This Cruel Year

Stepping off the train and letting Gulcan ride on alone to Hermannplatz, I couldn’t stop thinking about the past, couldn’t understand why everything had been the way it was. My stomach clenched with a low grinding pain and I thought about all the faces from those days—what they were doing now, what they were feeling at that exact moment. Do you lose the right to speak when no one can hear you? I don’t have the strength to search for places where nothing painful has ever happened. The street was wet and dark ahead of me, the paths of figures that made you feel worse just looking at them crossing with mine.

I can’t accept the fact that she’s no longer in this world. Is she in the wardrobe, is she in the mirror, is she next to the pillow, is she out there somewhere—where is she? I wanted to sleep with her right then and felt disgusting for wanting it. Closeness was what I needed. The ghosts of the past wouldn’t let go, pulling me under in sudden surges of grief. When it pours in this city, the silence moves closer.

I got dizzy. I had to stop and grabbed onto a traffic light—just a second, just a small pause. I saw all their faces. Steering toward a distant unknown future, howling before the rubble of their shattered emotional lives, begging for release—or smiling down at me from inside their own wreckage. I breathed in deep and tried to smile. In this cruel year I am perpetrator and victim. I feel worthless, and because of that I can’t end this strange journey yet. If I make it through, the reason won’t be fear. It will be disgust.