Poyraz
There was a poem I used to know by heart when I was a child… Now, when I look back, I realize I've forgotten the final lines. In that poem, it says, "When the vineyards are watered, a single tear falls from your eyes." Tears never flowed from my eyes throughout my life. But every time she cried, I cried for myself. Deep down, I was always helpless in front of her. Whenever she tossed her hair and scolded me, I blamed myself; every time she hated me, I hated myself just as much. There was nothing lovable about me—neither my state nor my soul. Poyraz was never someone to be loved. If he had been, he wouldn't have grown up in an orphanage, beaten and bruised.
Poyraz was never someone to be valued; if he were, he wouldn't have broken her heart.
Poyraz was never someone to empathize with. He was always the one who didn't understand and wasn't understood.
And now, Poyraz was standing in front of Sinem, his knees trembling.
As I looked into her broken eyes, her screaming, my eyes trembled with something. Deep within, the corners of my eyes ached. But I had grown so used to not crying that I silently watched her pull out her IV, come toward me, and slap me with her trembling hand. When my eyes closed for a brief second as if pulling me away from the world, it felt like a hallucination passed through the darkness. I was a terrible man. Yet I had never cheated on her.
As she shouted every insult she could think of at me, she looked as if she were on the verge of a breakdown.
When I looked into her eyes, I saw how disgusting of a person I was.
I only let her hurt me.
Then the door slammed shut in my face without letting me say a single word, and that girl called Asya pushed me harshly outside. People passing by in the hallway looked at me—kicked out and discarded. For a moment, I felt like I was exposed enough for everyone to see my helplessness. My phone rang persistently, but I didn't even bother to check it: Selin.
It was as if all the helplessness and hatred from my past had been projected onto her.
While I always believed I was too big to fit into this vast family that abandoned me and felt alone, my sister thought the same. Like me, she never fit anywhere; no wind ever showed her the way home. Because we had no home. We had shelters, because we were always at war. We had knives, because we always had to defend ourselves. We had thorns, because we always had to scare others away. We didn't grow up with toys because we were never more than puppets in the hands of life.
When the phone kept ringing and I was already annoyed, Sinem's screaming almost pierced my eardrums. Disgusted with myself, I turned my back and rejected the call by hitting the red button. As I tried to distract myself by fiddling with the ring on my thumb, people walking by were looking at me. In each gaze, it felt like the disgusting, shameless person I was got dragged into the light.
I hated myself.
Because I didn't know any different.
The pounding on the door, the nurses passing by me to enter Sinem's room with a syringe, and the shrillness of her screams hurt me so much that—for a moment—I genuinely wanted to change.
Could I… change?
Could people change?
The antidepressants, the psychiatric pills—I wasn't getting better.
Was I rotten at the core?
Was I truly worthless, unlovable, not even worthy of being looked at?
I staggered down the empty hallway, past people in nurse and doctor uniforms.
I had never seen death before—only those who were shattered...
Only those I had shattered...
Only myself, shattered...
People looked at me strangely. Maybe it was because of my lifeless expression or the weirdness of my walk... I didn't use alcohol or smoke. But the pills I took caused strange changes in my mood and physical state. Especially when I felt helpless... Especially in front of her...
Though truthfully, there hadn't been a single moment when I didn't feel helpless in front of her.
But why?
Why was I hurting her so deeply?
Why couldn't I understand her?
Why, despite feeling so deeply, was I making her sick instead of healing her?
Who was I to shatter her heart like this?
What right did I have?
A notification appeared on my phone. At the sound of the alert, I turned and lifted the phone in my right hand.
Her name was on the screen. My sister's… That person torn from the past, someone I never really knew, never truly met, yet someone doomed to be a part of my fate: Selin.
"Come to the seaside, the weather's nice," she had written. Was that the only reason she was calling me?
Or was it to tell me again about what her stepparents had put her through today?
Even though she had grown up, couldn't she protect herself by now?
Right… One can't protect themselves from their own parents.
Another notification flashed on the screen: "Aren't you coming?"
I imagined her looking at me with a needy expression.
I didn't pity needy people, but I always felt helpless in front of them.
Was that pity, though? Or did I just not know what to call it?
I swiped the notification to the right and looked at the name at the top of the message list: Sinem.
My fingers moved toward the keyboard: "Selin is my sister..."
I typed it, then deleted it. Would that be explaining myself to her? Would I look helpless in front of her? Fear burned my heart like a lit fuse. Was I giving her an account? Who was Sinem? If she didn't exist, could I even live in this vast world? I felt a growing anger toward myself. I was killing her... Not in a single night—but in a thousand nights...
My fingers moved again, to write something.
"I'm sorry..."
Those words felt so foreign.
And for what, for which one of the many things, does someone even apologize?
What was a mistake, what was an apology?
No one had taught me those...
But what if?
What if I apologized just once—what would happen?
For a moment, hesitating, I turned off the phone screen.
The messages made my stomach churn, because they needed a reply.
With a rebellious storm rising inside me, the idea of apologizing sank into dark waters.
As a child, apologizing had been the only way to avoid getting beaten up by older kids.
The person you apologized to had to be stronger than you, higher in rank.
I didn't know anything else.
I slid my phone into my pocket and watched the strange people passing by for a while.
A woman was tightly clinging to her husband's arm, and the man smiled with a sense of surrender coming from deep within.
At that moment, the world looked so strange to me.
I watched them for a while, involuntarily. Then they disappeared behind the gray glass door as two strangers. And with them, I felt like my own shadow withdrew from me too.
The air felt cold somehow. I started walking toward the exit door, my head aching. I stopped at random spots, watching people. What I wondered was how they lived.
My walking could no longer keep up with the thoughts racing in my mind. I wanted to be faster, to skip through time all at once. As soon as I stepped into the hospital garden, the sharp autumn air hit me. I made my way toward the car I had parked in the garage.
Soon I found it.
Moments later, sitting in the driver's seat, struggling to breathe under the seatbelt that imprisoned me, I was once again watching the people outside—especially the families.
A small boy trying to catch up behind his parents caught my attention.
Until I started the engine, I kept placing myself in that boy's position, strangely. He didn't seem to matter much to his parents. I barely managed to pull myself out of that role.
The engine started, I left the spot I had parked in and merged onto the main road.
At the traffic lights, I watched the pedestrians go by. They looked in such a hurry.
I wondered where they were trying to rush to. I couldn't find an answer, the lights turned green, I moved on. I could almost physically feel the friction of the tires on my skin.
Suddenly, I began to wonder what it would feel like not to be in this world.
It had never crossed my mind before.
This thought echoed in my head like a neurotic episode.
The psychiatrist had told me to make an appointment if I ever had suicidal thoughts.
But was this a suicidal thought—or just curiosity?
If it was curiosity, it was incredibly tempting, but I wasn't sure if it was worth thinking about.
The sting of Sinem's slap on my cheek felt like suicide sewn into my skin, stitch by stitch.
The cars were slow, the road was quiet, the traffic lights precise, and I couldn't understand the officers waiting to write tickets. Or rather, I couldn't understand anyone.
"Hey, watch where you're going!" someone shouted in this direction. The window was open. Instead of getting angry or responding, I just rolled it up.
The strange man's voice vanished behind the glass.
The images passing by in the rearview mirror were like the final, lifeless reflections in a dead man's eyes.
My phone vibrated.
Another message from Selin.
I pulled over. Before getting out, I stayed still for a while. The thought of writing something to Sinem, of telling her Selin was my sister, crossed my mind. Then suddenly, I froze. What would it even matter in the end? What difference was there between this and the idea of cheating on her with everything else I had done? I couldn't tell the difference.
Part of me wanted to call Sinem, to apologize for not wanting to tell her that Selin was my sister. But I couldn't do it. And honestly, I didn't even know why I didn't want to tell her. All I knew was that, moment by moment, I was drifting further away—from myself and from the rest of the world. The dull work at the ad agency no longer brought any satisfaction either. If I kept staying this silent, she would continue to believe I had really cheated on her. But if I hadn't done anything, why was I afraid of her thinking that?
Still, if I didn't tell her, and she believed I had...
Wouldn't that be my fault?
I unbuckled the seatbelt, opened the door, and stepped out.
The sea stretched endlessly in front of me, in all its deep blue vastness.
A few small ships were in sight.
Some people had come with cameras, taking photos of the view and enjoying the moment.
Their ability to immortalize the moment, while I felt obliged to ignore it, didn't seem fair to me.
The phone buzzed again.
"Are you here?" Selin had written, and I still couldn't bring myself to write a single message to Sinem explaining the situation. My fingers hovered over the phone, locked in place, waiting, then pulling back. The sound of the waves echoed in my ears.
The chirping of birds and the distant shouting reminded me with every second that I was on the coast. I couldn't find anything to do. I opened the messages. Sinem's name waited for me with a hint of hope.
"Write something," said the voice inside me.
"Just write something… even if you can't say sorry..."
Which I usually didn't.
I tapped on her name, entered the message screen. My fingers were numb from the cold. My whole body was numb along with my mind. The sea no longer existed—only Sinem did. A vision of her came to my eyes as if I were dying. Her smile, her lips, her eyes, her hair, and her scent...
"Hate me for an eternity," I wrote in the notes section of my phone. "Never forgive me, my honey fairy."