Always and forever

43 -Rethinking the past

Can

First month - Past

It has been a month since I left Istanbul and it has not been easy for me physically or mentally to face this journey through the world and through myself.

First of all, I realised that I had overestimated my physical recovery after the accident, that month of immobility had weakened my resistance to physical effort, my body had lost in a very short time much of the musculature gained through years of hard training.
Once I arrived in Caracas, I reached the places that are the subject of the largest exodus in the history of the American continent through uncontrolled routes from Venezuela to Colombia.
I was accompanied by some local guides through those mountain passes, we often had to leave the beaten tracks to climb up steep slopes following the hundreds of people, men, women and children who cover kilometres every day in search of a hope of life.

In order to be able to testify, I have to see with my own eyes, experience first-hand with them the hardships of a desperate escape by climbing mountains and crossing rivers in flood.
It wasn't easy, but gradually I regained the strength and stamina to be able to do what I have always done with my work, to bring to life through my photos the terrible life lived by those who suffer greatly in the most total disregard of the civilised world.

If the physical hardships have become less and less burdensome, it is another thing altogether to do with the inner torments that I have experienced every day and every night since I left. This slow journey, marked by fatigue and pain, has become an inner journey that is leading me to dig deep into my heart and mind.

The long hours of walking are an opportunity to meditate on the life I have lived up to two years ago, as far as my memories allow me to go, to compare it with what Sanem, my father, Emre and Metin have told me about my two missing years.

The meeting with Polen also served to make me realise that until I met Sanem I had never made a serious commitment, I had not bothered to get to know in depth the one I called my girlfriend for a long time but whom I only needed to meet two or three times a year. My relationships with women and others were superficial, devoid of any responsibility or commitment. Now I realise that it was not a desire to live or carefree living, it was fear, a real fear of loving and being abandoned as had happened with my mother as a child.

I didn't have a family, I didn't have a brother I could call one because of the many years we lived apart, my father had tried to do his best but he was a man with great responsibilities and his work often took him far away, forcing him to leave me at boarding school or with babysitters, my mother had abandoned me and for years she had been a card and a gift, which I hated viscerally, which arrived punctually at Christmas and on my birthday.
How could I have thought that I loved and that true love existed under these conditions?

Through what he had told me and from reading his book I had been able to see that even in my relationship with Sanem, whom I recognised as being very important to me, I had put up impassable walls at every difficulty, I had imposed clear cuts and categorical closures because I was afraid, afraid of loving and being disappointed and abandoned once again.

Looking around in the makeshift refugee camps, seeing the love in the eyes of parents anguished for the future of their children whom they were dragging along on a journey of despair and hope, was an example of a love I had never experienced.

Observing the married couples holding hands, helping and supporting each other in the difficulties of those terrible moments, even if only with a smile, a comforting caress, a kiss of hope, made me realise that I don't remember ever having experienced something so deep and true, at least until I met Sanem.

I left her for a whole year and made her suffer out of fear, fear of not being enough, of not deserving all the love she felt for me, fear of suffering. I left everything and everyone, I have no idea what happened in that year, but I feel that I went on a quest of my own, just as I am doing now, to see if I could be worthy of so much love and devotion, to ask myself if I could live without her and, apparently, the answer was no.

I must have come back for this reason, I did everything I could to win her heart again, so both Metin and Emre told me, because I had evidently realised that I could not do without her.

What does that tell me? I couldn't do it then, but can I do it now?

I have spent entire nights, under a sky of millions of stars that can only be admired in such remote places in the world, looking at the photos on my phone.

There are photos of the me I remember and photos of us I see as if for the first time and I can't help but notice the difference, the sparkle in my eyes that shone when I was with her had never been lit before. I see an unknown Can, happy and fulfilled, as complete as I have ever felt.

I have always lived a lonely life, devoid of affection, but it seems that next to her I found warmth and love that I still find hard to believe could exist.

Now I know that with her it was possible, I see it in the photos, I read it in her book, I heard it in her heartfelt words, now I just have to ask myself: how much do I want the past to continue to influence my present and my future?

On the answer to this question will depend something essential ... my happiness will depend.