the things i will not do;
i don't know who you are.
i don't know why i picked you up.
i don't know why i paid 1TL for you, and i why i keep you in a pile of other found photos.
i will not write a story about you. i will not discuss the knee-high socks, the chair, the round faces, the white collars, the painted nails, the time on the watch. i will not tell you to take a look at the vase and the silk flowers, the porcelain pieces, the encyclopedias, the leather strap around the ankle, the 1955 inscribed in black ink in the top right corner. i will not speculate about the father, so clearly missing, and i will not mention the black dress and the wedding ring.
http://www.meryemyildiz.com/2014/12/04/the-things-i-will-not-do/
ghost lovers;
november lost in little glass jars, sprouting words and things.
***
as with every other girl from her generation, she owned a small pink jewellery box. the outside was covered in soft, faux velvet; the inside was cushioned in soft, faux satin. when she opened it, a dainty ballerina spun on herself—a pirouette, in fourth position—, to a familiar music box melody. there was a minuscule, oval mirror behind her, and as she danced it seemed as though she was only dancing for herself. eventually, the music stopped playing and the ballerina lost her will to twirl.
the girl never kept any jewellery there, for she was just a child, and the jewellery she wore was on her at all times: delicate hoops with turquoise stones; a thin, perpetually tangled gold chain; copper barrettes. in her jewellery box, she only kept a perry ellis perfume sample she had torn out of a magazine. she rubbed it on her green wool sweater and her wrists frenetically before she went outside, eager to please one clueless boy.
she doesn’t remember when she got the jewellery box or when she lost it. it was one of those things that were a part of her childhood, until she was no longer a child and it was no longer a part of her. as she grew older, few things followed her around—a panda bear with a glued-on nose, a pierrot journal that no longer locked, paintings and drawings her mother had stuffed into a worn-out box.
on the beat;
it is hard not to eavesdrop on neighbouring conversations. the ear is tuned to seek patterns. once you learn a language, you cannot unlearn it. you go from noise to words, to gist to full sentences. suddenly the hum is no longer humming, the buzz is no longer buzzing, and you can no longer turn off the people around you.
***
"i'm sorry," the woman said, peering deep inside the other woman's body.
"it's okay," the other woman replied.
when a little piece of you is removed, she thought, you cannot follow that piece; you can only hope that it will be looked at carefully, with eyes that you yourself do not possess.
.http://www.meryemyildiz.com/2014/10/20/on-the-beat/
cut;
the older couple is telling the younger woman how they met.
they met in michigan. before they met, he had already planned to move to new york or california. she hoped he would pick new york. ("please pick new york, please pick new york.") it didn't really matter to him, though he preferred manhattan. ("it's changed since.")
they got engaged on christmas morning 1978 over the phone. ("it sort of just happened.") his mother got all choked up when he announced it over christmas dinner. they got married in march 1979. it was a simple, do-it-yourself wedding. there was a blizzard. it had been a cold winter.
they rented a u-haul not long after and moved to upstate new york. he had found a studio apartment walking around in a neighbourhood that he liked. it was cheap. ("so cheap.") they lived there for six to eight months, until they got their own place. that's when they became demolition experts. ("that's when we became demolition experts.")
the younger woman nods agreeably.
on expatriation;
do you have any friends there?
i do, i say, as if people need to be reassured, as if people cannot cope with the idea of my solitude, as if the question wasn't revealing their own fears of distance and seclusion.
http://www.meryemyildiz.com/2014/10/09/on-expatriation/
bougainvillea;
it is a record year for readiness. we are told to brace for golden light, for fire-darting steeds. there will be a wonderful celebration. it will be thrown out there, or thrown for us, even, knowing we will be there, waiting and ready. and so we are ready, and we wait. we get comfortable, until we reveal it all: a reflection of ourselves, or people's understanding of our difference. we are used to it—we have waited frequently, with no qualms and no regrets.
***
hüzün and sevinç come together at a fork in the road. we pause and hesitate to commit. we feel torn between the two. autumn is upon us; leaves are falling, petals have dried, a cold wind seeps under an auspicious sun. we realise we do not have to choose, and we need not always wait.
http://www.meryemyildiz.com/2014/10/03/bougainvillea/
talking to a wall;
i am talking to a wall. the wall is cracked, covered with chipped paint and mysterious indents. it has been standing there a while, waiting, aging. the wall is a shade of grey or blue, or grey-blue, the colour of clouds before a mid-week summer storm. if i look closely, i can see traces of fingertips left behind on the fractures. who left them there, the wall would not tell me. the wall says he does not remember how they got there, though it is hard for me to believe him when i know the wall has ears if not eyes, and the wall never forgot a single word i said.
waking up in a white room;
the page is blank, understandably so. all pages start blank, then end up filled with whatever you fill them with (water, sand, paper birds). sometimes the sentences make sense and bring purpose to our lives, sometimes they mean absolutely nothing at all. we find ourselves in one of those moments, where it could go either way, and i do not get to pick.
today is my birthday. i am thirty-three years old, symmetrically-bound. a song everyone has forgotten comes to mind. it is not even that good a song. these days i prefer alan, singing "on my own."
happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday.
i want to wash my face, peel away layers of my skin. i do not particularly wish to be any younger or any older. i need to cut my nails, remove my dress. i need to close my eyes, pull on my lashes. i need to slip under, below; to sleep, to dream. i have seen no moon, but heard the cries of too many seagulls. they take a long time to retire in the night. they do not believe in dark hours, not with so many lights on. we know how it is. the salt in the air reminds us. we are not far behind, with our hair dry and brittle, eyes out to sea.
http://www.meryemyildiz.com/2014/06/30/waking-up-in-a-white-room/
the roses have dried;
ıslak mendil var mı?
i see feet moving under the table and i think it is a cat. it could be a cat—we are outside, where cats roam freely, abundantly. i haven't yet seen a cat in this courtyard though, too busy they are finding places to hide from the sun.
a group of women talk about their grandchildren. there is a lack of wind. we feel the air stick to our skin and form a second skin. we wait for a breeze to undress us, but nothing happens. the roses have dried, the leaves hardly move and the trees no longer bend. it is the beginning of a long, hot summer.
a thin sliver of silver wrapped around my wrist holds my veins captive.
coffee rings inside a cup tell of time and pauses, conversations and silences.
after a moment, we are ready to set out again.
http://www.meryemyildiz.com/2014/06/16/the-roses-have-dried/
she kept her eyes open;
that morning, she dreamt. she dreamt she was shot point blank and lay dying. as she cried with her hands on her wound, three words came out of her mouth. they were familiar words, deep-rooted. she learned to speak with them. they were never not known to her. in time, she came to carefully dismiss them—a necessary exercise in autonomy—but that morning in her dream, she could not silence her voice.
three words, three syllables.
that morning in her dream, she wailed and she uttered the words over and over again in spite of her, as if to say, you will die, but not without these words flooding your last breath; as if to say, you will die, but in your one final gasp, you will compensate for all the times you could not speak while you were living.
a contraction of sorts.
in the end, it was not clear what she saw. she kept her eyes open til she gave up the ghost, but it followed her straight to the grave.
http://www.meryemyildiz.com/2014/06/11/she-kept-her-eyes-open/
in a life underwater;
seven years ago, in a life underwater.
half a bottle of wine on the first night. half a bottle of wine on the second night. a bottle of wine on the third night (hello, argentina!), and you are starving.
you cannot sleep without a seashell on your ear and a seahorse sigh down your throat. you think you can take away the hook from your gums but they are still digging at it, you are still starving, and stainless steel is your only aftertaste—trusty, and unequaled.
http://www.meryemyildiz.com/2014/06/05/in-a-life-underwater/
ashes;
i cannot remember the last conversation we never had. it was around a fire, a summer night, with bugs of lightning and flies of blood fussing around us, infatuated as they were with my left shoulder. i cannot remember what we talked about as you may not have been there. you were elsewhere or in my thoughts, moving on to the rhythms of my undercurrents.
the house was behind us, or more so behind me. the living room light was still on, bright and unwavering. there was a pair of black pants on the living room floor. we could see them through the murky windows, like a sleeping dog lying. i do not know what the pants were doing there all crumpled up by the sofa. they were not yours. they could have been mine, though it is hard to tell when we quietly discard and leave so many things behind.
sitting by the fire with the flies and the embers doubling as lightning, i thought about the conversation we were not having, the one i would not remember. i flipped over my left hand and looked at the lines. a bit of ash landed at the cross of fate and heart. you took your right hand out of your pocket and flicked away the lint that had gathered inside your black pants, the ones you were not wearing. your pressed your forefinger on the ashes, smearing them further into my palm. in the hollow of my hand lay the thickness of your absence. i scattered the dust away, until only your absence remained.
written then, rewritten now;
if i loved you before i met you, then surely i would miss you as much.
but how am i to know if there was no wave of an arm, if you never said hello?
i have never meant more than nothing to you, and that is all-encompassing. throwing wish coins into the well of our nonexistence, we revel in our ignorance of one another. our love carries on in busy crowds where elbows graze but do not touch, where breaths mingle with each other but are not swallowed, where our eyes cannot and will never meet.
there is no love as mighty as ours—
silent,
unaware—
and our absence is a testimony to our inessential devotion.
http://www.meryemyildiz.com/2014/05/23/written-then-rewritten-now/
the sidelines;
people walk by and it makes her feel exposed, though no one is paying attention, no one is looking. you walk by, and it's easy to keep your eyes on the road when you are headed somewhere, when you are in motion. in your passing, in your ambulation, you keep your eyes on the horizon, sharpened and undeviating. your eyes don't make it to the sidelines, and they don't catch sight of this blind spot wherein she sits quietly, feeling exposed with her too-dark lips.
she must sleep a while, she thinks.
she needs to watch her heart beat on the other side.
the lines, they remind her of cat scratches, though it's not because of you, it's because of her.
vocabulary;
czechoslovakia
every now and then, when my brother and i played hangman, we picked themes. one time, we chose countries. when my turn came, i knew i had a winning country in mind, a country full of the consonants we only guessed at the end, in desperation, long after we had ruled out s, t, r and l. i ran to the bedroom and looked at my pink old-fashioned alarm clock. the numbers had small glow in the dark dots next to them which no longer worked. at the back of the clock, below the lever, was a small inscription: "made in czechoslovakia." i memorized the letters, ran back to my brother, and wrote 14 low lines on the piece of paper. my brother guessed the word immediately. he had an alarm clock too, only his was black, and it still glowed in the dark.
frisky
i learned that the french word frisquet and the english word frisky meant two different things when, after drinking a lot of wine on a crisp summer night, i told my friend charles i was feeling the latter. in truth, i was feeling chilly; in hindsight, i was probably feeling both.
tryst
i did not know what tryst meant until april 21, 2000, at noontime. i learned the word tryst before i learned the word frisky.
toboggan
there was a young boy, a loner—he got to school early, when the school buses hadn't yet arrived, and the school yard was still empty. he wore a brown winter suit and spoke like a young french boy. one morning, he approached me and asked me if i liked toboggans. i enjoyed sledding, but in my mind toboggans belonged in martine picture books, and i could never understand why one would use that word out loud, when there were other words that could be used. it was the only question the young boy asked me, and i never saw him after that.
writing/astute
after reading some of the things i wrote, brett taught me that writing only took one t, not two. i was young; he thought i was astute. i thought so too, even though i misspelled writing, and i didn't know what astute meant until he told me that i had that quality in me. i appreciated his delicate, discerning eyes.
he loved the water;
he loved the water. it made him incredibly happy. he loved the water, but it was dangerous to live so close to the river. he could cross the road and walk to the shore and fall right in. he didn't know how to swim, the current was too strong, it would overtake him in an instant. he went swimming sometimes, but he always stayed in the shallow end, covered head to toe in orange floats. water brought the brightest smile on his face.
he not only loved the water, he loved all liquids. he could swallow any of them, so long as they were within arm's reach. he loved pop and fruit juices the most. he even had a short stint with turpentine, though it was short-lived, and he got his stomach pumped immediately afterward. he wasn't too fond of prune juice, though—even he knew its purpose, elemental.
we lost him, once. the latch on the backyard gate was left unhooked, and though the backyard was full of able-eyed uncles, aunts and cousins, we lost him. we couldn't find him. we thought he might have gone to the river, and we panicked. we knew he would never know how to ask for help. he didn't have the words. he never knew the words, and only we knew how to interpret his wails. we could be a second too late.
but we found him.
poolside, three neighbours down.
and at that moment we loved him even more than he would ever love the water.
sometimes i sleep;
when i breathe you close to my lips
in dreams my sigh feeds you.
(we knew it for the best,
we knew it for the worst.)