The Girl in the Tree

by Şebnem İşigüzel

People are nothing more than the accumulated stories of others.

Life itself is confused. Even Robert Pattinson, the vampire, said, “I’m definitely very confused.” So be it. I have a poster of him in my room. As I was leaving, we exchanged glances. He didn’t look at me as if to say, “Wait! Where are you running off to?” To the contrary, he seemed to be saying, “Well, fuck off already!”

Unease weighs you down, like melancholy or grief. It is an emotion, and an unpleasant one at that.

the ignorant hordes flock to that which is vapid and spiritless.

But if you ask me, literature shouldn’t keep up with the times. It should linger in the fields and pastures where Jane Austen walked with her skirts trailing behind her in the grass and in Ahmet Hamdi’s rooming house, Dostoyevsky’s gambling halls, and Tolstoy’s farms, tearooms, and the train station to which he fled.

Maybe this world, this life, is hell. Maybe this world is the hell of another world.

Sadly, life is like that: shaped by things that are the furthest from our minds, things that we don’t imagine could ever happen.

There is nothing more humiliating, degrading, and dehumanizing than trying, without success, to find work.

What I’m trying to say is that, when you’re a child, sometimes you can tell that something is amiss but it doesn’t really make sense to you, and then years later as you think over it—like I’m doing now—you pick up on something. That is, of course, if you believe that intuition is more important than logic. Otherwise, logic will have driven it from your thoughts long ago.

Nature knows how things should be done—it’s people who spoil the game.

When our night drifts off to sleep, the sounds of the other night awaken.

Here’s the thing: we can’t live our lives by forgetting. All we can do is transform our past experiences into something else. And that’s what we should do, turning them into memories that won’t weigh on our hearts or drag us down into misery. While it may be true that stories of suffering cannot be transformed into wondrous tales in the way that coal becomes diamonds, if we go on living in spite of them, we ourselves can become something else, like a treasure chest, or an oyster containing a huge pearl.

“Some things settle into our thoughts and feelings because that is the very place they need to be. That’s why you can’t get rid of them. They exist to be remembered, as they are the bedrock of our stories and that which we call life.”

“You don’t have to be leading a crowd of protesters to be a hero. When there’s a bloodbath going on in your country, the greatest form of heroism and rebellion is to sit down at your desk every morning and write.”

Once a person becomes ill in the mind or spirit, doesn’t everything in the world become a sign of madness, no matter how trivial or slight?

“Freedom and love are two of the most likely yet most improbable things in the world. They have the greatest chances of being realized, but they are experienced the least. While they are the most difficult things to experience, what could be easier than obtaining either of them? If you flee, you taste freedom. Even a stupid bird can manage that. Sorry, birds.”

Let me tell you, if the women, children, and youth in a given geography are suffering, that’s a shitty place. If I were you, I’d flee without looking back, but then again, the ghost of this place will track you down and find you no matter where you go. No one can escape their own reality. The realities of our countries become our personal realities, infecting our private lives, our loves, and our friendships. It’s a terrible, terrible thing!