Kişisel mektup

İzmir, 6 April1

Dear Lena,2

I miss you more than my terrible handwriting can say.3 It has been three whole months since you flew to Toronto, and our street still feels like a song with one note missing.

So much has happened that I hardly know where to start.4 First, the big news: I finally adopted the little grey cat that used to wait outside the bakery. I named her Zeytin, and she has already knocked two glasses off the table and claimed your old cushion as her throne. You would adore her — though she would pretend not to care about you, very much your type.5 I have started narrating my whole day out loud to her the way we used to talk to each other, and she judges every word of it.

School is school. I made the volleyball team, which surprised everyone including me, and I think of you every time we lose, because you always said losing builds character. I have a lot of character now.6 You would laugh at how seriously I take it — I even shout at the referee inside my head, in your voice.

But honestly, the real reason I'm writing is simpler. I keep saving up small things to tell you — a joke, a song, something silly our teacher said — and then I remember you're not two streets away anymore, and the day feels a little heavier. Please write back and tell me everything: the cold, the new school, whether Canadian chocolate is really better.7 Don't leave anything out.

Give my love to your parents. And save the summer for me — I am already counting the days until you come home.

With all my love,
Selin8

Ankara, the first cold night of autumn1

Dear Dede,2

I have owed you this letter for a long time, and I am sorry it comes so late.3 Mum says the phone line to the village is bad again, and anyway, some things are too important to shout over static. So here I am, at the kitchen table, writing by hand the way you always insisted was the only honest way to say something.4

I have been thinking about the summer I was ten — the one when you made me plant the olive saplings behind the house.5 I hated it at the time, if I'm honest. My friends were swimming, and there I was, pressing thin little sticks into hard soil that gave nothing back. You told me I would not see the fruit for years, that some of the trees might not even be mine to harvest. I remember thinking that was the saddest thing I had ever heard.6

I understand it differently now.7 This year I have had to make choices about who I want to become, and each one feels exactly like planting something whose fruit I will not taste for a long time — if ever. I chose the harder subjects. I said goodbye to a friendship that had quietly turned unkind. None of it feels rewarding yet; most of it just aches.8 But I hear your voice telling me that the ache is the work, and the work is the point.

Do you remember what you told me when I complained that the whole thing was pointless? You didn't argue with me. You just handed me the watering can and said that patience is not waiting for something — it is learning to love a thing while it is still too small to love you back. I was ten. I nodded as if I understood, then spent eight years not understanding, and now the sentence follows me around like a second shadow.

I want you to know that the trees are tall now. Mum sent me a photo, and I cried in a way I did not expect. You gave a bored, impatient child something to be responsible for, and I think you knew, even then, that you were really teaching me how to wait. You were never very good at saying things directly, but you were always planting them, trusting the years to explain what you meant.

I will come to the village in the spring, I promise — not just to visit, but to sit under those trees with you and say thank you properly, out loud, no static in the way. Until then, please rest, listen to Nene, and don't argue with the doctor as much as Mum says you do.

Your granddaughter, always,
Elif