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Thursday, 14 May1

I still can't believe I actually did it.2 Today I put my hand up in class and read my poem out loud, and my voice only shook a little.3 I have written that sentence three times now, just to check that it is real.

All week I had promised myself I would stay invisible. You know how it is — you decide the safest seat is the one at the back, near the window, where Mr. Okan never looks.4 For years I have been the girl who has opinions only inside her own head, the one who thinks of the perfect thing to say three hours too late. But when he asked who wanted to share, something stupid and brave took over my arm before my brain could stop it. For a whole second I stared at my own hand in the air as if it belonged to a stranger.

My face was on fire the whole time. I could hear my own heartbeat between the lines.5 The words came out smaller than they had in my bedroom, but they came out. And then… they clapped. Not a polite little clap. A real one. Selin turned around and mouthed "that was so good," and I think I will remember her face for a long time.

Now, hours later, lying here in the dark, I feel strange.6 Proud, yes, but also a bit sad — sad that I spent so many years being quiet when this feeling was waiting for me the whole time. Maybe courage isn't a thing you have. Maybe it's a thing you borrow for ten seconds and hope it's enough.7

I have read the same three lines of my history homework four times and understood none of them, because my mind keeps wandering back to that moment. Tomorrow I want to feel this again. I don't know how yet. But tonight, for once, I am not afraid of myself.

Sunday, 2 November1

I have started this entry four times and deleted it three, which is strange, because nothing dramatic happened today.2 We simply drove to my grandmother's house to begin packing it up, and I came home with a single cardboard box and a feeling I still can't name.3

The house smelled the way it always has — dust, dried lavender, and something faintly sweet I have never managed to identify.4 I used to think that smell belonged to the house itself, but standing in the empty hallway today I finally understood: it had always been her. Now that her things are in boxes, the smell is already fading, as though the walls are quietly forgetting her too. I have never believed in ghosts, but I believe in that — the way a person can be dissolved into a smell, a light, the particular creak of a third stair, and then slowly rinsed out of a place once the rooms are emptied.

I found the yellow teacup with the chipped handle, the one she never let anyone throw away.5 For years I found it embarrassing — why keep something broken? — but today I wrapped it in newspaper as carefully as if it were made of gold. I think I understand it now. She wasn't keeping the cup. She was keeping the morning she bought it, the person she bought it with, a version of herself that only that cup remembered.

Everywhere I looked there was a smaller version of her waiting to ambush me. The pencilled height marks on the doorframe — mine and my cousins' — climbing the wood like a strange little staircase. The radio she never once switched off, silent now, its dial still tuned to the station that used to read the morning news into the kitchen. I kept picking things up and putting them down again, unable to decide whether keeping them was love or simply an inability to let go.

It frightens me, a little, how easily a whole life folds down into a few boxes.6 My mother was efficient and calm, labelling everything in her neat handwriting, and I loved her and resented her for it in the same breath.7 How can she be so steady? Or is steadiness just grief that has learned to keep its voice down?

I am not sad, exactly. Or I am, but underneath the sadness there is something almost like gratitude — the odd comfort of having had something worth missing this much.8 I keep thinking that grief is just love with nowhere left to go, and tonight it has nowhere to go but this page. Tonight I put the yellow teacup on my own shelf, chipped handle facing out, and I think I will keep it forever. Not because it is beautiful. Because now it remembers her, and me, and this quiet, ordinary, unbearable day.