Rather than seek to define our surroundings, we must experience them through our senses . . .”
When we fall in love, and even if we stay in love, we can already taste the lonely void that the end of love will bring. In much the same way as we can see a clear shape looming through the fog of daily life. The desire for love is every bit as strong as the desire to prove our own existence. There may be people who never see a need to prove their own existence, who have never loved deeply or seen that love turn to pain. They may experience love as love, such people. And intimacy as intimacy, separation as separation, life as life, death as death, and nothing more. And yet life is defined by death, and death by life. But you. For you, separation begins with the first moment of intimacy, just as intimacy begins with the first moment of separation; for you, the first moments of love and tender feeling carry the seeds of their demise. To touch another’s skin is to forget your own existence. Or to feel it more deeply. My own existence. Is it not true that every life carries the seeds of its own death.
Boundless longings, they’ve traveled with me all through life, or should I say, in the midst of life. But the time has come to put an end to tireless searching. The experiences you sought have been experienced. Have been lived out. Some already buried. Turned to earth. So many people who were once so very alive, whose lives were once joined with mine—all gone. In their name, and on their behalf, to miss them, love them. To miss those we love, to long for them—nothing in life can be more important. To miss them and long for them even when they are still beside us. Though we go through most of life alone. While sleeping. While searching for sleep. Even inside the deepest sleep, are there not moments when a person feels the helplessness of solitude. On roads. While reading. While looking out the window at the avenue below. While getting dressed. While undressing. While sitting in a random café, watching random crowds pass by. While looking for nothing. While paying no attention to the people sitting in a random café, because our mind is on something else . . . While trying to remember what moss smells like, while stepping into the street at a crossroads, and remembering at the last moment that we live in a world of cars, while not recognizing a single person in the cafés lining a great boulevard, while wandering through a grocery store, looking for something, anything, to eat, while buying something else from a vendor, thinking lonely thoughts, while missing, loving, being loved and making love with those who come and go or leave entirely, and those who die, are born, or grow . . . those who want to live, or do not want to live . . . are we not always alone.
Could a moment ever arrive when I longed for life no longer. Twenty years on, they’re playing the same songs. Showing a film made fifty-three years ago. Fashions from the twenties and the fifties in all the shop windows. In the news, it’s all famine and war, backward steps and disasters on such an epic scale as to defy the public imagination. Thus life passes us by. You retreat behind your walls. They behind theirs. In another city. Another country. Each to their own country. To speak their own language. Or they try to understand. No two people speak the same language. You understand now that whatever anyone says, they are saying it to themselves. Their every word is in some way an affirmation of self. Even if you’re genuinely trying to explain something to someone, you can do no more than express your own view of the world, extol your own wisdom. Every hand that reaches out to caress someone else’s body will move across that body as if wishing to caress its own.
This life I thought I could leave feeling fulfilled—now and again it comes to you that the end will come, and still you will be longing for more. As if you’d not yet lived. Is fulfillment even a thing.
As if there is nothing, amongst all the moments we’ve ever lived, no single moment that our eyes have fully grasped, or our hearts embraced.
What is it that reminds you today, as it does every day, that there is nothing to do in this life, or in the lives passing all around you, nothing to do but wait for death. Life is timeless. Time has no place in it. Childhood, womanhood, manhood, and old age. Life and death. Love and lovelessness. Emptiness and fulfillment—all are intertwined. Reason and madness, existence and the void—they’re all of a piece. Like the white nights of Northern Europe. Like dawn coming to a sky that never darkened.
You don’t write to tell stories. The world is full of stories. Every person’s every living day is filled to the brim with them. Nor do I wish to define my surroundings. Even the grayest, emptiest concrete wall is covered with definitions. A single glance suffices. To read everything on that wall. To see children in their gardens, playing amidst the trees, to watch them on the brink of life, to feel a patient’s impatience, or the heat of a summer’s day, a sky reaching up into infinity, and the shapes of clouds. You close your eyes. You see. You open your eyes. Definitions come undone to lose themselves in the timeless continuum of past, present, and future.
How long can you carry a person like that. Never satisfied. He wears you out. You wear each other out. I took him everywhere with me. From the Bozdağ Mountains of Gölcük, from that little blue lake and the angry grandmother hiding behind the mountains. I took him with me into life’s deepest nights, and its most distant cities, its youngest loves and earliest mornings. But still, he wanted more.
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From Journey to the End of Life by Tezer Özlü, translated by Maureen Freely. Used with permission of the publisher, Transit Books. Translation copyright © 2025 by Maureen Freely.
