PREFACE

Neither our old nest, our shanty house, nor the piece of the picture I drew in the cellar is left. Years take everything away from a person. This is me, who engraved a memory inside me. It is something that neither years nor anything else can remove. As you grow, your memories grow with you, take shape, become more valuable as you grow, and in the end you cannot hold it in your hand. While you think it is just a simple scribble, it becomes the center of your life, in the middle of your chest, everything valuable is deep inside you.

Love is a deep pain that no one can name. There are those that are lost in silence as much as those that are written and drawn.

The socks I always pull up to my knees are Esem , the brand I wear on my feet. My cellar, where I used to run by clicking the heels of my sneakers, which I call Sport , where I used to rest my head at that age; full of mice, insects, thin long snakes. My cellar, my coal cellar, my wood cellar... my notebook where I started to scribble my memories is here. My fatherless childhood, where I unknowingly perhaps drew the lines of my destiny, my fatherless seven-year-old maturity...

When I lost my father, I started to love my mother very much, and I started to love her instead of my father. My mother was half of a longing. My father was hidden in her eyes, hair, cheeks, conversations, cries, joys, silences, and even despair. He loved me and all my siblings as two people, both as a mother and a father. I also distributed the love I received from him, starting from primary school. In primary school, I first loved my class teacher, a lady teacher named Sezgin Alpaslan. When she took scissors from my face and gave me a big kiss, I learned to be embarrassed and embarrassed. I fell in love! I was embarrassed, I sweated, but I loved her. Then she left, my love remained in my little heart. In my teacher's absence, I sought solace in my mother's warm embrace after school. She wiped my tears from my face and cheeks with her beautiful, delicate hands. She said that I would love my new teacher too, that all the teachers in our country were a separate value. When my teacher Hamide Sapancılar came, the same warm attitude, the same motherly compassion was enough to make me fall in love with her, of course. In those years, teachers were like mothers and fathers. They were doing the greatest and most beautiful social support so gently that you wouldn't understand. I loved them so much, but as I grew up, it was time to leave. I moved on to middle school, took off my black apron and put on a suit and tie. My teacher Hamide disappeared like a cloud of dust. Other teachers took her place. I loved them all. I fell in love with each and every one of them. At home, the love of my mother and siblings was overwhelming to me. My mother had taught me to share, and I shared my love.

I fell in love with my peers, Yasemin, Filiz, Müge… I fell in love with all of them. I loved them from afar without touching any of them like a sacred icon. I fell in love by scattering the love I received from my mother and my family. They fell in love with me, I didn’t care. Temporary loves that didn’t resemble the girl I drew in the cellar…

My heart was moving along the drawn route. Life opened up causes and effects, and jobs that led to effects. My path began to cross country borders. It would be an exaggeration to say that there was almost no city in my country that I hadn’t visited, no district, village or town that I hadn’t entered and exited, but I had traveled a lot for work. The picture I had drawn in the pantry had disappeared, but its traces in my heart had not been erased despite the passing of years.

My mother used to say that people are created in pairs. She still defends the same thing. Everyone looks for their other half and when they find it, they become a person, she said.

The roads got longer. They twisted and went all the way to Algeria. I continued to love. I grew up a lot, I became like a father. I became a pillar to my home, a trust to my province. Then the goals changed. The struggle for bread took precedence over love. I couldn’t find love in Algeria. I wasn’t looking for it anymore anyway. I earned money, I got stronger, my voice started to come out, my throat widened, I gained confidence in my body. My family came to peace. Then my Algerian adventure ended. I came back. With a few French words in my mind and memories of a tropical region with money in my pocket and an empty heart… And soon the same misery that I was no stranger to.

I was living as someone who had reached the age of 28, who carried life on his back and felt it in his palms. Now, real life, the rush to live had taken away the thought of love from me. What love? What sentimentality? What love? Life was difficult and arduous.

I struggled, I struggled, I was hardworking. I passed the exams opened by the state. Winning was not enough, I also needed favoritism. I was left incomplete, I was broken, I was hurt, I was devastated. I could not find a solid job at any point in my life just to live, to stay on my feet, to support my family until this age.

Does a person hate the place he was born in? When he is hungry, when he cannot fulfill his future goals, when he cannot see tomorrow, when he is alone, when everything is against him.

In the world of the wicked, I opened my hands in prayer to God. I prayed, crying out from the depths of my heart. I rubbed my hands on my face!.. I prayed with my mother for both myself and the dead while visiting the graves in the cemetery. Then a wind blew. The trees turned the summer heat into coolness. Peace filled my insides and my heart. Something was obviously going to happen.

"Love embraces you, then leaves you motionless. Everything happens like a spider catching its prey. Even if you desperately want to escape in the middle of the web, you can't escape in vain!"