Was the fear of hoping the first fire of your life—the drop that began the storm after a storm? Is this fire your share of that singular storm which left behind everything about ruin and life? And there is an endless longing for the sea.

A pinch of warmth is not enough for its smoke; the shivering god and fire flee one another without cease. And smoke: the veil of fugitive fire in the reflection of lightning, the tender guardian of the blessed as it drives us all from its meager warmth. So powerful is the ruin that disaster means a homeland to the homeless and property to the propertyless. They say the sea has seized this mountain; ever since that day it has been consuming the legacy of a flood.

Garments of pleasure, worn from living several seasons in a single day, in the inverted alchemy of branches. The roots of plants that blush whenever nature defeats them and sprout at that instant are frost, breathing the air of coal. Yet existence is now more serviceable with the support of cloth sharpened on white and ash-gray pebbles. The fabrics are tightly woven, patient, resistant unto death. Everywhere is a climate of cotton, anorak, and wool.

That broad square, no different from the others, tries to find its former multitude in the bust of a goddess turned to her left. Meaning grows and grows in the eyes of the crowd she can no longer bear to look at. She knows that not looking is defense. It is also somewhat a form of inward distraction. Time for herself, neither one step behind time nor ahead of it. Just as what makes night incomprehensible is its own darkness; if it has stripped itself of anxiety, the night is over. Yet a hidden truth remains in the drops falling from eyes that know which eye she looked into most.

I thought a great deal about how many kinds of tears could exist within a day made of the confusion of seasons. For days I searched for alternative tears, and for a night alternative to tears. What I understood is that, like the words of desire, tears are highly contagious and powerful. When nourished by words, their effect feels to me like that of a drop, at the level of Chinese torture, that will find the bottom of a sea: iron cast into eternity that parts the sea. Finding the origin afterward is as powerful as returning to it. Trembling, swelling, accompanied by sobs, utterly clear, for what remains from an illusion. The tears of desire have a counterpart to yearning, and also a trigger. Perhaps the density of salt in a tear depends somewhat on the intensity of that desire.

The goddess’s tears had found their target like a boomerang; yet the most impossible tear would still return. They gently asked her to turn her head. She directed the warm, piercing but speechless gaze of faith toward the place from which she had kept her dreams distant. She watched what unfolded with awareness of so many truths hidden from her and others. The needles of life piercing familiar faces were filled not with courtesy but with an unfamiliar anger. She saw herself in those eyes. Without hiding her wet face, she said, “The living dead cannot do this. Look at anyone through her eyes. Through her eyes that no longer exist. With her help…” The square collapsed. From that day on, the goddess found a language called prayer. Yet she never spoke a single word in that language; she seemed enchanted and did not want the spell broken. She gave birth to other nations and was sanctified in other homelands. Then she left. No one understood why. They called it a curse.

The hands of separation, lost tears; tears standing in a wheat field, desired like bountiful rains. A short distance from the power of bread. Separation, a resolute image in the oldest thing it knows; childhood as young as a two-year-old love. Though the roads deny it, roads exist to separate—the uncertain roads of departure. Separation loves roads; separation is riskless, just like roads. Flooded on every side, two pieces through which countless truths pass; half of this departure is familiar. The half that is not yours. When I said your separation, I was already gone. They tore me from the hollows of your hands, sorted me from the lines of your palms, so no uncertainty would mix into your fortune. They said it was the speed of departure that wet the eyes. There is no departure that has left no footprints in the mud of eye-water. Count a few drops of tears; let them not have been torn from other hearts. Distance is cold; distance is alone. Far away my eyes grow cold; take my eyes with you.

Short, broken, and distant from its pain, never becoming a balm. Hidden like underground rivers in a longing to flow without a bed: the tears of malicious knowing. The milking of the eye is sudden and docile, against the possibility that every kind of relationship between the strong and the weak may be rape. Crying is full of reason; crying openly is the safe road. For pain determines the proportion of blood in eye-water. Yet pain is something bought and sold, stored and stolen. The inspiration of virtual merchants; the only thing that can multiply as it is sold, scatter and spread. Pain is a little tame, a little wandering, a little treacherous.

While tears were still running from her eyes, laughing at a contrived joke for her came from the force of the invitation. To decline it politely was to be able to say white even when everyone said black, like those watching an encounter. My greatest fear was that ceaseless laughter would take from us that enchanted mystery of sorrow. Afterward came futile rushing, every meaningless departure. Perhaps because I always remember her laughing, I found the first and last time I saw her cry compelling. Sixteen years have passed. My curiosity has not. I have not forgotten to this day. Why was she crying?

The tears of the desire to fight striking the shore were undefined to me at that moment. A few of us were on the slope of a rocky hill adorned with villages and forests. Below us lay a deep valley. Although it was midday, that depth appeared dark to me. Like something in a dream. It was as if I could not hear in the darkness. Perhaps because of the dark, perhaps because I mistook reality for a dream, I cannot fully remember the words she used then. As though those tears still stream from my eyes today, they make me see her words dimly and try to diminish their importance. For according to them, in the atlas of emotions nothing is real except those that flow away into eternity. Words merely follow the traces of an old action.

Even so, the tradition-breaking words of desire and longing cannot be called frail. Like solitary mountains, they await the calm after the tide on the map of words.

Code Name: Arin Tekoşin

Full Name: Gerdan Oyman

Date–Place of Birth: October 25, 1974, Şırnak

Mother’s Name: Taybet

Father’s Name: Salih

Date–Place of Joining: 1997, Istanbul

Areas Where She Stayed: Dersim, Kandil, Xınere, Zap, Botan

Date–Place of Martyrdom: November 5, 2012, Cudi

Comrade in Struggle

Cafer Erzincan