I woke this morning to the ezan. It was 22 July, almost five. When the call ended, it left behind a silence rarely found here in midsummer. On the table lay the collage I had finished the day before. I looked at it. If only I knew what I was looking for. That had been yesterday’s question, and the collage was what remained of it. No answer came.
Instead, an impulse sent me out before the sun appeared over the mountain. The air was cool, the asphalt not yet warm.
I drove out onto an empty road. I love driving through this emptiness. At this hour, the town resembles my first winter here, ten years ago.
That winter, the town closed. The summer tables were pulled from the pavements, the shutters came down, and the houses on the hills went dark one by one. In streets impassable in August, nothing stirred but the wind. I had moved to a famous town and found myself living in its absence. It was like remaining onstage after the audience had gone home. The scenery was still there, the lights still warm.
A sadness followed me through that winter. I thought it belonged to the season and would lift in May. It did. Then, over the years, it changed address. In a few hours, this road will be impassable again. The heat will rise, music from different venues will mingle in the air, and the pavements will belong to tables once more. This July, the same sadness found me in the middle of the crowd, in all that abundance, as easily as it once found me in the empty streets.
Sadness had changed seasons.
They say there are only two stories. A stranger comes to town. Someone leaves town. Bodrum runs both, on a timetable. I arrived in the first and never made it into the second. I am one of the town’s local strangers now.
From May onwards, the others arrive. They emerge from the airport with the particular exhaustion of people who have spent eleven months holding something together. I know that look from my work. If not these people themselves, then the burdens they carry.
Perhaps there has been a divorce, a diagnosis, or a resignation letter waiting in a drawer. They have decided to reset. They have booked four nights.
On awnings, in two languages, the same promise in different clothes. Unwind. Escape.
Arın. Heal.
I am a psychologist. I conduct my sessions online from home. While someone tells me they can no longer cry, the garden waits beyond the window. A leaf moves. The face on the screen does not. When the screen goes dark, I make collages in the same rooms and tend the garden. For ten years, I have listened, and for ten years, I have watched this town. Most of the faces that appear when I close my eyes now belong here.
This summer I noticed something I had not expected. My eyes were tired. I wanted to witness less.
My daughter was born here. She is nine now. When she had only just learnt to write, she announced that she had written a book. It was two paragraphs long.
“Mum,” she said, “the book is called Soulless People.”
I cannot remember whether she explained the title, or whether I asked. Children place things like this in your hands and walk away. Her words stayed in me for years.
They finally fell into place at a party during the loudest week of the season. I watched people arrange themselves for photographs. The angles were identical from table to table. So were the mouths, and the practised indifference. Whenever a phone was raised, everyone put on a complete, overflowing happiness. When it came down, a faint scowl returned, like the tide. Had dissatisfaction become something you wore too?
I remembered my daughter’s little book. She had the name wrong but not the instinct. These people were not soulless. They were tired of carrying themselves. A self is heavy. It has to be tended and presented and defended and continually updated. After eleven months of that, you would book four nights too.
And this is where I refuse to be clever. This place really can make you feel better. The scent descending from the olive trees as the evening heat loosens. Bare hills that ask nothing because they promise nothing. The sea in the morning, before anyone is in it. People enter the water and something lets go, first the skin, then whatever is under it. The body remembers itself here. That relief is real. They emerge with wet faces, and I understand why they came.
But quiet repair is difficult to trust. It cannot be bought, displayed, or measured. So people reach for what can be bought. A better table, a more expensive beach, alcohol from late afternoon, music still rising after midnight, an entire summer compressed into four days. As if consuming more might leave them with less of themselves to carry. They try to cure excess with more excess.
Those who spend the winter here fare no better. Once the visitors leave, the sea becomes approachable again, darkness lengthens, and the afternoons go slack. For a while, this simplicity is enough. Walks, wind, the freedom of moving through town unseen. But silence does not only soothe. It brings a person closer to themselves. When that becomes difficult, those who remain reach for exits of their own.
Late nights. Drink. Someone else’s body. Loves that continue long after their natural deaths.
Summer people flee themselves by consuming experiences, winter people by holding on to someone. The season changes the shape of the appetite, not the appetite itself.
I include myself. Wanting to witness less is also a way of leaving town without packing a suitcase.
When I reached the ancient quarry, the sun was still behind the mountain. In that light, the stone was pale and cool. Below the cut rock, on a terrace, stood the tomb of Koyunbaba. A grave on the shore, a holy man asleep at the water’s edge. Before him lay water no one had yet claimed. The horizon was at exactly the right distance, the distance that pulls the eye away from the self.
I closed my eyes. No faces came. Neither did yesterday’s question.
Every September, I watch people fly away lighter than they arrived, only to land at home carrying the same weight as before. They decide they did not stay long enough and book again for next year. I no longer think them foolish. The sea really did lighten the burden. For a while, it even took the weight. But carrying something is not the same as reaching its source. In the end, it took nothing away. It never does. Not because it withholds. It has no hands, that is all.