Everything Passes, Life Remains

My impulses for power had led me to swiftly ascend the winding slopes from Firuzağa to Cihangir. Clearly, our meeting would be filled with questions and lingering uncertainties. At 3 AM, I was overwhelmed, my life turned upside down and inside out.

Like everyone in the new century, she believed in nothing but the certainty of her own body, desiring to experience others’ past experiences more intensely and to reshape all existences to fit her own image.

“Come inside,” she said. I had no god, politics, ideas, or ideals. I enjoyed letting her talk. My goal wasn’t to fix things but to make her aware of her troubles. Her stories were full of dangers we needed to overcome together. Moreover, everything she said contained too many ‘maybes’. Who would want to deal with such risky uncertainty? I always preferred a certain ending I knew would be bad over a handful of good possibilities.

She finished talking, and I left without answering any of her questions. The yellow lights bursting from Beyoğlu’s old houses scorched my body like suns. Yet, lately, it wasn’t the sun that warmed me inside, but her. As I walked away from her house, I quickened my pace with an unexplainable force and suddenly started crying in the street we had often walked together. We had met and parted as strangers.

Everything passes, everything grows, what about life? Life remained. With an impossibly large void to fill.