Walking on the Ceiling

by Aysegül Savas

I understood that all anyone can do in the midst of darkness is retreat to their own, bright landscapes.

it is a privilege to have a story, to know your own narrative as surely as you know your name.)

The coincidences always amazed me even if I knew that they were neither miracles nor revelations but the result of looking at the world deliberately and searching for connections.

“There are so many old fools,” he said. “They continue doing their foolish old things, growing blinder by the day.”

I enjoyed being this other person, away from Istanbul, surrounded by people who found me enchanting, whom I’d learned to enchant with fictionalized versions of myself.

She’s starved for things she didn’t really get as a child.

I also knew that things don’t loosen their grip so easily, with a single utterance.

This idea of a palace has stayed with me, even if I believe it is too neatly constructed to shed light on the devious ways of memory. Its innocent sleight of hand is only in the amplification of what is remembered, when the truth has so much more to do with hiding and forgetting.

What’s left of the memory is only the knowledge that I’m no longer in possession of something I once knew intimately. It is useless, this residue of absence.

There are many ways of hurting, without words. It’s silence that shapes us.

Stories have their own logic. For one thing, a story can only be told once it has an ending. For another, it builds, and then unravels. Each element of a story is essential; its time will come and it will ultimately mean something. In this way, stories are accountable, because they can look you in the eye.

What mattered most was that memory was stripped of bitterness and retold with joy. And once it took root, it grew bigger, this story of how things had been. It was a voice speaking through us, inexhaustible, it seemed, past resentment and sorrow. Past all that could not be resurrected.