I felt that she would return again.
But in reality, just like the others, I knew nothing at all.
When I reached the nurse with a limp, she blinked her eyes. She shook her head as if asking what was wrong. When she asked, "Are you better?" I nodded my head absently. A drop of sweat trickled down my temples. While I didn't even know what I was agreeing to, we began walking toward the middle of the corridor. "Do you know her?" she asked, eyeing me from the side, her voice mixed with a yawn. When she covered her mouth with her hand, I turned to her.
"I don't know her. You're about to ask what we talked about; just leave that to me," I said, without prolonging the conversation. I briefly added that I thanked her for everything and said I was fine now. Seeing my reluctance and not wanting to push me further, she went back to where she had been sitting earlier, took her tea—which I assumed had already gone cold—and headed toward her booth.
Not knowing how I would fall back asleep, I entered my room and closed the door. Taking deep breaths, I went inside and ran to the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind me. As I collapsed in front of the door with my entire being, I couldn't swallow. A sharp pain stabbed into my head; my mind, which I squeezed between my hands, was crowded to the brim.
Thoughts about this girl—whom I had just looked at and smiled with, who had seemed like spring to me—were swirling in my head in such a way that I saw myself as a wretched creature.
I remembered the days when the eyes to which I showed my paintings—the ones that immortalized my happiest moments—turned away from me, and the days when the people to whom I let read my innocent writings fled from me. Everything I had lost in those nights in my own home, where I felt no different from a captive and scribbled on my walls, was now pouring down over me like boiling water.
This girl, I said to myself.
A reason not for me to live, but on the contrary, for me to kill myself. How can she just smile and shrug at a life that doesn't even allow her to see?
When a sharp pain stabbed my head again, I leaned my back hard against the wall. The wretched thought that came to mind made me tremble all over again; even though I barely knew this girl, it was as if I knew so much about her... I couldn't make sense of anything.
My doctor's voice echoed in my head. "What is that thought, Bulut? Can you hear it?"
The voice hit my eardrum with an echo.
I felt as if that voice was truly right in front of me.
I stood up violently and turned the faucet on all the way. I was overflowing with the urge to scatter and break things, but that would draw too much attention; I didn't want anyone swarming over me, nor did I want my doctor's appointment to be moved up.
As my eyes slowly closed, I rested my hands on the counter; they were shaking—it was from life. I don't know how many minutes I kept my eyes closed like that, whether I slept or was awake. I was only terrified, like a small child, of what I would see when I opened my eyes. When my eyelids parted, a man with a very long face, a quite crooked nose, and a countenance full of wrinkles was looking at me.
His hair had been buzzed into a "number three" cut. I could tell from its unevenness that an amateur woman had shaved this hair. The beard was completely gone. Cut in such a way that the harsh strokes of the razor had been struck upon this face like a brushstroke.
"Just like," I was saying, "the way that girl paints the walls? Were these strokes, these cuts, applied to the face in the same way? People will call one 'art' or a 'painting'; and the other they will call 'disease,' 'old age,' 'exhaustion.' When they see one, they will walk up and look; when they see the other, they will change their path."
"They will run from this man for a lifetime; this man will hide from people for a lifetime."
My mind drifted toward a completely different image.
"There was a tile-colored house on a mountain top. The chimney was smoking with a piece called a roof on top of it. The stove is burning, the chimney is smoking; the stove isn't burning, the chimney isn't smoking. Sometimes the stove made the inside smell, but the windows were so small that the smell never left the room. It wasn't just toxic gases in that smell. What smelled in that room was a heavy loneliness."
Shaking my head violently from side to side, I splashed the running water onto my face. The water had such an effect on my face that I started, and as if drunk, I opened the door and walked out. I walked toward the bed. My legs trembled like leaves.
When I collapsed to the floor before reaching it, helplessly taking one of my previous positions, one of my hands involuntarily opened the nightstand next to me.
My fingers were shaking.
I wasn't sure if it was from the medicine or from fear.
It was a thick, black-covered notebook. A hundred-dollar bill was stuck on it.
A skinny man appeared before me in all his frailty and weakness. While he was standing, he suddenly crouched down and sat beside me. I was looking at him; his chest was moving very weakly with every breath. He was holding a drum in his hand. He gripped the drum in such a way that it gave me the impression he would attack or do something very bad to anyone who took it from him.
I was afraid of him. Very afraid.
Time and space intertwined. I couldn't even breathe. The images blurred.
That thing continued to look at me. And I had no courage left to look back at it.
End of Chapter