still spinning. When I come to myself, my gaze catches my own face in the middle of the glass. The image I see is layered. Over my face there is a familiar yet unfamiliar shadow. Lines. In the reflection, I see the woman. She is looking at me.

Without caring about the rain, I run home. I enter the cold, dark entrance of the building and quickly go up to my apartment. I look at my face in the mirror. This is my face. For a moment, I close my eyes, then open them and fix them around. I scan the objects in the room. A bed. A nightstand. A small wardrobe. The pale yellow of the walls can be seen. Creases. I close my eyes again. Tightly. Darkness swallows them. When I open them again, in the corners lit by thin beams of light coming from outside, there is nothing but small shadows.

They lost me there.

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The Woman on the Veranda

A woman appeared behind the fences. The fences were falling apart. They looked tired from being used for so long, fragile. With such a view, it was hard to make out the woman. But she opened the garden gate. She stepped inside at a slow pace, like a bird with a weight tied to its wing. When she finally came into view, it was as if the shadow over the fences had settled on her too. She looked to be in her forties; perhaps because of the lines on her face. In her hand there was nothing remarkable except a small flower seed. She stopped and glanced at the house. It was raining. Familiar feelings were overflowing from the woman’s eyes and mixing with the raindrops on her face. After a while she took a key out of her pocket. She put it in the lock, turned it, and went inside.

She took off her boots. Without putting down the flower in her hand, she walked to the back veranda. There were various flower pots there, all different from one another. She placed what she was holding on the table and moved forward to find an empty pot. Almost all of them seemed full; in some there were hydrangeas, in another lilies. But among the flowers her eyes caught a dried one. From her expression it was clear that it was her favorite flower: an alpine daisy. It had been a gift, left from an old birthday. Seeing it dried up like that was like saying goodbye to a memory she loved dearly. Like saying farewell to a friend from a certain time in her life.

She lifted the pot. She set it on the table, next to the seed she had just bought. She gave the pale plant one last look. Then, taking a deep breath, she buried her hand in the soil and pulled out what remained of the flower. She threw it into the garden, onto a patch of earth under the falling rain. And the alpine daisy disappeared at once, just like each drop of rain mixing with the ground and the flowing water. When she returned to the pot, she wanted to empty the soil inside it. But the roots of the flower had covered everything like a spider’s web. They would not let go of the pot. The woman tried hard to separate them. It did not work. She took a pair of garden scissors in her hand; this time she tried cutting them. In the first one or two attempts she cut some of the smaller roots, but the others seemed tightly wrapped around each other. They would not come apart.

At first the woman could not understand it. Then she thought that the flower had a life of its own. For years it had bloomed on this veranda. Many scenes had passed before it. There had been a summer once. The warm weather had helped it grow stronger and stretch its roots. Then winter had shaken it; it had tested its endurance with all its harshness. And with great effort it had come through its difficult past. The roots that remained after all of this were the symbol that it had once been there. The woman let the scissors fall from her hand. She could not find the courage to pull them from the place where they belonged. They were the only thing left from the life the flower had lived. Destroying the roots would be like destroying a past. After looking at them for a while, she raised her head. She too was tightly bound to her past. Letting go of her memories never crossed her mind. She took the pot in her arms and pressed it to her chest. She touched the roots. She pulled out a few extra clumps of weeds. Then she carefully placed the seed she had bought inside, without harming the roots. After that she added soil, covering it on all sides. She watered it and placed it somewhere safe, where it could receive good sunlight.

A month passed. Now she was returning to the veranda again. Because the clouds kept hiding and appearing, she did not notice the flower at first. Then she saw its lively, bright look. It had embraced the soil and accepted the roots. It continued to grow day by day. For a while she watched the flower with a gentle expression. Then she went inside.

With calm, quiet steps she put the house in order and breathed in its air. There was a sense of satisfaction on her face, almost a half-smile. This was not the house she lived in. She had her own home. But this was the place where she had grown up. Where she had taken root. What passed through her mind now was the thought that she too had once been a flower growing in the pot of this house. It was all about roots. No matter which pot it was in, what she needed was to grow and move forward. At last, with a satisfied look, she carefully locked the door. She returned the way she had come, her feet touching the soft, raised soil on the ground.

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THE SPIRIT OF A YOUNG GIRL

It’s March. It is a breezy day that lightly lifts the fabric of curtains. Compared to the winter months, the sun is brighter; it dazzles the eyes. Blue. The sky is an eye-catching shade of blue. Even before I open my eyes, I can feel all of this. It seeps into my blood before I even know it. With its shimmering hands, it pulls back my covers and draws me out of bed.

When I look out the window, I see the tops of flowers beginning to take on all kinds of colors. Everywhere, tiny buds have burst open. With each new spring, blooming feels like an act of resistance. To shout all your beauty out in the open. I haven’t seen a braver gesture in my life. Everything looked like a living oil painting that had stepped out of Monet’s garden. In that moment, the air swirls around me like a bubble, as if inviting me outside.

Now I go out for a short walk. The streets are like a beehive, seething with life. People buzz back and forth, their heads bobbing above their bodies. They, too, seem to have answered this call. I head to a park. I set my eyes on a bench in a shaded spot. I walk quickly toward it. Now I’m sitting in the best seat at the gathering. I let my eyes wander around. Most people are sitting on benches. Some are sitting on the ground, mostly families. Children flit around them, chirping like birds. Then, for a moment, when I look across, I see a mother and her little girl beginning to pick the newly budding flowers. They cup the blossoms in their hands and snap off the heads that sway toward the sun, one by one. I watch with my mouth open. With every head that falls, a shiver runs up the back of my neck.

I move away from the crowd and turn into a quieter street. The scene I just witnessed is still in my mind: the freshly picked buds. I’m catch my breath, as if they had cut off my head along with the flowers. I imagine them arriving home in high spirits, placing those heads into a vase. Of course, they’ll pour water into it in a small ceremonial air. Every day, they will proudly change that water and check on the bud’s condition, as if the power to make it grow and bloom lay in their hands. Even I feel dizzy at the thought; I can’t begin to imagine what state the flower is in.

One day, they notice that the bud has begun to move. But this first movement does not satisfy them. It looks paler than when they first plucked it. You can’t really expect much more from a severed head anyway. Still, people insist. As if this were all they ever wanted, they speak to it with smiles. They place it in the “favorite” corner of the house, an airless, colorless room. In time, the bud does bloom, but the fresh curve of its petals is gone. The color it once longed to show is dull, its stem is bent. It dries up from the outside in, until it is left alone with nothing but its own heart. That does not seem to beat anymore either. And when their excitement fades, they leave it all alone. As if they were ever truly there. In the end, they do only their final duty: they throw the severed heads into the trash.

The sun is quietly setting. Like the erasure of a memory. It exists in the distance for a brief moment and then disappears. Just as the last light fades, I arrive home. I step through the door and pause for a moment to check myself. There is one thing I need to be sure of. I can’t feel my head where it should be. They must have cut mine off too, when they tore those flowers.

I am frozen. I can neither think nor move. I have lost everything. Then, as if brushing off the soil on my shoulders, I come back to myself all at once. Spring would come once more. And then the flowers would stubbornly take root again. To the deepest places they can possibly go. They will stand tall. And this time, no one would be able to pluck or tear them away.

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THE PLACE YOU CALLED ME TO

The wipers move with all their strength, sweeping right and left. Sunday, just before noon. In the background, Edi announces the next turn. I am driving along a road that seems deliberately abandoned. I was invited to a colleague’s birthday. It was out of town; the first time I had left in a long while. From time to time, my eyes drift toward the distant point caught at the edge of the wipers.

I pass large buildings and workplaces in silence. Ahead, villas and rows of cypress trees appear; after that, both sides stretch out bare as far as the eye can see. When the first city limits sign appeared, Edi instructed me to turn left at the first intersection. Shortly after, I came across a sign indicating a return to the city. Shaking my head, I study the map. The earlier sign had been correct; I had entered the return road. I search the map for a way to reach the city limits sign. There is one nearby, but it is an old dirt road. I look for a while at the location pin beneath my hand. I lift my foot from the brake and slowly press the gas pedal.

Edi continues issuing commands from behind. Even so, I am determined to keep my eyes on the map. As soon as the dirt road begins, the shoreline comes into view. The view wrapped around my memory like the scent of mothballs spreading when an old sweater is taken out. The horizon line strikes my eyes like camera flashes. For a moment, I struggle to register where I am. Just as I realize I am nearing the turn marked on my screen, I find myself face to face with the fact that it is an entrance to a highway. I had followed the map on my own; now I do not know where to turn. I draw in a deep breath and release it more noisily through my nose. Gripping the steering wheel, I follow the directions echoing around me. Soon, it leads me to a seaside turnoff.

The rain has calmed. I step out of the car and walk toward the shore. Tiny droplets fall on my face as if I am inside a cloud. I inhale deeply. I try to remember when I last breathed clean sea air. I think I was in high school. The weather must have been overcast then too; an image in my mind supports this thought. When the mist thins, a rocky walkway along the crest of the sea becomes visible. I stand there for a while with drops entering my eyes. The view is so close, it is calling me.

I climb the hill. The rocks carry the sound of the sea up to where I am. I sit on the cool stone at the base of a rock rising like a monument. The landscape stretches out before me on every side. I lean my head back; it falls into a hollow and fills it. When I turn around, I notice a drawing of medium size. Inside it, two letters I know very well are carved. My own name and another’s; my former closest friend’s. It feels as if a piece of rock is being chiseled out of my throat with nails. The breath I take burns my nose. I run my hands over the two letters. It is a very old memory. We had come here only once. While I watched the sea, she had carved our names into the rocks. To leave a trace of us behind… She had said this was the most peaceful place she had ever seen in her life. Our gazes had locked; our laughter had risen. The echo of our voices had remained behind. At times that echo would reach my ear, like a song I am afraid to hear again and do not know how to begin. Beside me now, only the sound of the sea is heard. And it keeps rising.

I press my fingers to the corners of my eyes and draw in my breath sharply. I reach into my pocket and scroll through my contacts. The name is still there. For a moment, my gaze slips toward the horizon. I look at the light seeping through a break in the clouds. My finger rests over that name. I close my eyes. I take a breath. And I tap it.