The Island of Missing Trees

by Elif Shafak

Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.

Time is a songbird, and just like any other songbird it can be taken captive. It can be held prisoner in a cage and for even longer than you might think possible. But time cannot be kept in check in perpetuity. No captivity is forever.

if only he could, he would probably spend the rest of his life in the back garden or, better yet, in a forest somewhere, his hands plunged in the soil,

was it also possible to inherit something as intangible and immeasurable as sorrow?

Or that a tree’s rings do not only reveal its age, but also the traumas it has endured, including wildfires, and thus, carved deep in each circle, is a near-death experience, an unhealed scar?

they turn us into books in which they lose themselves on cold winter nights, they use our wood to manufacture coffins in which they end their lives, buried six feet under with us, and they even compose romantic poems to us, calling us the link between earth and sky, and yet still they do not see us.

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.

She could hear his heart thumping behind his ribcage. This boy who was gentle as the dew on a fresh morning and could sing the most touching ballads in a language she could not follow, this boy who could chatter excitedly about evergreen shrubs and crested hoopoes, now seemed lost for words.

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, treading its sunlit valleys and rolling fields, finding it warm and welcoming, and then, hidden in quiet corners, running into caverns invisible and unexpected, pits where you stumble and cut yourself.

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.’

she was the child of the type of love that rose from the bottom of the ocean, from a blue so dark it was almost black.

‘Listen, canim, I know you might get cross with me for saying this, but remember, good advice is always annoying and bad advice never is. So if what I say irritates you, take it as good advice.’ Ada narrowed her eyes. ‘Good, I can see you are already irritated,’

You know what I’ve been thinking since? I’ve been thinking that you are my country. Is that a strange thing to say? Without you, I don’t have a home in this world; I am a felled tree, my roots severed all round; you can topple me with the touch of a finger.

Human remains … What exactly did that mean? Was it a few hard bones and soft tissue? Clothes and accessories? Things solid and compact enough to fit inside a coffin? Or was it rather the intangible – the words we send out into the ether, the dreams we keep to ourselves, the heartbeats we skip beside our lovers, the voids we try to fill and can never adequately articulate – when all was said and done, what was left of an entire life, a human being … and could that really be disinterred from the ground?

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

You ancient soul.’

‘You are either an unsung hero or a glorious fool, I can’t decide,’ Defne said. ‘An unsung fool, I’m sure.’

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

When islanders meet tourists, we assume they must be here for the sun and the sea, never suspecting that sometimes people travel miles away from home just to be able to mourn.

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.

‘I love you, Defne. I have always loved you. I know we can’t roll back the years – I’m not trying to gloss over what happened, your suffering, our loss – but I want us to give each other a second chance.’

‘Without any family support, without a country, we’ll be very lonely,’ she said. ‘Everybody is lonely. We’ll just be more aware of it.’

You think you can leave your native land because so many people have done it, so why shouldn’t you? After all, the world is full of immigrants, runaways, exiles … Encouraged, you break free and travel as far as you can, then one day you look back and realize it was coming with you all along, like a shadow. Everywhere we go, it’ll follow us, this city, this island.’

Or one hand – made of twenty-seven bones, a thousand touches and caresses now lost.

‘So now they will be separated,’ said Defne. Her voice was soft, reedy. ‘They can’t be buried side by side. How sad – all this time we spent looking for them and maybe it would have been better if they were never found … if they could have remained lost together.’

you weep for all the sorrows in this world, in the end you will have no eyes.’

The bodies of the missing, if unearthed, would be taken care of by their loved ones and given the proper burials they deserved. But even those who would never be found were not exactly forsaken. Nature tended to them. Wild thyme and sweet marjoram grew from the same soil, the ground splitting open like a crack in a window to make way for possibilities. Myriad birds, bats and ants carried those seeds far away, where they would grow into fresh vegetation. In the most surprising ways, the victims continued to live, because that is what nature did to death, it transformed abrupt endings into a thousand new beginnings.

if it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.

I wanted to continue to be anchored in love,

Whereas Daphne was transformed into a tree in order to avoid love, I transmuted into a tree in order to hold on to love.