In the Absence

It’s as if I agreed to destroy a part of my selves to feel alive and find some twisted sense of belonging in the wreckage. You arrived with a quiet intensity, and in your presence, Vanessa vanished, Başak returned. She emerged, and with her came a fragile hope that maybe, this time, things would be different.

But he, too, was grappling with his own survival —holding onto life by the thin threads of self-discipline and rigid control. He believed in order, in staying within the lines, while she believed in love, spontaneity, and harmony. They met as two broken souls, each clinging to life in their own stubborn ways, and when collided, their flaws didn’t complement —they clashed. Both got broken.

It wasn’t that they didn’t try to make it work. They searched for reasonable explanations, cloaking the chaos in words like 'incompatibility' or 'different expectations.' But those were just convenient labels, desperate attempts to rationalise what they both knew deep down. The truth was more complex; it wasn’t just about differences but about how their wounds mirrored each other. Into a vicious cycle that they couldn’t break. They became addicted to the highs and lows, to the sick love that drove them to the brink of madness.

"When I turn inward, I see an acceptance that goes beyond mere resignation. It’s an acceptance born first from embracing my own flawed, wounded self, and then, him. I believed in the quiet, unspoken bond between us. I trusted that we would help each other grow, that we could lean on one another through the absurdities of human life. We both carried the weight of unresolved pain, unhealed traumas that bled into our interactions and often led us to act irrational, even cruelly."

They shared a common language of shame and neglect, of struggling to reconcile who they were with who they wanted to become. Their mutual understanding, born from shared darkness and fragility, led them, perhaps mistakenly, to believe they were meant for each other. It wasn’t only their pain that brought them together but also a shared sense of responsibility and a need to preserve dignity in a world that often felt chaotic. However, what initially bonded them eventually revealed itself as the fault lines that tore them apart.

"I see now that my faith was never solely in him, but in the elusive dream of what we might have become together. I held on to the belief that our love was bringing closer us to mutual healing, as if it felt just within reach. However, I overlooked the truth that love alone cannot bear the weight of our brokenness, especially when it is intertwined with the desperate need to fix and be fixed. In our need to save each other, we became lost to ourselves and confused our intense desire for intimacy as a path to wholeness. Our love, though wild and all-consuming, was never a cure for our wounds; rather, it was the flame that illuminated them, burning brighter and deeper until we were both scorched by its intensity."

In the end, what remains is a sense of profound loss —not just of others, but of the own selves once dreamed they might become. It's a learning to grieve not only the others but also the absence of the person they thought they were when they were together. Yet within this grief lies a delicate hint of rebirth —an invitation to rediscover who is the self beyond the pain. 

There is so much we don’t see, so much we don’t understand. Life is a vast and mysterious trip —endlessly unfolding, endlessly teaching, and reminding us that we are always in the process of becoming.