when i looked at the cloudy sky today,
i saw you smiling.
i closed my eyes in delight,
but i could still see the light.
my heart brimmed with love
like a cup filling from the ocean.
it connected me with you,
and with God, too.
now i feel a delicious togetherness;
an unceasing lovingness.
it comes from God,
and it has the shape of your smile.
Home
I was born here,
But is this my home?
If it is—if it must be—
Then why doesn’t it feel like so?
When I travel,
I don’t feel like an outsider
As much as I do in my own hometown.
Yet when the flight lands back here,
I feel as though my heart is a jewel
Being placed back into its safe box
Like this land is two open palms
That await my arrival
And spread to embrace me
Into eternal safety.
I must accept
That I am forever torn
Between being from but not of,
Being part here and part elsewhere.
My Love, İstanbul
I find myself a seat in the corner of a coffee shop; brown table, wood everywhere, the aroma of coffee and caramel filling the air. I place my book on the table or on my lap—either way my neck bends so low it aches after a few pages—and I lose myself in a different world, touching the pages as though caressing a lover. Recently I’ve been double-pretending; the first setting is that of the novel I’m reading, and the second is İstanbul. Wherever my body happens to be, my soul is nowhere but in İstanbul, all day and all night. This she-city; my loyal friend and my enchanting lover, my mind’s remedy and my heart’s home. I am under Her sky, my skin absorbing the life radiating from Her sun, my consciousness expanding in Her language, my feelings expressing themselves in Her tongue. İstanbul is the lover I never got to meet in the body of a human; She’s the beloved to whom all my love poems are about. İstanbul is both a manifestation of my soul and a being all on Her own. I don’t know where I end and She begins. I have never loved as fervently and wholeheartedly as I have fallen for Her. It is the waters that soften Her edges that are the blood that swirls in my body. It is the echoes of Her past with all its tragedies and triumphs that engulf me and make me believe that life is worth living, no matter how long it takes for it to feel like so. It is Her complexity, Her fascinating identity, Her secrets and hopes and memories that have slipped into a haze of amnesia that I most relate to… It is the voices of the souls that have taken Her as their home, both as a blessing and a curse, that fill my mind as I pretend that the corner I’m sitting in is on Her land, by one of Her flowing waters or in one of Her cafés. This is what keeps me thriving as I count the days to have Her air be the oxygen that kisses my lungs; to have the chirping of Her birds be the pleasant sound I wake up to in the morning and the flirtatious song of Her shores and rains that I go to sleep to at night.
On a Plane
On a plane, I am nowhere and everywhere all at once.
I am not the person time and space dictate that I am. Instead, I am a combination of all the versions of myself that I have embodied in the 18 years of my human existence. It’s 2017 rather than 2019—my happiest year rather than my most challenging yet; it’s a long summer vacation rather than a fleeting spring break; I’m going to a new city and sleeping in a hotel room rather than home in my own bed; I’m content rather than floating in a sea of melancholy; and instead of completely lost, I am grounded in my trance of not being in one fixed spot on the planet. Instead of it being a few weeks before my 19th birthday, it’s a few weeks after my 30th; instead of anxiously standing at the beginning of my life, I’m in the middle with the satisfaction of having fulfilled significant accomplishments and lived some of my dreams; instead of being just a student struggling with her sense of self, I am the strong independent woman that knows, accepts, forgives and respects herself enough to cast away the shadow of darkness that had been weighing over her for way too long.
On a plane, I am no one and everyone all at once.
Note To Self: II
I am finally confronting the rebel within me and waking her up to the fact that it is not physical freedom that I lack, but rather, psychological freedom that resides in my own mind. Yes, I am the prisoner and the imprisoned. I hold the key, even though I’ve locked myself in and thrown it away.
‘How is that?’ I ask myself.
‘Well, here’s how. First, let’s get the paradox of the key out of the way. I have the key to the door of this cell. Where is it? Look under the bed, in the drawers, in the books. Oh, don’t waste your energy looking in the wrong places. You are the key. You are your own salvation. You. It’s all you. You put yourself in here, and only you can get yourself out. You think you need a key of the material realm—driving license, your own apartment, sufficient financial independence—yet that’s no true key! Those attainments are beyond the door whose key you hold! Those dreams of yours will not be the cause of your happiness nor the sign of your freedom. They cannot be! Because they are not the source. They go through a process of manifestation, and that process’s first step is your psyche. So stop fiddling and quarreling with the outer world and look within for a moment. You need to heal the mess inside to produce a beautiful life on the outside. You are the cause, and the manifestation of your dreams is the effect. That is, you must be free on the inside to live that freedom on the outside; you must have a garden of joy for a mind to have a garden of happiness for a life; you must feel whole on the inside—compassionate and self-forgiving—to have a meaningful life. It all starts within. You are the first step. And if you neglect to start from here and go on your way to bring about your visions on the superficial realm of the material world, then, oh dear, you would be destroying your soul and killing yourself with all that effort and dread day in and day out. When you start your journey from the right starting point, you not only guarantee your arrival, but you also get to reach it through the easiest, least resistant, most divinely guided way.’
‘Easy and divinely guided? How?’ you ask again.
‘You’ll have the company of your wise soul; you’ll have your connection with your Loving Creator.’
Note To Self: I
Focus on this precise moment. Every single instant. Just stay here. Ground yourself. You have nothing to worry about. As long as you stay in the given moment, you won’t feel that drowning feeling. Just stay here. You’re safe here. You don’t have to know everything. You don’t have to know everything about who you are; you don’t need to have your whole future figured out. It’s okay not to know; it’s fine not to feel strong and confident sometimes. There are periods in life that are for stillness, and there are periods for action in which doing things feels effortless because it’s the right time to set things in motion. Right now you’re in the stillness stage. Don’t worry about the rest. You’ll rise. Those ideas you’re receiving will materialize. You just observe. It’ll all come together perfectly.
Timeless Detachment
I prefer detaching myself from where I am
Erasing the sharp edges of time and space
By concentrating on a screen or a book
And not looking at the clock
To take myself off this place and find my soul elsewhere
