Bitmemiş Hikayeler

Bitmemiş hikayeler vardır.  Son sözü yoktur onların. Ne bir tebessüm bırakırlar yüzünüzde, ne bir damla gözlerinizde, ne de bir titreme dudaklarınızda. Onlar aynı zamanda hem yaşanmış hem yaşanmamıştırlar.  Sayfalarında hem en çok hissettiğiniz, en derine indiğiniz, en açılmayan kapıları açtığınız, hem de en  kızdığınız, yeri gelince vurup kırıp savurup savurduğunuz, yeri geldiğinde süt liman denize döndüğünüz ama sonu olmayan hikayelerdir. O yüzden de duygusu yoktur artık. Boşluktur hissi,  bir nevi ifadesizlik. Her sonu koymaya çalıştığınızda daha derin bir sessizlik daha bir tanımsız hale gelirler.

Gerek yoktur o hikayeleri bitirmeye çalışmaya. Belki de o hikayeler değil mutlu, acı bir sonu bile hak etmezler. Askıda kalmaya mahkumdurlar onlar. Hissizlikte kaybolmaya. O hikayelerin satır aralarına takılmamak gerekir çünkü o satırların arası sadece sizden bir şeyler almıştır. En güzel tarafları ise size yeni raflar yaptırtmışlardır, ve o raflardan başka bir gözlerle başka halde ama daha güçlü bakarsınız diğer hikayelere.

Bir kere duyduğunuz ama sonra bir daha asla dinleyemediğiniz şarkı gibidirler. Başkasında çok beğendiğiniz ama size hiç yakışmayan bir elbisedir bazen. Boğaz’da asla bir daha yakalayamadığınız bir akıntı, yarışta hiç bir daha aynı yönden esmeyen bir rüzgar edasındadırlar.  Küçükken misafirlikte ayıp olmasın diye ne olduğunu bilmeden yediğiniz bir yemek ya da nerden alındığı bilinmeyen kırılmış bir oyuncaktırlar. Onların da tutunulabilecek bir sonları yoktur.  Zamanında gelmiş, kendini göstermiş ve süresi dolunca geldikleri gibi gitmiştirler.

Bitmemiş hikayeler vardır. Sonu yoktur onların, boşluktur onlar. Bitmemesi gereken hikayelerdir. Akışın içinde yok olmaları için son sözü olmaz onların.

Bedel

Kalemlerimi kaldırmıştım. Çok vakit  geçmiş üzerinden, fark etmedim. Küçüklüğümden beri çok kalemim olmuştu.  Ve hep farklı bir bağım olmuştu onlara; değişik kokularda, farklı yerlerden farklı hikayelerle her renkte topladığım kalemlerim. Hepsinin yeri, görevi ayrıydı, bittiklerinde ise hiç üzülmezdim. Görevini tamamlamış bayrağı bir başkasına teslim etmiş olurlardı.  Sırası gelen bazen daha sivri olur, bazen daha kalın, bazen daha renkli, bazen daha duygusal  ya da daha acımasız. Ama bu sefer bitirmiştim onları, nedeni elbette ki vardı. Kendime bile anlatamadığım henüz.

Her noktanın arkasında büyük bir duygu ayakta durur. Noktadır o, derin ve sabit. Kutularına koymuştum onları. Çantamın içinden hiç eksilmeyen, her seyahate taşıdığım ufak ama her tarafı fermuarlı bez kalem kutusunu bile almaz olmuştum yanıma. Hangi fermuarı çekseniz başka bir tarafından başka bir kaleme açardı o dünyasını. İçindeki minik sulu boyası kutusu ve küçük parmağım uzunluğundaki fırça ile çocukluğumu yanımda taşımama yardım eden renkli kuru kalemlerim vardı orda. Ben onlara “ara” vermiştim, onlar defterlerimi terk etmişlerdi ama o boş sayfaların arasında en anlatamayan yine ben olmuştum çünkü sözcüklerim yoktu yanımda.

Geri dönmek terk etmekten daha zor aslında. Daha güçlü hisseder kendini terk eden. Yaşanmış veya istediğin gibi yaşanmamış bir şeyi bırakıp gitmek, ne yaşayacağını bilmediğin bir şeye dönmekten daha çekicidir. Daha güvendedir terk eden. Bir adım öndedir o bıraktığı şeye karşı, bir tık yukarıda. Hep bir nedeni vardır, kimi zaman da bahanesi, hep bir kendini koruması. Terk eden asla zırhlarını indirmez, indirmesini de bilmez, öğrenmemiştir o. Kalkanları olduğunu bile bilmez. 

Geri dönüş hep buruk olur az da olsa acı verir o tatlı bilindik tanıdıklık altında. Çünkü bıraktığın hiçbir şey aynı değildir, ne el yazın, ne cümlelerin ne sevdiklerin ne de sen.  Bitmeyen değişim her an yeni bir şeyler getirdiği gibi hep de bir şeyler alır götürür, bazen iyiyi bazen kötüyü bazen duyguları. Zaman hiçbir şeyi sıfırlamaz. İyileştirir, sarar, doğruları gösterir ama en dipte hep saklarsın. Ufacık bir iz bile olsa o hep seninle kalır, tatlı-ekşi acı-baharatlı bir anı olarak. Ve anıdan öteye gidemez. Geri dönüş zordur, çünkü geri döndüğün geri dönmek istediğin değildir çoğu zaman, son kaldığın yerden başlamazsın.

İki zordur hayatta terk etmek ve geri dönmek. İkisi de cesaret ister, bir kıvılcım bekler, kendini duymanı ister. Her ikisinde de mutlaka bir bedel ödersin. Bir şekilde yine kelimelerin arasındayım, küs veya barışık ama buradayım. Şimdi hepsi dizili karşımda, oynamamı bekliyorlar benden biraz çekingen biraz kırgın biraz kızgın. Bıraktığım gibi değiller, ben de bildikleri ben değilim. Tanıdığız ama uzağız birbirimize.

Thin Lines

He asked me the other day why I wasn’t writing anymore. I said I don’t have time for it. He said no, you’re happy that’s why. I was challenged with the direct, right in my face answer. Actually I felt it more on my forehead, like a small rubber band. Bang! Hurtful.  Was that true? Do I only run to words when I have misery? Yes, misery likes company, but do I as well? And what’s the level of that pain and the sorrow that makes me pick up a pen or open up a fresh page on Word? Is my safety place in between my fingers, hidden behind the letters?

It’s a thin line. A thin, skinny line. I think I write, I am able to write as long as I walk on that line. When I get to have a view of the both sides, feel the fears and the joys of the two, when I struggle to keep the balance. I question the two edges, I trip over, stand up again on the line and keep moving. But when I fall into  in one of the lopes and I get captured, the words get stuck between my throat and lungs; and my hands, my brain and my heart can’t get connected. Even if any of these two creates a way to find each other, because they betray the third one, they don’t function as much and well as they do. Until I jump back on the line, I wait, watch and listen. I feel. I feel deeper. Then when I find myself back on it, I start walking as a new me, an evolved me; with all the things, all the feelings, all the new tastes I learned while in the lope, I recreate the path.

Life is about thin lines. Reality is on those lines.  Magic is on those lines. Dreams, pains, laughs, dissappointment and pleasure are on them. Love is on them. It’s a thin line between sun and rain, where in between rainbow appears. A thin line between black and white, where all the grays happen, perception and vision mature. Bitterness and sweetness has a thin line,  transition stands strong and powerfull on it, you know what change is, how change takes place. Love and hate’s thin line makes you feel every inch of your body, every cell and every unexpected unknown unnamed feeling you never had any idea that they even existed. Between hot and cold, you learn about danger. In a sentence’s words, you see how a misunderstanding can hurt anyone. Religion and faith, spirituality are on that thin line among a Christmas Carol and a posture you stay in Yoga. It’s a thin line between leaving and staying, for understanding, for courage, for responsibility and patience. Another thin line between a bar of orange and almond dark chocolate Lindt bar, and a fresh organic red apple, where you learn about determination, promises and willpower. Freedome stands firm and still on one of those lines, back and forth along the feel of a free fall and hitting the ground hard. A child sits on it, trying to grow up and trying to stay naive, creative and fearless inside you.

Life is a thin line itself.

Without any rules.

Unexpected. Thrilling. Even threatening.

Just a thin skinny line.

The Guy In Me

There is a guy in me, living inside. A guy who takes the lead and rules the show sometimes, who doesn’t listen to anyone except himself. It’s that guy who gets up from his sleep during the soccer games, makes me roar, wants to climb up the mountains, bleeds and gets dirty, and breathes after his adventures and walks on. Who makes me put on my masculine boots, baggy carpenter pants, my hard hat on and walks me around the construction site with dozens of construction workers and who turns me into their best friend. It’s him again who brings me to a bar to have a drink with people somehow foreign to me, gets me tipsy and drives me home safe. That same guy is responsible for me to think and say that pink is very girlie.

He wants to empower the woman in me, fights with her time to time. The woman in me awakens at the end of the games, willing to see my favorite player jerseyless. This woman shows her face and grace at business meetings, with a touch of make-up, stockings and a dress. The guy wants me in a suit and a white shirt, but also accompanies her there in me. He is shut down unless she needs to get tough with others and he shows himself as my thrown sketch-pen or as a mug harshly put back on the table. She shows up when I am ordering coffee, does her trick without me even realizing it, gets free stamps on my Nero card under the counter from the cashier guy.

It’s that very same guy who doesn’t let me fall in love with men. That’s why the woman in me lives love with places, objects, in between the lyrics of a song or with a paragraph in a book. He gives me craves to watch Hangover, wants me to be one of them while the woman desires Bradley Cooper madly. The woman wants candlelights and dinner; the guy just wants dinner-a juicy burger with French fries and a beer on the side. She wants to smell flowers and hear seducing compliments when sipping her wine, but he is totally happy with just the taste of the wine. She wants her car washed and gas tank full in her car, he whispers in my ear telling me to do it all by myself. He keeps a helmet in the trunk of the same car while she needs her mini-dress for an emergency night-out. He wants his son to be an F1 pilot, where the woman in me imagines her son exactly looking like her husband and be proud. He is the simple in me while the woman questions, stirs and blends, and turns me into a mess-a hot mess- and disturbs.

Because of this guy living in me, I don’t make any sense to the rest of my gender sometimes. The woman in me wants to be caressed time-to-time, cry maybe in certain situations. The guy is so strong and likes to rule her, I scream instead as he wants. The guy in me wants my hair pulled back, headboard cracked and random bruises. The guy in me makes me go running when it’s pouring down outside, or go kick the trainers ass in a kick-box class while the girl yearns for her yoga class, calms me down, followed by a girlie chat and a piece of desert. The woman fights with the guy because she feels she neither is heard nor understood-what a surprise! The guy in me wants to live my life limitless, make it priceless, tasteful, on the edge passionately without thinking, by just doing, by just how he feels in that specific moment. The woman wants balance, calmness, tender and clarity. Her face being recognized, touched. It is nothing like my two rising signs’, Aries and Pisces’s fight. This is a different fight, a different contradiction, challenge in me. While they argue and until one wins, I live by the guy, because he is my left side. Living the way he wants me to, with a rush of feelings, but feelingless. He keeps me on the right side of wrong. Just the way the heat, the excitement and the disappointment of the moment tell me to, without boundaries, until they figure it out for me.

Missing Keeps Love Alive

Sitting here, watching you wake up and fall asleep -you don’t even like to sleep, we are similar in that way- I can only feel. Not think much, but feel. What it has been about you, about me. What you’ve given me introduced me to and hide from me. Who you’ve turned me into and how I became the me that I am now, without even realizing it, knowing it. How you grew inside me, settled in me and how I absorbed it all; filtered it sometimes, sometimes resisted it until I learned to say yes or no.

When I thought you were going to leave me -and yes you played your games sometimes-, and believed that I’d never find you again, I always had that feeling on the back of my neck, that ticklish warm touch in my breathing which ran through my body and shine out of my eyes.

You taught me moments. To understand them, to cherish them and to let them happen to me. Breathless ones, complicated ones, delightful ones. Sad and angry ones: the ones that I wanted to hit the wall or throw my always-big-and-heavy-for-my-petite-size-bag at something- unfortunately fashion snobs and magazines judge me for my choice of bags.- Countless and sometimes indescribable moments. When the moment passed and the high was gone in those, I was left to deal with the feelings, with that rush or saddling afterwards: How to move on, pass it along, add those to other passages. I learned how to heal or hurt sometimes.

I met you at the corner coffee shops, under the traffic lights and during subway rides. Some nights you were there with me playing Wii at a friend’s house -obviously me constantly winning! - Over cooking dinners or on a bar stool with strangers. I dated you at a concert, in a chick boutique trying to find the best dress. I rediscovered you in an art piece that I watched for hours trying to seek answers to my questions. Some days your presence was in my apartment after a long work day with a sketchbook on my laps, a magazine on the couch and a TV show behind the lid candles lights and a diet peach Snapple sitting on the coffee table. You were real, vivid, as alive as I am and as true as it could be. I was transformed by you and with you.

I resisted you at the very beginning. I resisted you so much that I had even blinded myself for a period time. I didn’t want to make my reality yours and didn’t want to see yours. In my defense, I had no defense. I guess it was self-protection. Perhaps my ego –oh the biggest enemy of human kind-. But what I was protecting myself from had nothing to do with you, it wasn’t about you. I was only putting up those safety guards of mine because I was scared. Mostly scared of the things I could do and losing myself.

There is no end to happiness, to new experiences, disappointments, heart aches, new visions, falling in love, out of love, panic attacks, chocolate, tears, and laughs. No end to any beginnings. There are no limitations, to how one can feel, live, indulge and share. No finish line to learning. Because life goes on, moves, accelerates, descents, but never pauses –there are time outs though-. Life grows, branches out. Letting go is a part of it. It is a part of life when you need to, when you have to, but letting go isn’t forgetting. Neither replacing nor erasing. Letting go is just freeing you from that fragment or emotion. Letting go is sometimes while moving on, grabbing that feeling, blinking moments, your past-present-future, putting it in a thick skinned balloon and hiding it deep inside somewhere between your heart and soul.

That’s exactly what I did. I hid you in me and every time I need that uplifting, dazzling, and breaking the bonds energy and every time I feel lost, I let the balloon out a little, and wherever I am, I inhale that. I smell you, absorb it and walk on as you’ve always shown me. It gets easier because I let you and myself free.

Missing keeps love alive. And that’s why even if I cheat on you with other places; you’ll always be my city of blinding lights…
-it’s not where you’re born, it’s where you belong-

30 Rules Of 30!

1. It starts to wrinkle around your eyes. Yes, those eyes of yours which you used the cream your mother recommended for years and protected from the sun, the wind, sleep deprivation etc. It’s pretty harsh.
2. You understand yourself better, you listen to yourself more and you become more aware of yourself. You become a bit more positively selfish. Or another way of saying this is you value yourself more.
3. Time goes by so fast. You get trapped sometimes thinking that your life is running ahead of you, but actually all you need to do is to stop and look around.
4. Hangovers become hard to get over.
5. When you skip the 20s sections of the magazines, it hurts a little.
6. You forget where you put things, if you took your vitamins or if you locked your car etc. Your short term memory betrays you more.
7. Your favorite soccer players are younger than you.
8. You start reading more about Botox and new techniques for anti-aging.
9. You prefer to get seat tickets instead of standing up all night long for your favorite bands.
10. You have to double the sets in your workout for your tricepts muscles.
11. It becomes harder to remember every story for every single hair that turns white.
12. You understand people better. Or the truth is you don’t spend that much time trying to understand them. You just accept things and people the way they are.
13. The things you couldn’t do in your 20s become more important in your 30s.
14. Even though you knew before, your expectations of others and life become less. But the best part is, your dreams become more alive.
15. You learn not to plan ahead in life. You still do put certain deadlines for certain things, but you know how to limit them and how not to get affected by them.
16. You understand men better.
17. When life gives you apples, you accept them as apples and deal with them that way.
18. You start cleaning your Karmas.
19. The thrill you used find in your 20s, becomes harder to find.
20. These three things become easier: When in doubt leave it out. When in doubt paint white. When in doubt cut it short.
21. You learn your Mantras better.
22. An old friend’s shoulder, saves the day and makes you forget all your sorrow.
23. You detox more: your home, your life, your cell phone, your fridge, your wallet, your drawers, your heart, your mind, your sketchbook etc.
24. You realize that you won’t grow any taller and you start getting stools for each room that are full of high shelves.
25. You dig the question of where is home.
26. You learn to breathe better and right. You practice more.
27. If you don’t sleep in your bed, you wake up in pain the next morning.
28. Even though it’s hard to apply, you learn not to be sad for anything or anyone for more than 24 hours –thanks to that special person who taught me this-
29. Your high heels become more important; for a date, for a meeting, for a crazy night out etc.
30. You understand your parents more and it doesn’t matter how good and close it has been, you develop a more mature relationship with them. But you still cannot understand why they never stop worrying about you.

Bonus:

The Four Principles of Spirituality you learn in your late 20s, rules your 30s:

Whomsoever you encounter is the right one, whatever happened is the only thing that could have happened, each moment in which something begins is the right moment and whatever is over, is over.

Chi è che ti parla?

It's about a girl. A regular girl. It's any other girl you might run into in the grocery store shopping for zucchinis, at the steps of a church running inside to burn a candle for making a wish (no, she doesn't like the electrical ones, takes the whole spirit and the ceremony away), at a soccer game while ditching a few girl friends to support the boys.

It's a girl with a heart. A girl who left a part of that heart in New York City and she knows that she will never be able to have it back. It's not about a special girl. A random girl you can see when you lift your head up and look.

It's about a girl who sometimes lives fights and contradictions within herself (thanks to Gahl it's now known why), loving red but cannot let go of her blues. Crazy but aware of her principles, spiritual enough to make herself translucent but logical to handle judgements. She plays and burns in fire because she is the fire, finds herself in the middle of storms because her thoughts are stormy. As much as land, sea is her home too, among the other three places. It's about a girl whom you can find in lost and found. The very same girl who will come back in her next life as a rock star or a dancer.

Peace is sometimes in scented candles, in between words, in savasana after a practice. Comfort is watching the sky, flipping through photographs, resting on one's shoulder. Anger is transported in a place, in a teardrop, by a piece of chocolate. Life is at a family dinner, in a extra dirty martini with three olives and on the gas pedal of a car. It's about a girl who lives life and learns life in its moments.

It's about a girl Bono knows and talks about, too.

"I know a girl who's like the sea

I watch her changing every day for me
One day she's still, the next she swells
You can hear the universe in her sea shells

No no line on the horizon, no no line

I know a girl with a hole in her heart
She said infinity is a great place to start
Time is irrelevant, it's not linear
Then she put her tongue in my ear"