Ghost Village

Freak-Outs and Greek-Outs

A man has appeared.

When I least expected it, of course.

In the form I least expected him to take. (Turkish).

Despite my best and most valiant efforts, he’s taking up too much space in my brain.

So I’m hiking it off.

I’m heading up a rocky path in Karakoy, a ghost village near Fethiye. Vacated almost 100 years ago, when the Turks enacted a “population exchange” and sent most Greeks away, Karakoy has stood empty ever since, save for flocks of tourists and goats.

I came in search of that feeling, the one I seek wherever I go in the world. That connection with the ancients, that feeling of awe that comes from being somewhere where souls have walked and lived and worshipped for centuries or millennia.

But if I’m honest, I came to shake this man out of my mind.

We matched online, by accident. I confused his location with a town close by, when he was actually several hours away. But he lives in Istanbul, and in a few weeks I will, too, and, as it turns out, he has a conference here in Fethiye next week. So we continued to chat. The interests we share are eery. He asks (almost) better questions than I do. He’s travelled, he’s volunteered with refugees. He’s obsessed with psychology. He meditates.

He is also… how can I put this? Intense.

He started saying pretty early in the game how much he enjoyed talking to me. How happy he was when he heard from me; how he wanted me to teach him more about meditation. In a country where it’s almost a tradition for local men to charm and then screw over foreign women (so much so that we are referred to in Turkish as “partridges”), this worries me. It worries my friends, too. Most of them.

“He’s probably saying the exact same thing to 16 other women,” Willow declares.

“A chick in every port,” Sophia echoes, in a separate conversation.

Askin (who is, it should be noted, a Turkish man) has a different opinion.

“Do you know what Dan Savage would call this?” he asks, laughing.

I brace myself. “What?”

“A non-problem. We’re brought up to buy women flowers and give them compliments. I’m serious: they teach us that. It doesn’t mean he’s not a narcissist asshole, though. Want me to do a background check on his Instagram?”

But when I speak with this man, which has only happened by video so far, I don’t feel any of this. Instead, I get that that sense of resonance that happens when someone just… gets you. I feel like I can be myself. And I ask him point blank why I should trust him, explaining that no Western man would ever say the kinds of things he says, especially not so soon.

“I made a decision,” he says, shrugging. “To always say what’s on my mind. To not let bad experiences hold me back.”

Who does that?

Now, as I huff and puff up the mountain, heading towards a church at the topmost point, I gaze into the empty doorways and windows of the stone skeleton houses, trying to imagine the people living there. I always have a hard time believing that folks a hundred or a thousand years ago worried about this shit. Did the ghosts have ghosts? I try to stay present in the haunting beauty around me, but flash back to a guy I matched with a couple of weeks ago, whom I felt like I clicked with, too. But after a few days, he vanished. And let’s not forget the Lebanese guy of yore, or my supposed friend, Aaron. Or my most recent relationship, which was terminated via text message. Or my ex-husband, with whom I am now great friends, and who is also Greek, and to whom I declared, in the presence of a Unitarian God and 235 people, to be with until I died. All the promises broken and proclamations unproclaimed whisper to me as I climb… all the men who inched away, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically, and all the times I clung to them like life rafts. I know now why I chose people I needed to chase after: so I could avoid dealing with myself, my pain, and my own ghosts. But why would this time be any different? Am I insane to be even considering it? Also, why hasn’t he texted?

My phone pings. It’s him. I shove it into my pocket, round a bend and spot the top of the little church. I pull myself upwards and take in the vista below. I imagine the people of this town making their way up here, the highest point, to be close to god and to each other; to pray, to chat, to gossip. Also, to hide and survive and fend for their lives. I try to imagine being ordered to leave my home, my life, my everything. There’s a couple coming out of the church. As I stop to take in the facade, the guy lies down on the grass and starts blasting Turkish music through his phone.

I mutter something not very holy.

The church is smaller than my bedroom. There’s nothing left in it, just four walls and a place where a lantern may once have hung. I sit in one of the empty window holes, trying to block out the guy’s phone music, but all I’m getting is a feeling of dread, and I’m pretty sure it’s not just mine.

I am meeting the man next week. Supposedly. If he doesn’t bail. The more we talk, the more I find myself liking him, and the more convinced I become that he is going to disappear without warning, leaving me in a whirlwind of shame, doubting my intuition, and sprinting to the next nunnery I can find, even if it’s up here. This is one of the reasons I love being single: it’s safe. When you’re alone, you don’t have to question and second-guess someone else’s every action, never mind your reaction to their action, and so on and so forth.

And that’s what I’m truly afraid of.

It’s not being disappointed, or conned, or abandoned. It’s how I treat myself when that happens. It’s the way I feel when I berate myself for my fear. It’s how hard I slap myself on the wrist for being anxious. It’s the way I tell myself off for choosing the wrong person; for making the wrong decision; for doing it wrong, again.

I have been ghosting myself for a lifetime. It was a survival tactic, once. But now it’s gotta die. And no one’s going to kill it but me.

I make my way back down the path. I pass a trio of friends, and a pregnant woman and her partner, all snapping photos of the view with abandon. At the base of the mountain is another church, a much larger one, that’s been closed for repair since before I arrived in Turkey. It’s surrounded by grass and flowers, and I peer through an opening in its surrounding wall and feel a peaceful energy coming from inside. I stare at it for a while, imagining the joys, the unions, the losses that have been acknowledged in this place.

I get back into the car and drive down towards the sea.

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