So Much —

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © 2008

i breathe you in the citronelle candles
whose flames resurrect episodes of our reunions.

i live you in my wildest
yet most modest dreams
standing under the pouring rain
listening to each other's eyes
as raindrops waltz on our lashes
and lightning precedes the thunder.

i feel you in the silk i wrap around my neck
whose every inch was worshipped by your lips—
and hold you in a tear drop
gently as you held me.

i hear you in the music and the whispers of the wind.

i feel you, breathe you, wear you, live you
day by day every minute
in my sleep or consciousness.

i scorn the bitter longing and the pain
of not being with you so much —
so much
that sometimes i even believe
i am you.

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © 2003

It goes on . . .

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © 2009

The helicopter tragedy that had been unfolding since March 12th in St John's has left me with deep sadness and thoughts which I can finally put into words. I can do so partly because I saw many familiar faces from the past talk about the incident or recite poetry on TV, and allowed myself be overcome by a tsunami of emotion and longing for a place and life from which I feel so far away now.

I watched CBC's coverage of the memorial service at the St John's Basilica. It was a very poignant experience for me although mine is so different from the loss of those whose loved ones were swallowed by the sea. But that the service was a multi-faith one, that my former student Justin flew in to pay his respect, that I was so familiar with the setting and even picked out a face (or maybe two) among the crowd panned by the TV cameras filled me up with tears. I remembered watching Justin and Sacha's train ride from Ottawa to Montreal when their father passed away, and Justin reading his eulogy which ended,"Je t'aime, Papa." I was living in St John's at that time, feeling a similar nostalgia and longing for the familiar landmarks I had left back in Montreal.

I never had a proper closure with you; but I think this service— held for people I didn't even know, in a land I left far away in the past —and the prayers, which would be comforting to anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one be it through mortality or other means, were the closest to a closure for me as well.

Isn't it strange how life creates such poignant connections through unrelated events for us ?

The three words quoted from Robert Frost: "it (life) goes on", concluding the service, made me realize that as simple as it sounds, or as much as I had been thinking that it would be impossible, life has gone on so far, and will continue doing so without you. It is up to me to make something worthwhile of that life now, because it will not stop and wait until I feel I am ready.

Sometimes, when we feel so much pain and grieve a loss, even a simple nugget of wisdom is shrouded like a great mystery that we fail to see— until something happens. In this case it was a tragedy that touched the lives of 17 families which shook me up and showed me what I had been missing all this while. Because of this I feel even closer to those families —not only in their grief and loss but also (unbeknown to them) for teaching me something that has set my spirit free after its long and painful journey.

In the ensuing self analysis, I began to understand that my inner peace depends on my own integrity and sense of vindication— not necessarily happiness. If I respect myself and can live with a clear conscience, happiness may come as a result. What I had been trying to reclaim was that wholeness and independence of which you cunningly deprived me.

Keep what you took, beloved, for my heart abounds in plenty !

As one of my favorite poets wrote:

". . . the heart that has truly loved never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close,
As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets
The same look which she turned when he rose!"

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © 2009

Lucid Perplexities

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © 2009

So it is spring !

I don't see spears of spring bulbs pushing out their heads from the earth yet, but today's anticipated high temperature and the sunshine with a cloudless sky affirm the fact that it is finally spring. Any snow from now on won't have the upper hand any more, so let's rejoice and enjoy St Patrick's Day !

I felt very silly yesterday after getting up and dressed to go to my therapist only to knock on her door and be told that my appointment was for next week ! She was frazzled, baking a cake for her son's birthday. If she weren’t putting the garbage out , she said, she wouldn’t even have answered the door, looking pretty stressed herself. I was sure it was yesterday and had even marked it on my agenda, but she had it marked on hers for the 23rd. She said we could start the session but if her son called at any time we had to stop. I thought it wouldn't be fair if she was stressed out in the first place, so I left —not before advising her to reduce the oven temperature to 350 from 400 degrees for the cake, after she told me that she had burned the first one. I felt I made an unnecessary trip over the expressway and the bridge at a time when I'm watching my budget carefully until my lawyer's bill is paid off. Isn't it awful to have to feel this way? But even worse would be if I really get my dates and other facts mixed up— in other words, if my memory were going bad. I hope that is not the case. I've been on too many medicines for the last three years, and my doctor says I should still continue them, although sometimes I question his wisdom.

I'm so happy to that S and P feel they have begun their 'retirement' together. S is beginning to relax, and both are enjoying themselves, trying not to push to do everything at once. I think that's what retirement should be all about : enjoying life and taking it at a leisurely pace. They are so lucky to have each other.

I am lonely.

My sisters— my closest friends— are distant in physical space; and my best friend has her family and grandchildren but we manage to spend time together by phone or getting together since we live within proximity of each other. But when she spent the last four months in Istanbul, I was really, really alone, trying to keep myself busy writing to escape spiritual alienation and pain, or trying to turn the feelings into something beautiful which could only be achieved through extreme anguish and voiced through the craft of diction.

When I start to think to philosophically (or perhaps selfishly) I try to sort out things into their perspective. That usually provides a reality check and makes me grateful for what I have. I even feel shame for daring to complain. I have been following the Cougar helicopter crash in the North Atlantic, just off St John’s since March 12— and I feel so close to the people of Newfoundland in their loss and grief. Somehow the emotions are still raw and ring close to home every time I see the news and the background on TV- the South side Hills or the St John’s Harbour. . . My heart drowns in nostalgia. Last night Helen Fogwell-Porter, a local writer whom I got know well and became friends with while I lived in St John’s, was on CBC's "National" reciting E.J.Pratt’s poem "Erosion" and talking about the collective grief of Newfoundlanders from a writer’s point of view. I listened to her familiar yet unique Newfoundland accent while my memories of teaching the poem as a young teacher to my seniors were juxtaposed with the circumstances under which it was being recited by Helen on national news. It had always been one of my favorite poems- so much packed in such few lines and so poignant in the experience it speaks of.

The night before, it was Mary Walsh on a program called "Who do you think you are?" searching her roots from St John’s back to Ireland. I can close my eyes and travel back on certain routes, the streets still clear in memory, one yielding into another and changing name without warning. A Tim Horton's on one corner or a convenience store on another (Montrealler's version of a depanneur). The Churchill Square on Elizabeth Avenue and the only Farmer's Market where I had made friends with the fresh produce sellers and written an article for the Telegram. The bins of brine that keep salt cod and seal fins; the meagre offerings of the Newfoundland terrain: root vegetables for a jig's dinner. The hilly topography, uneven streets, colourful clapboard houses with a unique charm of their own... I do miss it all and —at the same time— feel banished from it all .

I still read the Telegram on-line although I do not write for it any more. That's my way of keeping in touch with the pulse of Newfoundland - a weak pulse, albeit. I read the comments readers post in response to news— many are very acrid about their premier and still hang on to the Newfoundlander mentality of 'Them' against the rest of Canada. They rant and rave even from as far away as Alberta and Washington, DC. as "ex pats", blaming much on Danny, but forgetting that it is they who elected him and will probably do so again. I take a look (with disdain) at the Saturday columns of Wells- the so called food writer and restaurant critique (whom I met at the opening of The Rooms in St John's). He used to be the weather man on CBC in St John's and has no culinary training or the refined understanding of food except consuming it, but he tries so hard to sound eloquent and knowledgeable. Sometimes even his writing gets away without being copy edited that a couple of comments I posted — very polite but subtly sarcastic— were censored and not published. But more often than not his column doesn't get any reader feedback. I wonder how many Newfoundlanders read or are even interested in food articles about ostrich steaks or bison roast.

It's time to get off my high horse and see if Selim wants to come in. He is such an anal cat— my domestic tiger— that he waits until he's let in to run to his box. He still doesn't understand that the outdoors are his to use as he wishes. Yesterday when I came home from Petra’s, he was at the door like a little boy, shifting from one leg to the other in a dire rush to go to the bathroom, and as soon as I opened the door he made a bee line towards his litter box for a long relief. Then he spent the next hour preening his silky hair and licking his paws clean before curling up for a well deserved cat nap after an entire day of chasing robins.

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © 2009

Paradigms Questioned

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © 2009

What is it in a photograph - a snapshot - that brings out such powerful emotions even after so much time has lapsed between then and now? The immortalized nano-second, buried in what we call "the past", spotlights only a single expression branded in a single frame of the continuum which itself may tell an entirely different story from that, which lives forever in celluloid.

You and I took many photos of each other - happy, smiling, pointing to places with backgrounds of oceans or churches, markets or street scenes, family or friends. Yet there are not many photos with both of us together in it. Was this because you or I was more interested in taking the other’s photos, that neither of us thought of asking someone to snap a picture of us together - tete- à-tete - just the two of us?

I felt that we didn't need photos because we were together and real in life. Photos served to remember things or people that one wasn’t likely to see ever again , so an image caught in a minute passage of life would be one's only tangible validation of that passage. If we took photos of each other, it was not because of a fear that we'd forget the other—since we would always be together— but rather to remember the places we had visited and left a part of ourselves along our life’s journey.

So today when I came across a photo in a forgotten album, I wondered what had made us pose for that picture. The note on the reverse (and I’m so glad it was dated, unlike so many that are neglected) is in my sister's script: "New Year's 2002 - The picture of happiness!" You are sitting in an armchair in Nurdan’s living room. You are wearing a shirt and tie with an unbuttoned cardigan. It's very unlike you to wear a tie. You look very happy —your luscious lips (as I used to call them) are parted wide in a sincere smile that reveals your unfortunately not so good teeth.

I’m wearing that red sweater and sitting on the arm of the chair, to your left, leaning over so that my cheek is touching yours and my red lips are chiming my happiest smile. My right arm is wrapped in an embrace around your neck; your left hand shows around my waist securing me in a close embrace so that there is no space between us.

Was that photo, I wondered, genuinely reflective of how we felt then? Or was it captured at the right micro-instant when both of us could look so happy and in-love without much effort. And the lightness of that effort was what must have had us believe, in all honesty, that we were unquestionably happy.

There is not a day, an hour, a sleepless interlude in my life when I don’t question and rewind the memories of the last nine years, go over every scene bit by bit with a magnifying glass, trying to see something that I missed! I keep asking myself what I could have done, what did I fail to do, what signs have I missed, was I subconsciously trying to destroy the best thing I had in my life because part of me believed that I didn’t deserve it, I wasn't worth it ?

Then I try to balance this with the other end of the scale questioning what if everything was the exact opposite of what it seemed to be? Black was really white, and white - black? Just like a photo in its negative - and depending on which state one views it, one’s perceptions could be totally opposite from the other’s.

Imagine a row of pearly white teeth revealed in a beautiful smile looking like blackened, rotten ones exposed through a clown’s exaggerated mouth. Or what one sees as such turn into a vision of a captive smile displaying a row of white pearls — so much more appealing than what was perceived in its negative, its opposite, its false paradigm.

So is that old photo really a reflection of happy, connected us at that instant in time, or is it the positive of a false paradigm of whose existence neither of us was aware on New Year's Eve 2002 ?

As time goes on, I feel as if I’m beginning to forget how you look. Your presence, your voice, your smell, your touch filled me with warmth and excitement, security and desire all at the same time. It is that feeling I miss so much yet at the same time I'm trying to forget because missing leads to longing . Longing without hope is the road to painful desperation. Missing is empty and painful. I wanted your presence in my life ; your absence came suddenly and against my will. You severed our connection without my will, my consent and my knowledge. You walked away on a deceitful, pre-planned, inexcusable path. You planned your departure in a pretext that denied me my voice and the ability to make sense of what happened.You worked out your details so sinisterly that I could not even question, seek out answers, make any sense, find closure and move on. At the end, after months of bleeding tears, I could do nothing but let go praying that the open wounds would form scabs on their own — the only badges of survival and closure to the pain.

I still haven’t let go, because letting go means erasing you out of my thoughts and I cannot do that completely yet. But the more I think of you , the more I question your actions and your words. Rewinding into retro years, I see the negative — the side of the picture that shows everything in its primal stage.

When I look at the picture from this perspective, you emerge as a stranger to me — the antithesis of the man I loved for sharing my values, my dreams, my life, my love. But the image captured in that photograph has long been spoiled by your departure ; so I have to focus on the only one that remains— the undeveloped one. The negative. It is the negative of that photo, the flashback to my life with you— (like the photo that was taken in Wilmington, on New Year's Eve, 2002, the one that caught the false paradigm so convincingly) — that will allow me to let go. There's a tiny voice within, a feeling which keeps gnawing that, little by little, it must be through the negatives I'm likely to find the answers to the most painful questions and finally - hopefully - be able to let go with the insights I gain.

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © 2009