The world left my enthusiasm in my crop. I wanted to hug, kiss, smell and tell. However, now we are all doing our obligatory stay-at-home service during corona days against the world.
My dear friend,
How happy it made me to receive your letter, especially to see the envelope that is the color of my soul. It's like we're sharing a serving of tel kadayıf with you. I took apart each string and read it over and over as if I was breathing in. My tongue and my palate are all sugary as you can see. Believe me, you're the one I want to see the most since I came back. I missed you so much. I came back very happy, very, very full of life, completely different. If only you could see it, you would say "how much have you grown, vacation, well sorry, research helped". The world left my enthusiasm in my crop. I wanted to hug, kiss, smell and tell. However, now we are all doing our obligatory stay-at-home service during corona days against the world.
For your new research topic, you asked me, "What have those who ruled this country taken from us since 2002?" My dear friend, I would like to take my most serious tone and say “he took my love” in a way that befits your research. I want to say labor to you, "Emek Cinema, İnci Patisserie, Beyoğlu Metropol Music, the old chirping of Istiklal, the cats that I once fed, the cats that never leave my lap", but you understand my "love". I want to say to you the squares, the spring suns on our faces from the scattered actions. But you still understand "my love". The Aziz Nesin scene, our pre-game conversations at Akm, my shirt with a blue ribbon, a heirloom from our sit-ins in front of the Sultanahmet courthouse, the strawberry fields of my childhood, which are now the İstinye villas, the watery hills where my grandmother and I used to collect lamb's ears, which they now call Journalists' site, but there are no journalists there. Would you still understand my “love” if I said that he did not sit down, but took the springs that filled the small buckets of my childhood with their hills flowing from all over?
If you ask my father, they even took the peace of the seasons. Before they came, March came, then April, then May, and so on. Now the seasons are also confused. From pain and bewilderment that is mindless in nature.
It's annoying to stay at home, to stay at home. We say "stay at home Turkey". I'm going to shout that I've stayed at home as long as I'm old. But the worst thing is that one has to isolate oneself from everything. Everyone is hostile to everyone, everyone is afraid of everyone, it seems like they are disgusted. I saw lovers holding hands in medical gloves on the beach the other day. Uncles chanting rosary with Nike shoes, nylon tracksuits...
We need to learn to live in a way that puts the boundaries not between human and human, but only between human existence and virus existence. Otherwise, there will be a human being that is difficult to define and in trouble.
You said that you spend this period of staying at home by doing “remembering exercises”. You are doing very well. I also do “heart-opening exercises” and “heart-widening exercises” a lot. There are so many sides of my heart that is raw and rusted. You know, after many years, I realized that I have a heart again.
We've only had two weeks like this so far. But sometimes it feels like these days are not from life, life is like a movie break and we don't know when we will continue from where we left off and we are doing distraction exercises until it starts again. But lately it has passed the distraction. It's like we're trying to hasten his arrival. It feels like we've appreciated his worth while he's gone and we're preparing a nice welcome for him. Welcome life.
So remind me that “when that day comes”, you, me and the world will go to eat this palm dessert, whose name and taste I never knew. Concluding, the poet was asking me, and I was asking you: "Will the world never smell like an after-school ever again?" What are you saying?
Longingly.
Zeytin.
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