you’ve been searching for a very long time

for a very long time, i’ve wanted to write a text about you—
one you will never read,
even though we’re only separated by a single wall,
a wall through which everything can be heard:
the moaning during sex with various bodies—yours very quiet, and mine, to your
dismay, far too loud— or the discreet coughing after insomnia escapades,
or the laughter during phone calls with those who aren’t here anymore,
or the breathing after a nightmare and the light shining through the crack of the door
we never open.
these walls are thin like paper, you once said.
we don’t write on them, the walls—
we have no shared paper,
only the co-existence of our diaries
in our own rooms
or fortresses.

you’ve been searching
for a very long time

for something that would have made it all worth it.
Like in your weekly therapy session,
where you talk about other people’s traumas,
you search for your reason, your excuse to fail.
you’re allowed to fail too, your therapist tells you,
she’s something like your smuggler, the one you pay—
but you have to cross the border yourself.

or in my diary, which you read, you search between the lines
for my words you didn’t listen to closely enough,
because you stopped really being present.

or on the dance floor, which is really just the last squat left in the city,
there you search for your body,
the one you only feel when you’re pressed against a wall
by a He who seeks something like love—
or maybe just revenge between your lips and lips […]

or in the garden, where you keep chickens and water tomato plants,
and let the scrubs grow wild between aloe vera and weeds,
in the cycle of photosynthesis and compost and cosmos,
of reincarnation and menstrual cycles, of seasons and seeds—
there you search for energy transformation,
for the constant within the change, the fertility of decay,
for something
that stays.

Or in the sea, whose horizon always says Turkey
(this shithole of Erdogan and (over-)exploitation and oppression and police violence
and genocide)
and never freedom,
you search for God or the lost ones who now only
appear to you as waves. ripple. shadows.

when the hurt days begin again,
for reasons that are so obviously there
merely ignored and buried on other days,
you sneak,
surrounded by 5 million meters of of walls and curbs,
you tiptoe where heads hit the ground
with your personal Fortress Europe, your barbed wire,
your permanent state of alarm,
through the hallway through the hallway,
gazing down as our eyes meet
(like all people in mourning).
in the kitchen, when you take the coffee off the stove
before I let it boil over and burn again,
you ask about my plans for the day and I answer and ask back,
as if it had any relevance what either of us is doing today,
as if we weren’t just melting pieces of insignificance.
on some of those mornings, the skin under your eyes is red
like you cried again (and I didn’t hear it),
but maybe it’s just another allergic reaction to something unknown.
nassim’s eyes are always red,
nassim’s grief is frozen in blood-etched marks
left behind by an overflow of tears.

other times, when we run into each other in the kitchen—
to say we “meet” or “see” each other would be too much—
you squat for more than a while
in front of the broken freezer
as if it were a grave
that cannot be closed.
when you look up from your crouch,
your pupils are still dilated,
holding the black night you’ve absorbed
and clearly hidden,
because you never went to sleep.
those are the nights when you take ecstasy or speed or MDMA,
sometimes even coke—of all things, coke—
with people who couldn’t be further from you.
you once said you take drugs to get lost in your own confusion
without having to feel the pain.
for instance, you think of H. or M. or I.
or your sister’s baby that died before it could live.
on some dawns, before morning,
before the day of the week of the winter can even begin,
I sometimes see you going through the gate,
outside—wherever that may be for you.

sometimes we actually meet in the bathroom too.
when you burst in while I’m sinking into my reflection
and the disgust of this society, for example—
and then you do something absurd next to me
like take a piss and use toilet paper and flush
and wash your hands
without sinking into your reflection and the disgust of this society.
next to the toilet hangs a photo of you and her and them
and another person who used to be here,
and now only watches us poop in the form of this one-dimensional photo.
the bathroom is a place of measuring and missing,
and your collectivized shame,
which you try to wash off in the shower,
sticks to the disposable razor from the warehouse.
and sometimes it gets to me too,
when I use it after you,
and I cut myself on it—
and a month later, when the blood has long since seeped away,
you ask me about the scars on my skin
after sunday egg breakfast.

and you always find
your reasons to keep going and going and going and staying—because of people.
even though they all eventually leave,
because this place is full of piss and cockroaches everywhere
and shipwrecks and selective ports and murder,
and this sun is a matrix.
and then you’re alone again, with the dog and the chickens and your weight.
fallacies for burdens—
how much more can you carry before the ground opens up
because you’re too heavy, you sometimes ask yourself.
and the whispering voice,
with which you step into the boxing ring every Monday and Wednesday and Friday,
answers you:
you deserve to go under because your privilege is a crime.
because you can liberate others by sacrificing yourself, can’t you?

and you lose
in all the days and nights and years you’ve already been searching
for something that would have made it all worth it,
on this island / in Izmir / in Subotica / the world wide web
(which you’re actually trying to boycott),
never the control over yourself—
only the access to yourself
or the closeness to others,
until one day—
when only they or He or I are still leaving,
and no one holds you together here anymore,
the framework of symptom-fighting collapses
and you lie alone in this boxing ring
with the ruins of causes and wrong turns and abstractions
and the monopoly on violence,
brick by brick,
wall by wall,
until Fortress Europe
falls…

then I hope
you find the glue in the second-to-last drawer
in the hallway of our house,
the one I left there for you.