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Sevgilim
Sevgilim yalan söylersem sanaKopsun ve mahrum kalsın dilimSeni seviyorum demek bahtiyarlığındanSevgilim yalan yazarsam sanaKurusun ve mahrum kalsın elimOkşayabilmek saadetinden seniSevgilim yalan söylerse sana gözlerimİki nadim gözyaşı gibi avuçlarıma aksınlarVe göremesinler seni bir daha.Nazım Hikmet
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The Little Bell
Recently, I have been listening to Behzod Abduraimov play La Campanella on repeat. No words. Just the piano, and that astonishing performance of a piece I thought I already knew. I have listened to La Campanella played by many pianists. It is one of those pieces people perform partly because it appears almost impossible to…
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Tonight I Do Not Want a Song.
I am sitting on my sofa with the window open, listening to the wind outside. There is no music playing. London was hot this summer. Now it is autumn, and the air has changed. It enters the room cool and forceful, lifting the curtain and bending the flames of the candles before passing further inside.…
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For the Person Who Wants to Love Me Properly.
I have spent enough time thinking about what love should not be. It seems far more useful, and considerably more enjoyable, to describe what loving me well might actually look like. I am not someone who loves halfway. If I care about you, I will pay attention. I will remember the story you told me…
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Goodbye, Henry: Let’s Celebrate the Endings.
I am sitting in a restaurant I like, waiting for something involving fancy mushrooms. Work is finished, the evening is mine and RAYE’s Goodbye Henry is playing through my headphones. It is a brilliant, tongue in cheek breakup song. There is pain in it, but also clarity, humour and the unmistakable sense that it is…
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What The Urge to Leave is Trying to Say.
There is a particular moment in some relationships when closeness begins to feel like confinement. Nothing dramatic may have happened. The relationship may be loving and the other person may have done nothing wrong. Yet something inside us becomes restless. We feel crowded, irritable or unusually alert. We begin to imagine leaving and, with that…
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What Is So Non-Traditional About Them?
In dozens of countries, private sexual relationships between consenting adults remain crimes when the adults happen to be of the same sex. The penalties differ, but the message is much the same: these people are not merely disapproved of. They are considered undeserving of the privacy and protection everyone else expects. A law does more…
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Somebody Was Watching Me.
This afternoon, I took my laptop, a picnic rug, a speaker and a book to a park. The plan was simple: find somewhere near the water, work outdoors for a few hours and escape the desk without entirely escaping the work. The weather was unreasonably hot. I had always assumed that heat would never bother…
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Vienna Waits for You.
This blog will make a little more sense if you listen to Vienna by Billy Joel first, or while you are reading it. Consider this my invitation to you rather than a request. Find a comfortable chair, make yourself a cup of coffee(or any other beverage of your choice) if you have the time, and…
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The Stranger on the High Street.
This morning, I went for a walk. The weather had become unreasonably hot, and my wardrobe was better prepared for rain than sunshine. I had been working at home, had recently bought a fan and wanted to escape the desk for a while. My bicycle was broken, so I walked instead. As I approached the…
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A Stubborn Woman and Her Unreliable Dutch Bicycle.
My bicycle broke today. To be fair, it did not come as a complete surprise. The bicycle and I had been having the same argument for months. It would develop a problem. I would fix it. It would develop another one. I would decide that it was nothing serious. The bicycle would disagree. Today, it…
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Thoughts Dancing Reggae.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if we could see inside each other’s minds. Not the version of ourselves that we present to the world, but the actual thoughts moving through our heads at any given moment. We spend so much time judging people by what we can see: the woman rushing through a train…
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The Girls’ Trip.
I have travelled with friends before, usually one at a time, but until recently I had never been on a proper girls’ trip. I am not entirely sure why. Perhaps life simply got in the way. Work, family, relationships and the endless procession of things that appear urgent in adulthood had always managed to occupy…
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How London Became Mine.
I did not fall in love with London when I first arrived. People speak about cities as though they are capable of love at first sight. Paris dazzles them. Rome seduces them. New York overwhelms them. London did none of those things to me. I was young, homesick and trying to build a life in…
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Waiting to Be Chosen.
One of the questions I am asked most often is surprisingly simple: “Why are you still single?” It usually comes from relatives, family friends or kindly intentioned acquaintances. Sometimes there is concern behind it, sometimes curiosity and occasionally genuine confusion. The question itself does not bother me. What interests me is the contradiction concealed within…
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The Rusty Fork and Other Things We Leave Behind.
A recent public celebration reminded me of the country of my childhood and of the question that seemed to follow its people through years of political change: who are we now? When an empire collapses, those living within it do not simply receive a new flag and continue as before. Institutions change, public symbols disappear…
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The Soundtrack of a Life.
My taste in music has never been orderly. I listen to hip hop, R&B, jazz, soul, electronic music, Afrobeat, classical music, pop, folk music from places I have never visited and songs in languages I do not understand. Perhaps this openness began in childhood, when music arrived slowly and unpredictably. There were no streaming services…
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We Inherited Different Stories.
For much of my life, I believed that people who grew up on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain belonged to different worlds. We inherited different accounts of freedom, progress, responsibility and belonging. We were taught to fear different things and to admire different virtues. The older I become, however, the less certain I am…
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What Does It Feel Like to Be Born in a Country That Disappears?
When I was growing up, history was not something we simply studied. It was happening around us. The country into which I had been born disappeared while I was still too young to understand what that meant. New symbols, currencies and accounts of the past arrived in its place. As children, we accepted these changes…
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Coming Home: The Story Behind Unlearning Silence.
Before I tell you about this blog, I should probably tell you something about home. I grew up during a period of profound political and social change. The world the adults around me had understood was disappearing, and everyone was trying to build a stable life while the meaning of stability itself was changing. Old…
