A MAN'S SORROW CUTS DEEPER

Understanding Can...

So many moons passed since Can left his home. The untamed spirit in him felt as if there was no air left in the city. He was a loner, he made no excuses and felt he owed his explanation to none. As much as he felt at peace when he met Sanem and when she accepted his feelings, now he felt that his world collapsed because of her. Stuck at the sea, he was forced to admit to himself how much he had changed and how nothing would be the same.

Reliving the past was excrutiating. At some point he wondered how much more Sanem had suffered because of her memory, where each memory came back as vivid and raw as when the moment had happened... With no way to run, no longer any desire to do so, and because it would have been easier to process it all sooner and burry it deep, Can decided he would relive each day since he met Sanem.

He could not force himself to regret not telling her he read the notebook. So much happened in a matter of hours that day that he could not have processed it all. Act and don't think, was his life's motto. It was rooted so deep in his soul that he did not know how else to cope with what came his way. He made a conscious decision to base his life on it when it occured to him at a very young age that his mom left him. Moreover, she took his brother with her. To this day he chose not to think about what hurt more - that she left him, or that she chose Emre. A child's heart works different than a man's. The feeling is real, it etches itself in a child's heart as such, and only that pain fills a child's thoughts...

Sitting alone on his boat, Can decided to reflect on the days that had passed. Though he did not possess Sanem's ability to see the written word as it was written, his mind was filled with the memory of how it made him feel when he read her notebook. And as painful as it was, and all too new to him, he realized to trully heal, he needed to sort out what each moment they shared looked like from both of their views...

As in the tales of fairies, their story began with a kiss. Though he had been baffeled by that first kiss, she had been blindsided. He had no idea what it meant to her. He became her knight all based on his touch. How trusting and open she was, full of innocence and hope, that by that single touch the infamous now Albatross took over her heart? Where he had no one to really open up to, Sanem poured her soul into that notebook. Not even Ayhan knew just how deep Sanem's feelings for him turned out to be. The written pages caressed her heart and because of that she felt no judgement from it. She met Can at a time when her sister Leyla barely acknowledged her existence. What came to Can as a complete surprise was how Sanem could fill 10 pages worth of writing about him based on his mere accepting a glass of çay from her, yet her family would be afforded a mere 1/2 a sentence...

Can's memory of the night in the beginning when she had told him to leave left him with a bruised ego. Yet as he recalled the passage in her notebook about it, it left no doubt in his mind how wrong he was about that night. She wrote of the hurt she had felt that struck to her core, for he was a man who had touched her heart yet because she was constantly reminded he was so much above her, she could not have dared to reach back for his hand...

The moment he released his fear of losing her, and went after her at the beach in Agva mattered to him so much. But that man's ego yet again fell so short from the way she described herselft in the notebook. Beyond all reason she felt needed, accepted, and wanted. Wanted, above all. For the first time in her life she felt that he saw her. Her. And not as an employee from the lowest step of the ladder. He saw her as a woman. In Sanem's words, the amount of Can's desire for her, to her, in that moment could have easily been compared to the overpowering love that went beyond all of the universes combined. To him it was a moment of acknowledging his intentions and acting upon them. To her, it signified that just perhaps in the unimaginable virtue of a world of hope and reality, that someday she just may stand a chance to stay in his arms...

Yet nothing prepared him for what he read about the night they returned to the opera. She repeated her words on paper as she told them to Ceycey about the man whom she fell in love with, but who would never love her. Her thoughts of despair. Hopelessness. And the raw pain after having learned he had chosen Polen. He finally understood how insignifficant and insecure Sanem felt around Polen. And he had to acknowledge that he was mostly to blame. Polen took every opportunity to belittle Sanem. Yet she had stood her ground, and that was part of her charm... and the triumph in her soul after learning he was her Albatross was beyond what she could have described with her words. He felt proud of himself at that moment because he felt relieved that he finally could admit his true feelings to her. Yet again, his feelings were nowhere near the level of happiness she had felt at that time. Sanem noted that her heart moved that day within her. Not just emotionally, but completely, and literally. Those pages sang to him with the tingle of pure excitement and joy. Why? Because Sanem described in the most delicate detail how fulfilled she felt. Not just in learning who he had been, but in finding out that he had chosen her for his sweetheart...

His words of confessed love meant much to him. He opened up and found not weakness, but strength. He had thought she hurt him by not telling him back she loved him too. But her version of that was so vivid he saw it with his eyes. He saw her as beautiful, she saw her fears and dreams of love all bashed into one. She was unimaginably in love with him, yet she understood he would deny her love the moment he would learn of her past...

He tried his best to process his knowledge of all Emre had done, of how Fabri took every advantage he had, and how blindly she treated Yigit. How he wished they would never have met him. His world ended when Yigit appeared. And now he felt anger for he finally admitted that by leaving after accepting Polen's offer, he left Sanem free to fall into his trap. And he prayed in his soul that one day she'd realize how cunning Yigit was. How Yigit was the Bad King!

Looking back at the past, Can realized how wrong he had been to turn away from Sanem when he learned she did in fact release her perfume to Fabri. He judged her, refusing to hear her pleas and explanations. The notebook, as much as it was his curse now, it opened his eyes in ways Sanem's words could never do so. Where Sanem oftentimes lacked the guts to tell him the raw truth, the notebook itself did not care for his feelings. Did not look for an explanation, nor did it ask for understandinf. It just revealed the truth.

The notebook also gave him the clarity of the true reason Sanem surrendered their scent to Fabri. The real reason, not the one he was foolish enough ti misunderstand. Their scent was everything to her for it brought them together. Yet Can meant so much more to her. She could not breathe without him. Her soul was gasping for air that failed to come to her... The one line Can read before putting the notebook down, that very last line he read before their lives change, burned itself in his heart. Sanem had written and his life was more precious to her than all world's perfumes put together. And she could not bear to stand that Fabri's threat would turn the one thing that brought them together into the very thing that would tear them apart.

Can was a man of no regret, yet he could not help to regret that very mistake. And because of that acknowledgement, he spent countless moments while at the sea wondering if he had not turned Sanem away that day, if they would never have met the snake of a man that was Yigit...

As Can stood up on the boat, and looked toward Istanbul in the distance, he sighed, albeit painfully, and realized that his journey had brought him back to Sanem. A complete full circle back to the point of no escape. Yet after the year of trying to understand Sanem, left him finally understanding how little he spoke with her about what trully mattered. He demanded so much of her, without hearing her pleas to get him to open up. And now, when it seemed his luck got him where he should be, Can understood that to get back to Sanem he'd have to make her understand how raw his passion for her had been, and that his pure feelings matched hers...