that your inner self, which you thought would always do as you tell it, has begun to act crazily, like an unleashed rebellious child. The astonishment of realizing that you are unable to deal with it. And the inexorable allure of that adventure which has brought you to a matchless state of ecstasy you could find nowhere else.
I know a few languages, but none contain words that could describe this feeling.
Wait a minute! That broken time machine is now hurling me back into the past, carrying me to one of those ordinary childhood moments which truly, yet unexpectedly, determine the course of your life, although the very same piece of memory had somehow seemed unimportant when you lived thatactual moment.
I now go to that winter morning when a cold distant sun hung sulking in the sky.
To Ankara, when I was fourteen.
Does childhood make cities seem more beautiful in memories than they actually are?
Or is it that we destroy and devastate cities as time goes by?
Later, each time I visited Ankara, I only saw an ugly, worn out place packed with clumsy buildings. A city that had lost its beautiful sunny mornings forever.
Tedious, oppressive, drab apartment complexes had replaced those spacious boulevards of my childhood, the bright orderly buildings, wide public squares, sunny hills, and lovely homes with pretty gardens.
Perhaps the steppes were rejecting the untimely siege that had begun through the symbols of a new civilization, which we believed were magnificent.
Later, each time I saw the shantytowns, the ramshackle, jerry-built structures, and the impoverished inhabitants next to the old homes near the castle, I couldn’t help wondering if that was all we had succeeded in achieving over so many years in the capital city of hopes.
Now, that cold mausoleum on Rasattepe—the symbol of this city—gives me nothing but a deep feeling of gloom.
I wish that instead of following the tradition of the Pharaohs, who sought eternal life after death, we had protected the warm, modest home of our national leader, the place where he had lived when he was filled with the hope of building a new country. This would have made life, rather than death, the symbol of this city. I also wish we had believed that many others like him could have grown up in all of these homes.
No, I don’t adore Ankara anymore. Besides, I haven’t been there for years.
I tell you, when you are a child, you see things differently.
Maybe it is not the city but my weary eyes that make me think even the spring sun has changed. Maybe that mist which seems to cover the people is not real but just a film over my eyes.
This is not the same city where I raced my bike, leaving our small house with a garden, nor the one where I sometimes slid on my school bag on the sloping streets that are now lined with giant buildings with glass façades and big hotels.
I wish I could have saved the images of Ankara of my childhood to revisit again and again, not allowing new images to replace them.
Unfortunately, this is how our memory works. As time goes by, memory blurs and become vague. Images, sounds, and voices are superimposed, replacing each other. No wonder when I spend my time at home, I catch myself humming some worthless refrain from one of the contemporary songs they keep playing on TV nowadays instead of the beautiful melodies of the past.
What can you do? It’s not only one’s own face in the mirror that grows old.
Those serene summer afternoons when Ayla and I played in the garden are somewhere just here.
Nobody told us back then that those days would grow distant when we tried to recall them, that memories would be lost quickly, and that we wouldn’t be able to replace them with anything as pure, beautiful, happy or comforting.
No, they never warned us.
I can hear my mother’s voice calling us for afternoon tea. The wonderful smell of the warm walnut pastries and apple cookies reach all the way here.
We will go in now, and the tranquil atmosphere of the dim hallway—something that is perhaps only found in old houses—will surround us. We will make ourselves comfortable on the armchairs covered with old, dirty upholstery and wait for our tea.
When was that? Ayla had come in with a book in her hand again. She had said, “Do you remember years ago when you showed me a poem in a magazine and said that the author would be a great poet one day?
“How can I remember that?” I replied. “Is he a great poet now?”
She laughed. “I don’t know. Find out for yourself. Here’s his new book. I enjoyed it very much.”
I read the book that night. Somewhere, it said, “Childhood is something like the sky / it does not go anywhere.”
It is true. Childhood does not go anywhere. It is always there.
Everywhere we go, it tags along, as if holding our hand.
Ayla has those pictures. I used to tell her, “Don’t show these photos to anyone. Anyone who sees them will not want to marry you!” Yet, she wouldn’t listen.
In the pictures, we both look like boys. Our hair is tousled. We have bruises everywhere. We are dressed in plaid pants or overalls, and we’re either climbing on something or jumping from a tree.
It’s strange, but most of those scars are still with me. Today, when I look at my knees, elbows, or feet, I say, yes this is the one that happened when I fell out of the tree while picking mulberries with Ayla, or this happened when I fell off my bike that morning. The traces of my own little history, like chapter headings.
If I had been told that I could stop at a certain moment in my life and stay there forever, I would have chosen one of two moments.
The first is when I was rocking in the swing hanging from the branches of a tree in the garden of my childhood.
The other is the day I first kissed the man I loved more than anyone in my whole life.
In those times, I didn’t realize that a feeling which finds you suddenly at some distinct point in your life in an unexplainable way stays with you forever.
During that most wonderful kiss of my life, I felt the same excitement and joy I had while rocking on a swing. Perhaps at that moment, I realized that I had found again what I had been seeking for years without even being aware of it.
In all those books, films, and songs we were told about love.
And in ancients scrolls, legends, tales, and drawings engraved on walls, too.
Even people who do not go through adventures that involve a mysterious feeling that drags you along were carried away by the excitement of love and felt as if they were in a totally different realm.
Some have even written books, carried out experiments, or tried to define this feeling through scientific equations.
