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Monthly Archives: October 2013
And now you sleep…
You will sleep but forever be awake.
I send you away, far away from me but this is the only way.
Like a child telling their mother lies, I can see right through them.
I can see that you changed your mind.
The painting you did on that water surface
can’t hide what you painted first.
Don’t be afraid, as there won’t be anything worse than what you can imagine.
Close your eyes.
I WAS BORN GREEN
I was born green,
Representing fertility, demonstrating youth and promising happiness.
I often felt lacking, finding myself explain what I was and who I was.
I felt the need to paint my flowers brighter and remove the ones that I didn’t think were desirable.
I was green.
I was jealous, jealous of those who just were.
I insidiously became a different shade of green. Became envious, envious of those that flowered brighter and envious of those that had no flowers but stood proudly.
The shame of desiring excessively to be accepted, loved and adored turned me red. Slowly but readily changed me.
I turned harder after accepting that I wasn’t my potential or what everyone thought I represented.
With each self-acceptance I drew new hard-edged lines that consumed me and took away my colours.
I felt liberated as more saw me as I’ve always felt- lacking vibrance, eaten away, consumed, hanging on with the threat of falling.
I am free now, free without the shackle of expectations and free to fall.
The Ugly Pretty, The Pretty Ugly and Everything in between
Are we obsessed with the word PRETTY? Am I pretty? Is she pretty? Is he pretty? Is it pretty? Are we all pretty?
Pretty… Pretty…Pretty…
The more I type the word pretty, the more it feels like I misspelled it, but my trusted spellcheck would tell me if I had.
During my extended Turkish summer I learnt a new game called “Güzellik mi Çirkinlik mi?” which translates roughly as Beauty or Ugliness. My father explained how the game worked, and I know you may think it is weird to learn this from your father at the age of 27 but in my defence one of our key players was my 4-year-old niece Lidya.
The rules were easy: if you are chosen to go first, you decide to either ask to see everyone do a “pretty” face or an “ugly” one. Then you choose the person that you think embodied the expression the best, and then it is their turn to either make everyone pretty or ugly.
I really doubt that guidance counselors or child psychologists would recommend this game, but to be honest playing it with someone so young and less exposed to media and social norms was very revealing.
We form an idea of what is attractive and what is not very early on, and these ideas are very resistant to time and age. The 56-year-old granddad, the 27-year-old uncle, the 4-year-old girl and any other willing souls, all pulled similar expressions.
I still think that I had the ugliest face in the game but that will never ever be published on this blog (also my camera-phobic family would not take the photo).
Then again, never say never.
Kyiru’s Voyage
Hello my confidant. It has happened again and I don’t know who else to tell. It appears that you are the only one that will believe me or even listen in the first place. Again it was in the middle of my rest period that I found myself there, the location that I can‘t describe more accurately than “that world”.
It is the third time in this lunar cycle that I floated from my slumber to a place that lacks colour. This time I passively and reluctantly moved down a metallic sliding platform that penetrated a rhombus. There was someone else in front of me and as he moved into the rhombus, I saw someone else come out of it.
I came across a girl that was stuck inside a box. She sat at the edge of it, motionless apart from her hands, focusing on a small trinket that was transmitting visions and sounds. From time to time she gazed to a white domed palace with a certain longing. I believed that she was entrapped there and her person of interest was in the palace trying to communicate through her trinket.
I walked out of the invisible doors and saw a creature that reminded me of the pests that hide in our homes. It hopped towards me as I reached out and travelled through the air, lacking grace or charm. It flew past a most bizarre structure of interlinked squares of dead trees that reached nowhere. I did not understand its function or what the two women on top of it were doing.
I followed the direction of the thick strand of liquid with its never-ending motion towards a cold metallic structure. My eyes instinctively travelled up to reveal the first letter of my name, Kyiru… Could this be a coincidence or was there a higher power taking me there? With this question that made me half scared and half excited, I glanced back over the metal lines uncovering the glass city where I woke up in and continued forward.
I continued forward through a dark tunnel resembling the metal platform that brought me there. The darkness was interrupted regularly with light sources, revealing interlinked squares and triangles. I was taken aback when I noticed a glowing globe hanging at the edge of the tunnel exit. What further surprised me was that there was someone inside a globe appearing larger and larger with small movements of his legs until he vanished and appeared in front of me. The only logical explanation that I have is he travelled through the globe portal and that he is very used to this mode of transport, hence his lack of expression in response to my perplexed face.
Another curious fact was the abundance of water. Apart from that giant moving strand, I could feel some on my face. It was as if the water was able to fly but only in one direction. Also something that would really impress the alchemists back home is that I’ve seen a see-thorough rock slowly turn into water. This rock had a symbol on it and it felt very very cold.
Like the vertically flying water, I too moved in one direction. I don’t know why I chose to follow this route but it lead me into a building whose grandiosity suggested that it was a palace lacking security guards or any other means of selecting who is worthy to enter it. The large groups of people moving independently like stray pockets of magic pushed me through a small gate. My curiosity took the best of me and I jumped into a moving roofed metallic platform with circular feet that spun. It moved along a bed of metal lines that seemed to go on endlessly and was only interrupted in very short intervals by smaller lines perpendicular to it.
The inside of this roofed platform was spacious and was populated with cushioned seats. Behind me I heard voices speaking in another tongue, and through the little crevice between the seats I started watching them. Although it was the first time that I had seen them during that voyage, I could not shake off the feeling that we had met before. As I tried to remember when I had encountered this man with the wavy hair, crinkled skin and velvet voice, he looked at me with his gentle eyes and once again I found myself back in my small humble lodgings, back in “my world”, yet another time.
© Gökhan Tanrıöver