Music by My Bedside. Kürsat Basar

in ourselves.

      Like an endless civil war.

      Time passes, altering our identity, taking it captive, changing it by force, and creating an entirely new being.

      In the end, naturally, you never know who has won.

      It seems that I did not run the chance of abandoning even the smallest pieces that form me. Unaware, I preferred to live with the crowd and multiplicity inside of me.

      Did I do so because I couldn’t bring myself to give anything up?

      Or because I believed life couldn’t be restricted, or that it shouldn’t be limited by hiding in a room or following a preconceived path?

      Or maybe just because of coincidences.

      I don’t know.

      All I know is that I was confronted continuously with new sides of myself and was surprised each time.

      It has always hurt me that the game of life can be played only once, and that in spite of our lack of experience, we are not given a second chance.

      Isn’t this unjust?

      Don’t you think that making a choice at every fork in the road, choosing one direction and foregoing the other (without knowing what would have happened had we gone in the other direction); abandoning some people; not going to the right but to the left after thinking, or just listening to our inner voice (in reality, the voice of others); and determining our whole life as a result of all those ordinary choices is just nonsense?

      It probably was the second year after we left Ankara.

      I remember very well that summer morning in the living room of the two-storey red brick house from which I could hear the sound of the mounted policemen passing by.

      I was reading a magazine article about people who claimed they had been abducted by aliens and taken on a strange journey of light, which they could not remember.

      I remember it very well.

      The front cover of the magazine was illustrated with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Underneath, a caption read: “The unhappiest beauty of all times!”

      I read the long article that began with the question, “Have aliens really arrived?”

      Such subjects have always excited me.

      I don’t care whether they’re true or not.

      Some people claimed that they were surrounded by a bright light and weren’t able to see anything. They related that they felt as if they were in a very long, restful sleep, or a dream they wished would never end. They also said they were hurled with incredible speed for hours through a corridor of bluish, bright light in the sky, as if caught in a radiant whirlwind. They heard a sound which resembled the deafening screech of sirens. Soon, however, everything slowly calmed down, the storm ended, and they found themselves in a silent, tranquil void.

      Sometimes when you wake up, you know you have had a wonderful dream and feel blissful, but you cannot remember or recount it. That is exactly how they felt.

      A young woman said she had thought she was dead but wasn’t frightened. On the contrary, she remembered having abandoned herself with ease.

      These people were asked various questions.

      The article included photos of scientists, authors, and psychiatrists who had investigated this strange phenomenon. One doctor discussed the reasons why people make up such stories. The scientists explained why it wasn’t possible for human beings to travel in space like that. They talked about confusing imagination with fact.

      How bored I was with those idiots!

      I tossed the magazine away.

      I’d do anything to experience such an extraordinary thing.

      I envy those people who have opened a window in their humdrum, unhappy, empty lives and lost themselves in a dream no one had before when they looked at an undefined cluster of light in the night sky.

      Just like primitive people.

      I would love to be one of those who see things for the first time, who have the joy of facing something new, and who are the first to step on terra nova—an undiscovered island or a boundless continent of ice.

      I am fed up with cities built centuries ago, streets that millions trampled before me, the shared memory of humankind, and glamorous structures of bricks laid on top of the other.

      They are all know-it-alls! Everyone knows about everything!

      I’m sick and tired of the wretchedness of this arrogant civilization!

      If we were able to put together all that we have learned in thousands of years, it would fit into a small box when compared to what we have not discovered. Yet, no one is aware of this fact.

      In one of her letters, Ayla had written, “People think it bizarre that I spend months on a forlorn excavation far away from everyone. Honestly, I sometimes doubt myself, too. But there’s not even the smallest piece of land that can still be discovered on this earth. At least I can find the door to a tomb deep inside the earth after digging for months. After thousands of years, I can be the first one to stand in front of that tomb, at the gate of that lost land. Time has passed. I can stand at the threshold of one time and open the door to another. The moment of opening that door is worth everything.”

      That was it! How nicely she had put it.

      Wasn’t this all I ever wanted throughout my childhood, no, throughout my whole life?

      Standing in one time and opening the door to another.

      Opening a door to a realm of things beyond our knowledge, in a land of the obscure and the undefined. You open the door when you’re too frightened to realize you are overwhelmed by fear and emerge into an entirely different world—a world where you have no idea what you will encounter or in which direction you will be pulled.

      I know that such things remain in childhood.

      Childhood has an end. Everything we see for the first time is taught to us. Everything soon becomes familiar. Even the new things we see are comprehended by comparison with past experiences. As years pass, we get accustomed to everything, and it all becomes common. Familiar and well-known. Familiar and ordinary. Familiar and harmless. Familiar and a part of us.

      This is the kind of world we try to establish: a world in which we think we’ll be protected from all threats.

      Childhood ends, doesn’t it? Childhood ends, and all of the different children in us grow up, or perhaps they go away. Along that long road, at every curve and every fork, we silently desert them one by one, unaware of what we are doing. In the end, we are left all alone.

      Only one person remains from all those different children.

      Why isn’t it possible to hold each one of them by the hand and continue to walk on the path together?

      As I sat and looked through magazines that morning, these thoughts crossed my mind.

      I was wholly absorbed in what I read, unaware it was midday already. The sound of the doorbell brought me to my senses.

      I hadn’t tidied up the house after breakfast. Newspapers and magazines were scattered about. My teacup was still on the breakfast table. Dressed in my rose-colored housecoat, I put my hair up before I went to answer the door. At this time of the day, it could only be the postman.

      I opened the door and for a moment stood there petrified.

      As if they had agreed beforehand, there they were standing at my doorstep in suits of same color and with the same hats on their heads.

      The two of them. Those two men who have determined my life. I stood there motionless, utterly bewildered, as if aliens had come to take me away to infinity.

      “I’m sorry