BARBAROS ALTUĞ

To you…

You will never be able to read this letter, but I’m still writing it to you. Because you are still the one, I love the most.

No, you are not dead yet, you are alive. See, life doesn’t end so easily. Do you remember how your forty-year-old mother seemed so old to you; you calculated how old she and you would be in 2000 and got upset in vain. She is still with you, strong and healthy. I wish I could tell you how much you get upset for such trivial things. But you will realize it when you are forty.

Your dreams will change; you will not create that happy family. You will have a cat and some love stories, at most. They will give your toy train you had played with in your childhood to a relative’s child, thinking that you are too much grown-up to play with it. You will be happy even though you don’t see that train any more since you dream of it some nights. No one else but you will know this secret. And me. But you will travel around the world just as you always dreamt; you will live in Paris, London and New York.

You may not be able to have a family, but you will have good friends, they will lift you up whenever you are about to fall. They will make their voices heard even though you are far. Maybe they will know you better than your family would, and they will be your family.

You will be frustrated lots of times; you will withdraw in your shell as your loved ones hurt you. But there will always be someone who cracks your shell because you have been a romantic since your birth, just as your mother told you.

This will first make you a strange person in life, but later a special one. So, don’t you ever fear it. Just run back to home after school, as you always do, instead of playing soccer with your friends, and continue reading that book you started to read in the dim crimson light of the night lamp the night before, as you sneaked out of your bed when everyone in the house was sleeping. Your eyesight might fail just because of that light, and you and I will be the only ones to know why. You will feel a little bit tired at school because of lack of sleep and you will have a stomach-ache because of sitting on the cold floor at nights. But it will be worth it, because what’s most beautiful is that you will write a book. So, the first and foremost dream of your life will be realized, even though you would have been doing all sorts of different things for years.

Then, years later, at a time that would seem so far to you now, they will want from you to write a letter to a loved one. Without thinking a second, you will start writing this letter to the child that doesn’t talk much but loves his curly blonde hair and books. Your hair will be neither so curly nor that blonde then. What is more, they will sometimes say you talk too much nowadays.

But you will find yourself smiling as if looking at an old and beautiful picture whenever you think of him. You will always know that he is the only person that brought you to this day in life, whose days you memorized. Nothing will change it. Please take good care of that child who still bites his nails as I write this letter. He will struggle not to be like anyone else but himself, but believe me, this is not an easy task. It is even harder than surviving sometimes. But bear in mind that he will still be loving you years later and even write a letter to you for that…