TE16 Turkish Delight

Letters to Shefkati all my heartache and rage surface. Some nights I end up at the beach, I wander. I shove my feet in pebbles, I watch the waters. See, pebbles and broken glass bits erode on the backs of waves, and turn into gem-like objects. Bottoms of glass bottles, those usually turn out to be the most precious looking ones. On the shore they resemble diamond medallions. When I take them out though, their spark fades away in seconds. Do you knowwhat else fades away that quick? Fractions of happiness I’ve been feeling, all these years. I find joy, somehow, and a split second later it freezes into this matte insignificance. A man without joy in his life is destined to be trapped in the darkness he fabricated. (That’s what killed my Uncle Nejdet too). I spend my entire shift bent over the table, focused on papers and their content, in a constant back pain, and at the end of each day I ask myself: What have I learned today? What made me laugh yesterday? The answer is consistently nothing… In agony, sometimes I take a look outside from the window, to the creeper covering the wall across. Its leaves have all turned red and orange nowadays. And in the corners of my square, there are poplar trees, which frankly I never understood why they were planted in the first place, while I pondered as I printed Shakespeare and Balzac- in the garden of a printing house funded by the state. These are what’s in front of me, they are my horizon. My experiences are translations of the same depressed states of mind. And that’s all there is, every day.

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