To Get There

Chapter 4

Warning 🔞 : in this chapter there is a part that talks about abandonment.

Do not read it if you are sensitive to this topic that is at the beginning of the chapter.

Also, mature contents are present. If this type of content doesn't make you comfortable, don't read that part.

Serkan's POV

I never fell in love.

I don't know what love is: I've never been loved.

I didn't know what love was. I couldn't understand how to be loved by someone could make me feel.

I didn't deserve to be loved, maybe.

And I convinced myself of it.

My mother abandoned me when I was four years old: she and my father decided to separate and she left home, forgetting about me.

My father tried to be a mother and a father to me, a child who hated being in the midst of so many people forever and who had found himself accepting that he had been abandoned by his own mother, who no longer wanted to know about her son, a child who just wanted to be loved.

For every goal I reached in my life, I phoned her hoping to hear her voice, I wrote her a letter waiting every day for an answer from her in the mailbox.

I did not hear her voice anymore, I did not read the words on the white paper with the elegant handwriting that I remembered that she had: my mother, Aydan, disappeared into thin air.

My father Kemal brought me up with respect and hard work to earn esteem and gratitude: despite his every day trying to make up for my mother's absence, work commitments led us to share little time together and I grew up in solitude and abandonment.

I made myself strong every day, every day I convinced myself to be enough for myself: and as decisive as it is for yourself to be everything you need, sometimes it's nice to have someone to share your silences with.

After several years of silence from my mother, I never hoped to see her again.

But I saw her there, in the middle of the green lawn of my university campus, on the day of my graduation.

I saw her dressed in a light blue pantsuit, with her ginger blond curly hair barely touching her shoulders.

Around me, my friends congratulated me for my achievement but my eyes were on her: and suddenly a young boy with similar hair to mine, similar to hers, appeared beside her. Next to them was a man with grizzled hair, of medium stature, and with an elegant dress.

My eyes tightened to see if I was really watching my mother in the company of two other men, while they joined a group of young freshmen in the company of their own parents and a guide made them tour the campus.

My mother's eyes never crossed mine, heading to the opposite side where I stood, surrounded by toasts and celebrations in my honor.

And while my mother's hand was on the shoulder of that tall young man with hair like mine, a hand rested on my shoulder.

"This is no time to cry about reality, my son."

The harshness of my father's words was the introduction to the discourse that upset my soul and closed my heart forever.

My mother had gone away and met another man with whom she had another son, Alp.

He was a few years younger than me and he was also about to start the faculty of architecture, perhaps driven by the passion for this discipline that our mother loved to pass on to everyone around her.