A Brief History of Salt

I thought sleeping in the arms of habit was a kind of comfort. I hadn’t realised I was already dead. You exhausted me, and I thought you were tired too. It turns out I was the only one whose house…

III – Believing

By the time I arrived in Koyasan at the beginning of September, I already knew what this month’s essay would be about. Believing. I had actually started thinking about it the night before I left for Japan. I was sitting…

Up There

The mountains had swallowed the road by then. Only stone, thin air, and a silence that seemed to hold everything still. He was somewhere nearby. Not close enough to touch. Close enough to notice. We had met before, somewhere closer…

Promises

𝐁𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐞𝐝𝐢ğ𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐳 ş𝐞𝐲 𝐚𝐬𝐥ı𝐧𝐝𝐚 𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐝ığı𝐦ı𝐳 𝐤𝐚𝐝𝐚𝐫 𝐛𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐚𝐢𝐭 𝐝𝐞ğ𝐢𝐥. Bunu çocukluğumuzun, ailemizin ya da eski ilişkilerimizin üzerimizde iz bırakması gibi açıklaması kolay bir yerden söylemiyorum. Daha rahatsız edici bir şeyden bahsediyorum: İnsan bazen kendisini, tam da kendisine karşı geliştirdiği savunmalar…

A Minor(!) Disappearance

I thought I had lost my soul somewhere between men in beds that held my body more easily than they held me, in the blue light of a phone I kept turning toward my face as if silence might change…

II – Success

I wanted to make success the subject of this month’s “Ordinary Things” — my little series, currently being read by, what, ten people? For now, I am choosing to find this intimate rather than statistically concerning. I have been thinking…

New Fridays

There are people who leave a life without leaving the city. The street remains. The house remains. The balcony keeps its shape. The curtain still falls in the same folds. The same bus still stops at the same stop. 𝗔…

Places to be

For months, something had been humming underneath my life. Very low. Very committed. I could be having a genuinely good day and it would still be there, doing its little shift in the basement. Coffee, work, running, dates, dinners, Amsterdam,…

I — Waiting

 I have often thought that waiting is mistaken for time. It isn’t. Time keeps moving with the same indifference whether we are waiting or not. Waiting alters something else. It changes the weight of each minute. It persuades the body…

Misprinted

İnsan, dünyanın adil bir yer olduğunu sanmak için ne kadar genç olmak zorunda? Bunu gerçekten merak ediyorum. Bir yaş sınırı olmalı. Yirmi üç olabilir. Yirmi yedi de makul. Otuz beş yaşına gelip hala “İyi insanların başına iyi şeyler gelir.” diye…