One shot

With an open heart

Can

I don't know what drove me to the pier in the middle of the night.
Suddenly I felt the need to return to the place where I had met her after a year apart, where my eyes rested on her again and where the cool breeze from the Bosphorus had carried traces of that wonderful perfume I had missed so much.

As soon as I had passed the high hedge and turned into the lane leading to the sea, I stopped in my tracks in disbelief. Here is my Sanem, even now she is sitting on the planking of the jetty with her gaze pointed towards the horizon, exactly as I had seen her do only a few days before.
A solitary figure, lost in her own thoughts and in a world of her own.
I remain spellbound as I observe her.
My God how beautiful she is!
If possible, she is even more beautiful than I remembered her. In this long year I have done nothing but bring back stills of her, falling in love again and again with her face, those huge eyes that seemed to reflect the same love I felt for her, and those lips... oh those lips.

Now, a year later, looking at her, she seems even more beautiful to me. She has changed her look, she dresses in an exotic and sensual way, her longer, curlier hair caresses her bare shoulders, moved by the light wind blowing over the Bosphorus at this time of night. My heart seems to explode with emotion, it is a vision with the changing lights of Istanbul as a backdrop.

As my fascinated gaze follows her every movement, I see her take something from her bag, bring a pill to her mouth and then swallow it down with a sip of water. My heart clutches, I feel myself dying at the idea of what she has experienced, or should I say what I made her experience. Never would I have imagined that my departure would make her fall into such a state of prostration even though I too, in a different way, lost my mind and was not myself during this year of loneliness. The break-up with her made me forget everything, my life, my work, my family, even my father's illness. I left everything behind, without her everything was lost and forgotten. In my mind, at every hour of the day and night, there was always and only her. Nothing and no one else.

Now knowing that she has been hospitalised and that she still needs to take medication annihilates me. I close my eyes overwhelmed by the pain of what I have caused her by my departure. How could I have done this to her?

When I come back to look at her, she is busy writing on a small notepad, she tears off the piece of paper on which she has just jotted down something and puts it into a small plastic bottle, which she seals tightly and throws into the waters of the Bosphorus.

It feels surreal to see with my own eyes what for days I imagined had happened. It must be some kind of ritual she has repeated often over time and it is because of this that I am here now.

I inhale deeply and move towards her. How it hurts me to see her stiffen at the sound of my footsteps on the pontoon planking, it is terrible to know that she no longer feels comfortable when she is close to me.

I stop and bend on my knees to look at her face.

'Was that medicine you just took?'

Her sad look devastates me as I hear her whisper softly.

'A lot happened when you weren't around.'

The heartfelt tone in her voice tugs at my heartstrings and I can only be honest, there can be no more pride or spite.

'When you weren't there nothing happened...Sanem...a huge nothing'

I inhale deeply bringing my hands to hide my eyes and then say what I wanted to say to her from the first moment I saw her again.

'Sanem I am very sorry... I ask your forgiveness, I shouldn't have left.... If I think you ended up in a clinic because of me'

He interrupts me sharply.