Everything in my mind turned upside down. Thunder rumbled. Even though I couldn't smell the earth, the roar penetrated deep into my heart. The coolness leaning against the walls filled my lungs. The scent of longing wrapping around my lungs drove me mad with the first heartbeats of the rain. It was as if my heart... recognized this face. This voice. This emotion. This yearning. And a love that went far beyond everything.
The moment I saw Tarık's face from over the operating table flashed through my mind like lightning. While I was sitting on that stretcher with my frozen body, the names of surgery equipment I didn't know passed by, voices talking... While I continued to fail to understand what anything was, from my half-open eyes, I actually heard all the voices. My inability to give meaning to those voices. My lack of trust in silence.
In fact, I had never trusted silence.
What was happening?
Pressing both hands against my temples, I stepped backward. The face was fluctuating. It was flickering, trying to drift away from me, but at that exact moment, a single memory seemed to drag me toward itself. The person I saw wasn't Tarık. He wasn't my husband. His gaze wasn't as cold as it had been inside the tunnel. Maybe back then, in that secluded corner, his gaze had just seemed cold to me. Maybe in that helplessness, the way he looked at me had felt foreign. But now... I knew him with all my heart, and I didn't find myself estranged from him.
"You," I murmured; "I remember you..."
The sound of the knock on the door was no different from the gunshot that went off the night Sis committed a murder.
Just as he was left with the weight of being a killer, I was now standing here with the remorse of someone who had killed themselves.
One of those massive cracks covering the city walls split open.
I took a step back. Stepping forward was no longer possible.
Another memory from the time I lay on the operating table flashed through my mind.
The movements of the sterile instrument in Tarık's hand had hooked a hook into my brain.
"I will finally get rid of her."
This sentence echoed twice in my head.
While I was lying on that operating table, Tarık had said this sentence to those next to him.
The memory was vague. Everything had become a tangled knot.
"You are the bane of my existence! I'm sick of you lying in hospitals! I'm sick of your medications! I'm exhausted from your crying, your giving up, your constantly looking for me by your side. I'm sick of your appointments. I... you—"
Where he paused, the door burst open violently.
"I'm sick of you living."
A freezing cold entered through the open door.
Now, he was standing right there in front of me, having walked through all that coldness, with his eyes fixed on me.
I had never loved anyone but Tarık... Tarık— Wait a second. My mind was so confused that I couldn't perceive whether that operating table was real or an illusion. I had backed away so much that my back hit the wall hard.
From the meters of distance between us, he took a step toward me.
As if he wanted to save me from my own quicksand.
This was the man who kept looking at me from that holo-screen.
He moved his hand slowly toward the scarf on his face.
Yet, I had already known it was him just from his eyes.
"You sa-said you would remember," he said with a broken voice.
I shook my head fearfully from side to side. "I don't remember."
He advanced another step.
"I am not a stranger," he murmured; "I am not a trickster."
While my lips were parched, "Who are you?" I said helplessly.
The rain was seeping through the hole, wetting my hair.
Without breaking his gaze from my eyes, as he lowered the scarf, the longing reflected on the sharp contours of his face became even more visible. I could only call that image longing. Because nothing ages a person more than regret.
I noticed a single tear suddenly dripping from his bright black eyes.
Tarık's face reappeared in my mind.
I thought about his excitement when he was talking to me... talking to me about the chip, with as much vividness as he had when performing those magnificent surgical procedures.
"She will get well now... This chip will make her different from the others. Still, I don't want her fate to be like the fate of other patients," the snippet played before my eyes like a live movie. The pity-filled tone in his voice was overshadowed by a strange kind of provocative silence. He didn't sleep with me at night; he didn't speak to me for days. We had become two strangers in the same house. But then, why did I remember him as a good person back then? Why was my memory deceiving me?
Now listen to your heart, I told myself. Tarık was a bad person. My heart could see that even behind all his rigidity, he was stubborn, aggressive, provocative, loveless, and full of hatred.
"Am I hallucinating?" I asked; I lost myself in the fleeting moment of hope shining in the eyes of the one across from me. "Is everything an illusion?" I sniffed. "Is my mind... really playing games with me?" His name was right on the tip of my tongue. My heart was pounding with power. "Tell me..." I said, forcing my brain once more to recall that name.
Just as I couldn't remember his name, he too was having difficulty closing the distance between us.
It was as if we both understood each other.
Neither his being the four faces of the mechanism nor my being a patient mattered anymore. Neither the mechanism nor the walls meant anything.
Only the sake of time was left, that was all.
He took another step; I pressed my back harder against the wall.
My heart was beating so fast... I thought it would stop.
Suddenly, something completely unexpected happened.
Myself... I threw myself into his arms—the me who hadn't felt like belonging to this world even for a single moment.
Because some moments of reunion could only be described this way.
Because some moments of reunion were as silent as the moments of death.
Passion, love, and pain. Helplessness and exhaustion.
In the midst of everything, we saw each other in our clearest form from behind the misty glass.
The place where his hands touched my back felt as if it were burning.
The fragility of my body, which had shrunk and stayed away from eating and drinking, was blooming like a flower instead of being bruised under his arms.
In that tiny fraction of time, my eyes were tightly shut, and the scent of old times emanating from him filled my lungs.
I didn't know what scent it was, but I kept thinking I was constantly dying.
At that moment, I didn't trust myself... I only trusted him.
My heart recognized him.
The moment he pulled me away from himself, we looked at each other with tearful eyes.
"Efes..." I murmured; that name on the tip of my tongue came out.
Everything... I remembered everything.