The Other Kind of Love
I still don't know why, but this is where I need to be.
Honest truth: I’ve been too sad and too scared to write.
Apparently, this is what they want. “They” being the ones in power who are overloading us with terrible acts of inhumanity to the point that we can no longer function.
What they want: for us to be too sad or scared to do anything.
It is being said that if we don’t take in enough joy, and don’t rest enough, and don’t talk to friends enough, our nervous systems will go into freeze and we won’t do much at all.
I believe this is true.
And I’m in freeze.
Mostly. I have been writing, a film project about Lebanon that I’ve been working on for a long time.
But it feels like that’s taking all the energy and hope I have. I spend the rest of my days wandering around dazedly, watching Spanish rom com series and eating too many cookies.
(Not to shame cookie-eating. The amount of cookies that is too many is not a set amount. It varies from person to person. I judge no one else’s cookie intake.)
I wanted to do a theme for you for February: “Love Letters to Turkiye”. I want to share more stories and images from the beautiful, weirdo small city/holiday town on the southwest coast of this country where I spend most of my time.
Because I’m finding that after 3 and a half years, I love it more than ever.
It’s not the lustful, gushy kind of love I had when I first moved here, all “oh my god the sea” and “wow those sunsets” and “oh my god the tomatoes that taste like tomatoes”. (I have a friend who tells a story of coming here as a toddler and being so enamoured by the colour of the water that she bit her aunt on the arm.)
It’s more like long-term marriage kind of love. (Not that I speak from experience, having managed to stay married for all of 4 years.) But I am starting to love Fethiye with its faults. With its chaotic driving and its ridiculous apartment rental situation and the fact that it’s somehow acceptable to leave beer bottles and plastic bags on the beach. I yell about these things. I let myself actively hate them, which somehow gives me the room to love this place even more.
But instead of writing about that, I’m eating eat cookies.
So here’s a love letter to Fethiye, but one I wrote way back when, during the pandemic, when I was juuuust coming out of that lustful stage.
In some ways, it’s more relevant than ever.
With love,
Natalie
I fell in love with Fethiye over fish water.
I had been travelling for two years by that point. It was 2016, and I was stopping here to visit my dad, who had lived here by that point for over a decade.
I’d walked to the outdoor market square to pick up some fish from Ozman, the fish guy. (In Türkiye, you have a fish guy.) I was waiting by Ozman’s shop when I felt a cold sensation on my foot. I looked down and saw that water from the melted ice they used to keep the fish fresh was flowing down the cobblestones and running over my sandal.
I looked around the square. Locals shouted greetings over stacks of cucumbers. Fishmongers dangled cigarettes from their lips as they hacked grouper. Old men laughed over backgammon boards and glasses of tea. I took a breath of tobacco and raw shrimp and goat’s cheese and sweat.
And I thought,
“This is life. It stinks. It’s loud. It’s messy. This feels more alive than anything I’ve ever experienced in the western world.
I don’t want to go home.”
But I did.
After so much time away, I thought it might be time to put down some roots. To reconnect with the place I grew up, and the friends and family who still lived there. I wanted community. I was 39. I thought I should be responsible. That I might still want to be a parent. That maybe a relationship would be a good idea.
So I flew back to Ottawa. I cried as the plane descended, already longing for crumbling ruins; ear-splitting traffic; still-standing goddess temples. For smelliness; messiness; life.
Almost exactly 5 years later, I’m back.
I have sold, stored or given away everything I own, aside from one suitcase and backpack, and my dog, Django, now by my side. All the dog-related paperwork has been signed and stamped by all the right people in the right colour of ink (it really came down to that), although the process of even confirming that Django would be allowed on the flight had been so Monty Pythonish that, until we boarded, I was terrified they would turn us away.
So much so that the fact that we were also flying during a pandemic didn’t occur to me, until it did.
At least a third of my fellow passengers wore no mask, including one of the flight attendants. None of the rest of them seemed to care. After a year and a half of masking, vaxxing, and isolation, I was open-mouthed (not that you’d have known).
We emerge at Dalaman airport in the blazing heat to find my dad, all tanned and relaxed in his shorts and now-white hair. The air is muggy and salty, and there are the palm trees and red dirt hills I’ve dreamed of for so long, after a year and a half of lockdown in the suburbs, most of it (it feels like) under ice and snow. We might as well be in another galaxy. My brain just won’t take it in.
We load everything into the car, and Dad says,
“So, were Django’s papers okay?”
I blink. The stack of papers, detailing my dog’s rabies vaccine, his vaccine checks, his microchip number, his astrological rising sign… are still in my bag. Not a single person asked to see them.
On our way home, we stop for dinner at restaurant with an outdoor terrace. The sun is setting. The Aegean is glistening. No one is wearing a mask.
Welcome to Turkiye.
A couple of days later, I take Django for a nighttime walk. The air is body-temperature warm, and I’m still so jet lagged that somehow we end up strolling all the way into town. Despite it being 9:30 at night, everything is open.
I keep feeling like I’m going to roll over and wake up back in Canada.
My favourite shops are still here, and some new trendy cafes. The old baths in the centre of town, the fish market. The bars blare music. Toddlers and grandparents sit at tables piled with sweets and tea. I cannot wipe the smile from my face, cannot believe that this place had continued to exist during that entire crazy, sad, dark time.
The next morning, I join dad on a trip to the supermarket. I’ve been excited to practice my newfound Duolingo Turkish skills, but as we walk through the aisles, I peer at bottles and jars and understand nothing. Suddenly, I imagine future, solo grocery trips, or dealing with official people who would try to take advantage of my lack of Turkish and my foreigner-ness (a very regular occurrence). The freezer section rises up around me, cartons of (I assume) ice cream yelling,
“What were you thinking?
What right do you have to be here?
Did you really think it was going to be that easy?”
My mantra, the go-to steeped so deeply into my soul:
You’ve made a huge mistake.
Yes, I came to Türkiye because of fish water. But really, I came for a lot more than that. For the past few years, in my conservative, government hometown, I’ve swung back and forth between trying to “be responsible” and the truth waking me up at night: that no amount of RRSPs, mortgages or instagram followers is going to protect us for what is coming. We are in so much trouble. And it feels like no one is talking about it.
It feels like no one is talking at all.
Shouting on Twitter, yes. Liking on Tiktok. But not talking. Not collaborating.
I’ve known for some time that I want to start creating or trying to find what I’ve been looking for: a community that is working together to address mental health, isolation, and the fact that we need to stop taking from and start giving back to this planet that has supported us unconditionally but won’t be able to for much longer. I want to do it in a place where you can grow food year round, and in a place where the idea of collectivity and closeness is still woven into the cultural fabric.
What better place than here?
And yet, two weeks ago, 38 people died in floods in northern Turkey. A month ago, in this very area, fires raged through 160,000 acres of forests, not to mention many lives and homes. The political situation is dire. Arab people cannot safely walk in the streets. Domestic violence rates are staggering. And so many of the people speaking up against any of it – journalists, lawyers, students – are in jail.
The whole idea of what I want to do is insane enough to begin with, never mind in a place where people don’t live freely, and where I can’t understand what’s written on a yogurt container.
A couple of weeks after, I am surrounded by Syrians, sitting at a table almost tipping over with Syrian food.
In 2014, at the start of my two years of travel that culminated in Turkey, I volunteered for a then very small, very unknown organization called the Nyaka AIDS Orphans project in Uganda.
In 2015, I came to Fethiye to visit my dad. I found a hair alon recommended by locals, but when I went on its Facebook page, I saw a link to the Nyaka AIDS Orphans project in Uganda.
“This can’t be right,” I thought.
It turns out that one of the women on Nyaka’s board, which at the time contained 12 people, lives here, in Fethiye.
We met for lunch. We became friends. When I came back in 2016, I learned about the work she’d been doing to support the hundreds of Syrian refugees who have moved here, and did my best to get involved. Through that work, I met one of the women in one of those families we were supporting: Jasmine, a mother of two who had walked across the Turkish border with her husband, two parents and sister, holding her baby and pregnant with her second child.
Jasmine and I stayed in touch. I watched from afar as her life in Türkiye took shape. She became a citizen (a rarity for Syrians.) She started a business, which blossomed. Her family got a bigger rental house, and a beat-up old car. Her younger sister graduated from university at the top of her class in a language she had only been speaking since she arrived.
In the few times we’ve hung out since I got here, she’s shared stories of a past and a country so ravaged by terror and trauma that it goes beyond my ability to compute. She’s shown a kind of generosity most of us are lucky to encounter once in a lifetime. She’s made me laugh. We’ve eaten so much falafel.
She’s called about apartments for me, has driven me around town, and has invited me to every family event, including the arrival of her older sister’s family from Damascus, whom they hadn’t seen in almost 10 years.
This country falling apart.
Fuck, everywhere is falling apart.
The language still sounds to me like something you’d hear in the Star Wars cantina.
I still wonder, some days, whether I’ve made a huge mistake.
But most days, I know I haven’t. Like when I’m surrounded by people who have designed themselves my new family, while shoving food into my mouth and trying to teach me Arabic.
Like when I get to eat dinner and argue about politics almost every night with my dad, who is losing his hearing but still insists on carrying my baggage up 6 flights of stairs.
And when I’m surrounded by half-masked Turks, smoking, yelling and laughing over a roasted chestnut stand, on a Tuesday at half past midnight.
This is fish water. This is life. And I still don’t know why, but it’s where I need to be.
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HAHAHAH! I like the look of the nice light breakfast with Jasmine :)
I understand that little kid. When I saw the photo of THAT BLUE SEA, I wanted to bite someone!
Thanks for sharing.