I wasn’t going to write today. I was going to take the precious time of the first day of my vacation when children are in school, to do laundry, read a bit of a novel and weather permitting, take a long walk. That was the plan.
Then last night, a suicide bomber killed a few dozens of people in my beloved Ankara and I was taken by a storm of news and personal communications, with nose stuck in my phone for hours. Life in this damp English town never really stops, probably because it never really has to, being so slow anyway. We hop off life and hop back on and find that nothing has really changed. So it has been, I suspect, for many centuries. Taking comfort in this fact, I managed to scrape my nose off my phone and even slept, though barely enough, last night. This morning, breakfast was eaten, one child was taken to school with the required clown costume for the end-of-term show, and the other’s key fob was deposited with lunch money just in time for her lunch break. No interruptions. I even exchanged genuine smiles and hellos at the school gate, in the coffee shop and the grocery shop, because it felt good. Of course I’m feeling absolutely hopeless and immensely angry inside, but had some secret service agent followed me through North Oxford this morning, he/she wouldn’t have been able to find the slightest clue to suggest anything was wrong.
Here is what is wrong: My home country is being run by an irresponsible mob. The state forces kill and bully innocent people. The terrorists kill and bully innocent people too. The more the terrorists kill and bully innocent people, the more the state has an excuse to kill and bully more people. Who knows what other massacre is being plotted in the hidden corners of that beautiful, sad place called Turkey as I write this. And I write this in anger as well as fear, hoping that readers will NOT share it, as that might pave my way to a Turkish court on charges of siding with terrorists. This is of course the last thing I intend to do but misunderstandings of this sort are not an uncommon occurrence in the said beautiful and sad place.
All of this is wrong in itself, but there is also this personal situation: I am here in this peaceful place that hardly ever changes visibly, in an adopted country that my children now consider their home. All of this means that it is now impossible for me to even consider making my children live in my home country, so that they get to know it and learn to love it. However beautiful it is and however much I love it, how am I to bring myself to moving them there? At any rate, such a sad place it has become that they will probably never understand why I miss it so much. I am in fact missing a place that no longer exists.
To me, this feels wrong. Very wrong.
The Pensive Owl 