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I’m sitting in a tiny restaurant on a side street in Venice. It is late for lunch, nearly 3:30 p.m., and the restaurant is empty. The chipped brick walls curve up into the cracked white ceiling and the creamy tablecloths have little flowers printed on them. I order pasta alle vongole, or pasta with clams.
It seems as if every time I write, all I can think about is aging. As 2024 begins, I am on the cusp of my 21st year. This milestone comes with its own set of hassles, yet 20 is a big year for most. For some, it’s the first time they are living away from home; for many, it’s a moment of self-discovery and finding their identity; and for most, it’s the start of accumulating existential dread for what’s to come (kidding, kinda).
My grandfather has been asking me to write his biography for years. A tome, he said. Something hundreds of thousands of words long to capture his every struggle and triumph. I brushed it off as a joke, and though he would laugh along, there was always a somber undertone to his request. He wanted to be heard. He wanted to be remembered and seen and celebrated.
This Thanksgiving was full of gratitude, coziness and nostalgia for me because I spent it revisiting a family I got to know back in 2019 and haven’t seen since: the Gatniks, the family that hosted me when I flew to the U.S. for the first time in my life back in ninth grade as part of an exchange trip.
About a month into summer break after my freshman year of college, I went to the mall with a couple of friends. At the end of the day, my father picked me up on his way home from work, and I showed him the dress I had gotten on sale. Five months after that, I wore that dress to his funeral. As the first anniversary of his death approaches, I wanted to write a small reflection of some of the things I’ve learned in the time he has been gone.
When I was flying to Baltimore for the first time, back in August, I promised myself I wouldn’t let being an international student prevent me from joining social circles. I’ve indeed kept my promise by finding a way of fitting in, and I managed to embrace my Turkish identity while doing so.
I’m 15 years old, and I’m sitting in my eye doctor’s office, learning how to put contact lenses into my eyes for the very first time. I’m practicing, yet I’m failing. My kind, patient eye practitioner says, “give it a drink” every time I fail, in reference to me soaking the contact lens with contact solution in order to make the process easier for my dry eyes. I chuckle. With every failure, I’m met with this same piece of advice. I try once more to place the lens into my eye, and once again, I fail. “Don’t worry, these things take time,” he says.
Since the moment my fingers touched the 88 black and white keys for the first time, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the piano. While the joy that the piano brings to me always outweighs the frustration, it is those challenging moments that have made me grow as a musician and person and enabled me to love the instrument more and more.
I took my first Amtrak last Thursday. Or rather, not my first Amtrak — my second one, if we’re really counting — but the first one I ever took by myself. It was the first time I set an alarm extra early to make sure everything was packed, the first time I obsessively checked TransLoc as I hunched over my Bird in Hand breakfast, tracking the JHMI, triple checking that it stops outside Barnes & Noble.
I wake up to the gentle sound of rain outside. Movie posters and postcards from my recent travels litter the walls and a soft, gray light escapes through my curtains and into my room.
I’m a very anxious person. I worry about future finances, the weather tomorrow, my talent as a writer, how much people will like me — and of course, the possibility that the world will end by the time I’m 28.
Going into this summer, I knew it wouldn’t be about writing, but I told myself it would be — as if saying it could make it true. Honestly, I had hardly written in the winter and spring of 2023. At first, it was because I was busy adjusting to my life in a foreign country. As winter faded into spring, it was because I was grieving the loss of my cousin to leukemia. I had wanted to write about Paris, but I instead found myself blaming Paris for my misery, though it was merely the setting. I had this big idea about how I could write an incredible poem in my cousin’s honor, but I couldn’t do it. I still want to write that poem, but I still haven’t found the right words.
The other day, I watched myself age by scrolling through my camera roll. Picture by picture, video by video, I saw change and growth in ways I hadn’t expected. It spurred a little reflection.
My grandma, my baa, is the strongest, most beautiful woman I know. She married young, didn’t finish school and immigrated from India with her six children. We jokingly called her a family man. She made time for her 14 grandchildren, spent her days calling each of us before and after school and would ask for updates on our well-being and our friends. She was, and continues to be, my dearest friend.
Whenever I told people I was studying abroad, I felt like I was lying. I felt as if I hadn’t done anything to deserve such a rare once-in-a-lifetime experience — the kind most people don’t get.
Growing up, I used to feel anxious before the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. The thought of spending hours at my synagogue on an empty stomach made me feel uneasy, and I always found the holiday to be a lengthy challenge that I just had to push through without question.
We’ve all done it: woken up some 15 (or 30) minutes too late, scrunched our eyes in exasperation at the steps of our morning routines that must now be skipped in order to make it to class on time. In high school, we were all guilty of it — exhaustion compounded after a particularly heavy week of assignments — and those extra minutes in bed felt like a worthy trade-off for having to eat your breakfast while walking out the door. But all of this changes when you get to college and are presented with exceptional freedom to control your own morning routine.
There is a tiny little square of my computer screen, tinted light blue and gray, where I can see the silhouettes of people walking into my quiet level of the library. I don’t look at it often — usually, I’m too preoccupied with the blankness of my Google documents — but when I do, I can see so much. They’re just silhouettes — not people, really, not until they come into view — but without the face, you notice so much more. The way they walk, the urgency with which they go places. Sometimes they look around. Maybe they’re curious about the people inside, maybe they’re scanning for a free seat, a nicely secluded desk.
As I am sitting on a park bench facing the runway at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, the ground begins to shake. About two miles away, at the other end of the runway, one of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ many Boeing 787-9 airplanes begins to push 1.2 tons of air past its engines every second as it lifts over five hundred thousand pounds of fuel, cargo and passengers off the ground. In roughly thirteen hours, it will touch the earth once again on a similar runway outside of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. As the plane thunders down the runway, the roar of the fan blades overpowers the sound of my camera’s shutter, as I gather as many photos as I can in the few short seconds it spends on the runway.
On his 42nd birthday, author Ross Gay decided to write an essay each day about a small joy in his life — a collection of essays that later became The Book of Delights. I first read an essay from the collection, “A High Five from a Stranger,” a few months ago. In it, Gay describes the beauty of positive physical interactions with strangers. The essay struck a chord with me, as I always initiate physical contact — whether it be a high five, a hug or a kiss on the cheek.