The Island of Missing Trees

by Elif Shafak

Pain, there was so much pain everywhere and in everyone.

The only difference was between those who managed to hide it and those who no longer could.

When the soul departs the body, it ascends towards the firmament, and on its way there it stops to watch all that lies below, unaffected, unmoved, untouched by pain.

underground, linked to fungi and

With a bit of light you can make us do so much. With a promise of love …

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.

Where do you start someone’s story when every life has more than one thread and what we call birth is not the only beginning, nor is death exactly an end?

For it is a land without borders, a lover’s body. You discover it, not at once, but step by anxious step, losing your way, your sense of direction,

I suppose it is a bit like being jet-lagged. Day and night patterns are thrown into disarray, leaving me in a perpetual haze. I will adjust eventually, but it will take me a while.

Every time he felt this fear, he gently pushed it down into a place in the basement of his soul where he kept all uncontrolled and painful thoughts. He tucked it next to the memories of his father.

‘Fine, but when you are, just remember, foam love is interested in foam beauty. Sea love seeks sea beauty. And you, my heart, deserve sea love, the strong and profound and enchanting type.’

For kindness always is – direct, naive, effortless.

At the end of the day, we all remember for the same reason we try to forget: to survive in a world that neither understands nor values us.

family traumas are like thick, translucent resin dripping from a cut in the bark. They trickle down generations. They ooze down slowly, a flow so slight as to be imperceptible, moving across time and space, until they find a crack in which to settle and coagulate.

‘Everybody is always raving on about love – all the songs, movies. I get it, it’s cute, but you don’t build a life on cute.

Love is the bold affirmation of hope. You don’t embrace hope when death and destruction are in command. You don’t put on your best dress and tuck a flower in your

hair when you are surrounded by ruins and shards. You don’t lose your heart at a time when hearts are supposed to remain sealed, especially for those who are not of your religion, not of your language, not of your blood.

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.’

what mattered was not the final destination but to be on the move, searching, changing, becoming.

Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. In life, unlike in books, we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly’s wings.

nature did to death, it transformed abrupt endings into a thousand new beginnings.