The Island of Missing Trees

by Elif Shafak

But legends are there to tell us what history has forgotten.

So many times in the past she had suspected that she carried within a sadness that was not quite her own.

People assume it’s a matter of personality, the difference between optimists and pessimists. But I believe it all comes down to an inability to forget. The greater your powers of retention, the slimmer your chances at optimism.

It is a curse, an enduring memory.

A contemplative girl who had always preferred to live in her own mind but had become all the more distant and withdrawn since her mother’s loss.

As you aged you cared less and less about what others thought of you, and only then could you be more free.

Because that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.

Humans are strange that way, full of contradictions. It’s as if they need to hate and exclude as much as they need to love and embrace.

And then they were silent once again, drifting back to the painful place they both shared but could only occupy separately.

It must all be written in history books, though each side will tell only their own version of things.

You don’t share a language, you think, and then you realize, grief is a language. We understand each other, people with troubled pasts.’

‘There are moments in life when everyone has to become a warrior of some kind. If you are a poet, you fight with your words; if you are an artist, you fight with your paintings … But you can’t say, “Sorry, I’m a poet, I’ll pass.” You don’t say that when there’s so much suffering, inequality, injustice.’

Islands had a way of deceiving people into believing that their serenity was eternal.