The Girl in the Tree

by Şebnem İşigüzel

Life itself is confused.

“Living in this damn country is enough to give you cancer.”

Suffering is like a jammed lock that gives you no end of trouble. But when you do finally get it to click open and for the briefest of moments you feel a sense of relief, suddenly you fall to pieces,

The world is made up of stories. If it wasn’t, life would be insufferable.

Sometimes kindness can bring about more harm than the most malevolent acts.

When we laugh, it helps us pull ourselves together, like how the wind carries something from one place to another. Laughter is the wind of the mind and soul—it picks you up and whisks you far away. Laughter signals that the place where you are now is no longer a good place to be. The wiring is fried. A belt has snapped. The brakes are overheating and you can’t stop.

Why are people born into the world? That’s easy. So they’ll have a story to tell. Some of us die before the story ends, some of us die long after the story has ended, and some of us die right at the very start.

almost fell to the ground but managed to grab hold of a branch at the last second. I wrapped my arms around it, wishing I’d had someone in life I could hug like that.

Streets, like life, are full of injustice.

Secrets, as I said, are bombs that crash into homes.

Fear me! And love me because you fear me. Love against your will. Love grudgingly. Because if you love something, it thrives. If you hate something, it dies. That

being able to speak is proof that you’re still alive.

Can’t the mind repeat itself again and again, like day turns into night which turns into day? Being alone and turned inward all my life matured me. But being overly mature is like what happens to a fruit that has over-ripened on the branch and starts to rot. I was rotting. My spirit was rotting. I was dying.

That wasn’t long ago. Just four years, to be precise, and yet so much has changed. How can life change so quickly? Or rather, how can it go to shit so fast?

Because you can’t live today without the past.

everyone splits up sooner or later. Who’s ever heard of love ending happily?”

Talking about the past is like chewing gum.

But that’s the only way we can exist—by talking about others, by seeing ourselves in their darkest moments and being afraid. We are secreted away not so much in the stories about the things we like, but the things we dislike. And that is precisely why we dislike them, because we know that, by shifting our position ever so slightly, we could be the protagonist of such stories.

Obsessing is dangerous; it’ll give you cancer in the end.

The best approach is to forget everything right away, because if you start thinking about things too much, you’ll get screwed twice over, and then what? Get well soon! What else can you say?

In order for a story to be a story, two people have to be involved in the plot.

Time is a key, not a remedy. With it, you can delve into the past and unlock doors that open onto rooms filled with things you couldn’t otherwise remember.

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

What the characters really do is give voice to our emotions, to the things that have had a profound impact on us. Writing is like looking in a mirror, but the face we see there isn’t our own. What we write doesn’t actually belong to us as the author. Rather, it comes from the depths of our being.”

It is inevitable that people will one day break their silence, but you can’t explain everything all at once. You must do it slowly, hearing your voice as you go along. And when you get started, it’s the voice of your emotions that speaks, not logic. That’s what this is all about. If logic gets the upper hand, things fall apart because it doesn’t have the power to heal.

We always have the strength to deal with whatever comes up in our lives.

Love enslaves others or it is a slave itself.

When you’re afraid, every sound is a sinister rustling.

“Never give up on your dreams. People can put up with hunger, but seeing their hopes dashed is a torment worse than any other.”

Forgetting doesn’t alleviate the pain we feel—remembering does.

How could they die like that? How is it that our loved ones die? How can they leave us like that, how can they just be wrenched from the world? The people we love can’t just die.

“Forgetting is the only way to get through life.”

“Fears exist so we can overcome them.”

You only really die when there isn’t a single person left on the earth who remembers you.”

And unhappy people wear their misery on their sleeves.

People create their own suffering.

That is the role that children play: they document the lives of their parents through what they remember about them.

Admiration, after all, is nothing more than envy that has been defeated and reined in.

That’s what hope is like. It doesn’t seep from our hearts, nor does it drain away like blood, for if it did, we’d die and that would be the end of us.

How long can we keep a secret before giving in to the temptation to whisper it to someone?

love is not for the timid. It demands courage. Love is courage.

The mind is the outer space we carry within. Nothing ever gets lost there.

“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.”

being free does not mean being able to do whatever you please. In my opinion, we don’t really understand the concept of freedom. We don’t have to be locked up to be imprisoned. In fact, we can be in a state of imprisonment even as we go around, visiting the places we want to see. It’s all in our minds. The entire world is a figment of our imaginations.

the world is full of injustice, and everyone gets their share of it. It’s inevitable.

The act of writing is like giving up control and going with the flow.”

People in love find each other.

“Being warm is happiness.”

How many politicians does it take to cut a ribbon?

Things can’t always be the way you want. They shouldn’t.