Homecoming

One Sunday morning, I woke up on the second floor of the three-floor apartment of the Mimoza neighborhood, where the signs of life in the remote hills of Istanbul are understood by the voices of two or three markets and all the arranged married women who are released into the streets in the morning and picked up from the streets in the evening. I woke up once again to the morning when I woke up every day with a cheap beer bottle that was a quarter full of mud and the smell of substance leaking from every corner of my one-room house. In fact, until a year ago, this place seemed like a paradise to me because I’ve never had a house like this before. My parents always talked about how rich I would be when I grew up and how I could offer them my childhood life that they gave me in the future. Father always said “you have to be a big man for big money”. Now I am neither a big man nor a penny in my pocket.

At the age of 18, due to stress and anxiety, I started to run away from home and sleep on the streets. Thanks to those times, two aunts couldn’t stand me and took me to their house. They looked, they couldn’t get along with me, they moved to their hometown and left their house to me. I stayed in that neighborhood until I was 23. until the foreclosure officer came, who came to foreclose on the house and brought me back to my true homeland, to the streets. I am now 33 years old. Until a year ago, I was wandering around the streets like a stray dog ​​until I met again with my military friend Halil at the journalist I was working with. Halil was a person I loved, whom I stayed in the same ward during my military service, who we ate and drank in the same ward, who did not go away, but whom I never heard from again after my military service. The day we met, we went to have tea together and talked about our lives again about our military days. Khalil was a very kind hearted person. unlike me, he was loved for his strangeness and a success in his career. That’s when we decided to live together. He was sharing the rent and I was preparing the food one day. Our life was going up and down, but two months ago I was kicked out of the newspaper I was working for and was no longer able to help out equally with the rent. Although Halil said that it was not a problem for him, my conscience did not allow me to live with him anymore. I needed to find myself a job and it was not going to be coy for me. I was constantly sending the articles I wrote to somewhere, but the last article I wrote that had to be read behind the scenes caused a drop in ratings on television screens because I had sent the article wrong. After this small-scale disaster, as you can understand, I lost my job. so it didn’t occur to me that anyone would want to hire me. Then, on that Sunday morning when I woke up, Halil, who heard the phone ringing, took the beer in my hand to wake me up and replaced it with a cup of coffee and informed me that a woman on the phone called for me. After hearing my name, my hands went around my feet and I immediately arranged my clothes in an orderly manner. The place calling was the central agency of the crescent moon’s dream for years. In the crescent moon, we are also a newspaper and songwriter. For years, we used to talk and sell our writings somewhere. 15 seconds wasn’t enough to understand the woman on the phone who read my articles and said that they were impressed because the woman invited me to the agency for a job interview while I was still in shock. I didn’t know what to say because even though it was very important to my career, Halil had done so much for me until now and I didn’t want to live his dream in his house with his right. I had a plan in my mind, whether it works or not. Khalil deserved much better than me. I started writing a letter to be read on Monday morning. My letter was for Halil. “Dear brother Halil, I am writing this letter because now I have to go back to my hometown and help my family. Thank you very much for putting up with me for all this time, opening your home and most importantly being a new family to me. The phone call I received yesterday was for a business appointment from the central agency. You deserve it so much, my dear friend. I can’t pay my rent with money, but I hope you can clear all my debts with this memory of me in your new life. You are always with me, my friend. Take it easy”.

As I looked at the letter I folded in my hand and put it on the table for one last time, I thought to myself, “Is it your final decision?” but there are some decisions that we cannot make ourselves or that our heart does not allow to choose the other option. Now I’m going back to my hometown with three or five pieces of my belongings. There are some images in life that always take you on the same path, no matter how wrong you think it is. Yes, I’m going back to the streets now. maybe the streets are my real living space, what do you think…

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