Chapter I: The Liturgy of Tin Baths

Sea Glass in the Womb, a memoir

Photo courtesy of Gülşah.

To Dilara—with undying love. You are the ladder carved from moonlight, leading me out of the dark.

We bathed in tubs set out on the cracked streets of Dolapdere. The tubs held hot water heated by an army of kettles whistling away like steam trains. A fresh bucket of water was dangling over a barrel fire. It was there for when the water turned tepid. There was a row of at least seven tin baths on the street. They stood like soldiers on parade. Filled with the dirty children who were forced, at broom-point, to endure a weekly bath.

In the winter, it was a much different affair. For obvious reasons, tubs were kept inside. The furniture was moved. We were lined up like soldiers in order of age. Mother always went first. We evacuated the room and gave her the privacy she needed. On occasion, I would sneak a glance through the crack in the door, not in some unspeakably perverse way but in observation. I would just catch silhouette in the mirror.

The steam made her look mythological. Hair wrapped in a towel like a queen. Lips drew wide with an old stick of lipstick that never seemed to run out, even in her fervour to remain beautiful. Her skin shimmered from the heat. Flushed and glowing like polished copper. The mole just above her left breast, the tattoo near her shoulder––half-wilted flowers inked somewhere in crisis. They seemed like they belonged in an old photograph no one had taken yet. She didn't walk. She prowled like a lioness. To me, she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

But she was also fire. Molten lava. Beautiful. Ferocious. Impossible to touch without getting irreversibly burned. Even then, I sensed love could blister. That she would grow cruel with the years, wither into something sharper and tenfold more lethal. Still, I wanted to be her. Not like her. Her. And that was the secret that burned in my chest long before there was even a name for it.

My eldest brother, Mustafa, followed. Then my sister, Zeynep. Then came Kemal. Then Me and Ahmet. We shared the tub. An unfortunate affair. The water had turned a dirty, grey, soapy colour. We were scrubbed with an olive soap. It seemed to last for a year. It was a great brick of a thing. Mother, with her hair towel formed into a turban and her nightgown tightly tied, would scrub us clean. With great vigour, she would scrub behind our ears. Our necks. Our armpits. Our feet. Our feet were particularly difficult.

Ahmet and I shared a pair of shoes. When he went out to play, I had to stay in. Vice versa. But that didn't stop either of us. So, we would often play barefoot. Our feet would get cut and then harden. The soles blackened.

Alas, the street was our bathhouse in the summer. Our bathhouse and our playground. That soapy, lukewarm water sloshed over onto the dirt as Ahmet and I kicked our chubby legs out. Our mother knelt beside the tub with a warm plastic pitcher. She'd pour water over our heads to rinse the stinging soap out of our eyes. The suds ran in rivulets down our backs, over the tin's rusted rim, and onto the thirsty ground. I remember blinking through water droplets. I remember seeing everything haloed in gold.

The arrived as omens wrapped in silk. Not walking. Arriving. Summoned by the clatter of soap-slick furore and laughter echoing down the cracked spine of Dolapdere. Travesti. Trans women. The spirits of the margins. Their heels struck the pavement like jackboots of defiance. Prophetic. They wore tight dresses and had the most beautifully painted faces. They were not just visitors. They were the three wise women. Their bodies shimmered in sweat. Eyes bursting with mystery.

They encircled our tin tub like a protective ring. The water was liquid amber. My mother knelt with her pitcher, rinsing the sting of soap away from our eyes. But the air changed. It thickened. It fell heavier on my lungs.

Perfume wafted from the haze. Talcum powder. The static sweetness of hairspray set the sun ablaze. Their bangles clinked, warding off demons. Their voices were rough silk. Silk dragged through the mud. Laughter, low, knowing, and merciful. They had seen the end and returned to cradle the beginning.

They were not women in the way my mother was a woman. They were women in the way night becomes velvet. The way flames seduce moths. In the way that fallen angels make nests in alleyways.

One slowly knelt down beside me. She had a beauty mark penciled above her lip. Her lipstick was a scream. Her lashes were wings ready to ascend her to heaven. She reached down, not just with her hand but with something eternal. Her fingers brushed my cheek. Then, with solemn theatre, she kissed my pruney hand as if it were a relic.

When she kissed my hand, it felt like a mother claiming her child. Not with duty, but with wondrous adoration. Her lips were dry and soft. And yet the kiss was that of a mother that I never truly had. She didn’t flinch at the prune-wrinkle of my fingers or the green dirt beneath my nails. She kissed me like I was precious. Like I was already whole. Like I was a seed and her kiss was both water and sun.

It was entirely foreign. I had never felt that before. Not from my own mother. Not from anyone. It was love without hesitation. Without question. The kind of love that wraps around you like a shawl and says, I’ve been waiting.

A hush fell. Time buckled. I felt my soul arch upward like a cat in the hot sun.

In that kiss was a secret passed without words. A knowing passed in love.

My mother turned her face. Her silence was a slap. Her shame is a black widow's veil thrown across the scene during a celebration of life. But I was no longer in her temple. I was among witched. Warriors. Sisters.

They drummed their long pink nails against the tub. The tin sang. I laughed. I wept without knowing it. I reached for them like a child reaching for a starfish in the surf. Fragile. Luminous. Otherworldly.

One of them said—Maşallah, ne tatlı—Their voice was hoarse with smoke and maternal joy. Their breath brushed my ear. It felt like scripture. Like a holy book being written. My chest cracked open like a fig under the sun. And something rose. Not a name. Not yet. But the beginning of one. The first letter.

That day, I was not merely bathed. I was received. Not into shame but into a secret covenant older than any blood that flowed through hateful veins. I was claimed by a lineage etched not into family trees but into old, punished faces. Into bruises that shimmered under impoverished light. In laughter dragged from the depths of womanhood.

That moment, bare and blinking in a tub of lukewarm water, was the first time the world made sense.

Not the world my mother spoke of, with rules and expectations. Men and punishments. But another world, veiled and glimmering. Where saints wore bangles and smelled of rosewater.

I was thrown into the long road of womanhood with no map. Only memory. I was touched by divine hand.

Their presence bent time. Bent me. It was as if I had been scooped up from a stolen life and cradled inside their olive scent, their smoke, their gaze. I was not born from my mother alone. I was born again in that tub, under their beautiful eyes, under the heat of their mere existence. Their womb was not flesh. It was myth. It was sisterhood forged in blood and thunder. And I was the infant held aloft. Held to the heavens, and claimed as a continuous proof of our existence.

My mother did not hold the same respect as I did. They would try to talk to her, but she would ignore them. Most of the mothers did. There was an undeniable bitterness that I could sense from the mothers. These people were different, but to me, they were just women. I had no idea of the concept of being trans. I didn't know what it meant. In this respect, I was still illiterate. My mother would tell us that they were abominations. She said it with such venom that I almost burst into tears. They did not speak with forked tongues. Nor did they ever show the mothers any disrespect. They were simply motherly in a world where being a mother is relentlessly binary.

I didn't know it then. I was barely four years old, but something in me recognised those women as kin. Their presence felt like a benediction. I stared up at them wide-eyed and unafraid. I reached a soapy hand toward a skirty as if to snatch a piece of magic. One of them took my pruney hand in hers and kissed my knuckles with a flourish. Even those bound by hate laughed. My cheeks burned with a shy, inexplicable joy. The air around us sang a rare kind of safety. A radiant knowing. Looking back now, I imagine that afternoon as a baptism of sorts. Two little bodies doused in water and sunlight. One of us was blessed by a sisterhood of outcasts. It was a spiritual anointment in the middle of the street. A promise I couldn't yet understand.

Not long after that golden afternoon in the year 2000, our family left Dolapdere and moved up the hill to Tarlabaşı. I was five. Tarlabaşı was only a few streets away, but it felt like a different planet. The neighbourhood was a densely packed maze of alleys that echoed with life at all hours. It was run down. The streets snaked between rows of drunk buildings. The paint was peeling in scabs. Laundry lines crisscrossed above. They were strung between balconies. Faded shirts and threadbare sheets fluttered like Buddhist prayer flags. They contrasted against the exhaust-stained heavens.

Each morning, a cacophony of smells hit me when I stepped outside. Diesel fumes from the main road. The must of damp stone and alley muck. Samovars. Frying oil. Cumin. Charcoal. Sweat. Wet dog. Sometimes, there was a surprise of sweetness when a bakery opened. The air was tinted with the scent of cardamom and sugar.

Tarlabaşı assaulted and embraced. It was relentless. Restled. Alive. Decayed yet protective. Cruel yet intimate. At times, a womb. At times a cage.

Our new home was a small home on the third floor of a wooden house. A once-grand building that had housed diplomats had now surrendered to decay. The rot was winning anyway. Several of us shared that floor. My family of seven, including my parents. It would be twelve in no time.

A Kurdish couple with their baby next door. A trans woman lived below. A Syrian Orthodox family lived on the bottom floor. The walls were thin. They were like cigarette papers. One hard wind. Gone. At night, with the five of us in one bed, we fell asleep to the lullaby of our neighbours' radio. The murmur of arguments bleeding through the paper walls. The arguments were always about money.

We shared a single bathroom with all the other families. It was located on the bottom floor. I learned to deftly tiptoe down the stairs and around the black mildew on the tiles, ignoring the cockroaches that skittered whenever the light turned on.

The trans women were, and still are, a part of the fabric of Tarlabaşı. More than a part. They belonged in a way no one else seemed to. You'd see them descending the crooked staircases in robes of cheap satin flaring like comets. Hair piled high. They carried themselves with a grace that defied the profound poverty of the area. Some were older. Hardened. Eyes bubbling with wisdom. Their voices were rich with the scent of smoke and sugar.

Despite what the world said of them, they were motherly. Not in the brittle, traditional sense but in the fierce, defiant way that only women forged by the crucible of survival could be. They offered advice in stairwells. Slipped candies into children's hands. Adjusted a crooked scar. Gave scolding glances when we cursed too loudly. They protected us in strange, small ways. I didn't yet know the word, but I felt it. They were both a warning and a prophecy. Spectacle and sanctuary. Even when my mother pulled me away with a tight grip and tighter mouth, some part of me turned back. Watching. Remembering.

In the evenings, the smell of onions frying in many languages drifted through the drafty halls. Each family cooked whatever meal they could manage on a small stove. That aroma was comforting. It was also cruel. Very cruel. Needlessly cruel. It was soothing in its warmth. Alas, it was evil in the way that it sharpened our hunger.

A rusty nail on the wall held a roll of rough toilet paper, more akin to sandpaper, that always seemed to be near its end. Winters were brutal in that house. Truly. Wind knifed through the gaps in the window frames. We piled all our thin, frayed blankets onto one sagging mattress to stay warm together. My mother would heat water on the stove and pour it into plastic basins so we could hover over the steam. All of us were shivering and laughing at our gooseflesh. Poverty was the wallpaper of our lives. Peeling but ever-present. We didn't name it. It was just how it was.

My mother was born in Cyprus. The fourth of seven children. In a village that no longer exists in memory and ruin. She was a girl when Greek terrorists came. A flash of tanks and fire turned neighbours into soldiers and homes into rubble. Almost all of her family was wiped out. She never spoke of it much. When she did, her sharp voice turned to ash. What I know, I know from the silence between her words.

She fled to mainland Turkey with what little she had left and a rage that would never cool. She was just a child. She made her way to Muğla province, working as a cleaner in tourist hotels. She scrubbed sunscreen and semen from linens while the gentry sunbathed like deities outside. That was where she met my father. She was sixteen. He was older. Quiet. Sun-worn. Perhaps she thought he would anchor her. Maybe she mistook silence for safety. Either way, they married, and soon after, he brought her to Istanbul. To Dolapdere. To poverty. To the life, she would carve open with her bare hands. She worked as a cleaner. She spent a life sweeping the homes of foreign diplomats. She took immense pride in her work.

My father was a fisherman. He spent more days out on the Marmara Sea than at home. When he did come through the door in the dead of night, he was more absence than man. He was heavy with exhaustion. I could smell the brine on him. He'd drop his big boots by the door and collapse onto the bed without a sound. Those boots loomed by the threshold for days. Sometimes weeks. Untouched. A pair of silent sentries. I often found myself staring at them. Cracked black rubber caked with mud and fish scales. Frayed. Tongues flopped open. They were more tangible than the man who wore them. In a way, my father's emptiness filled our home even when he wasn't there. His silence was like a third adult in the room. It watched over us with hollow eyes.

Once, when I was about five, I remember trying to step into those giant boots. I managed a few clumsy strides before tripping and crashing to the floor. I sat there in a tangle of too-big rubber and little limbs. Tears of frustration burning my eyes. Even then, I understood that I could never really stand in my father's shoes, not least walk a mile in them.

If my father was a ghost. My mother was a fire. She was short-fused. Firm. Dazzling. My mother could hush a whole street of rambunctious kids with a single sharp glance. She could draw every eye when she strode to the market. She had a beauty that I have never seen since. She strode into the market in her green sundress and crimson headscarf. I adored her with a devotion which bordered on worship. In my eyes, she was the epitome of glamour. The kohl lining her dark eyes. The thick dark chestnut hair. The gold bangles on her wrists. The way she'd tie her scarf with careless elegance. She smelled of rosewater. Black Opium. Cigarette smoke. Fried onions. A combination of harsh and sweet. Much like her.

I would sit on a stool and watch her get ready for the day. Chin propped in my hands as she dabbed on lipstick or pinned a stray lock of hair. There was a ceremony in her routine that enthralled me. I loved how strong she looked as she squared her shoulders at her reflection. There was no sign of weakness. How her expression would soften for a moment as she traced a finger along her eyebrow and then hardened again into resolve. I admired her. I feared her, too.

Her temper was fierce. It could flare without warning. A match to dry kindling. She was raising several children on scraps with a husband who seemed to vanish more often than he smiled. The strain showed in the tight line of her jaw and the tired slant of her shoulders by evening. I remember every crease on the palm of her hand. A misplaced shoe. A spilled cup of tea. These were things that could set off an eruption of shouting and profound beating. She would take off her shoe and throw it at the culprit. She would then lunge forward in a state of incandescent rage. She would grab the culprit and drag them into the kitchen, and you could hear the rhythmic beat of palm against flesh for minutes on end. Minutes.

That was just how it was. Nobody questioned it. Parenting was much more hands-on.

That being said, her words could cut deeper than a belt. Her anger was swift, and then it was over. Finished. Done. Until the next time. It was much like a summer storm. But when it was over, I'd feel a different kind of hurt. A silent ache of guilt. It was as if I failed a crucial test. Even so, I live for her moments of tenderness. On rare Fridays, when my father was actually home and in a peaceful mood, he'd put on a scratched Barış Manço record. He and my mother would dance. She would laugh and grab our hands. She would spin us around the kitchen until the world blurred. Her bracelets clanged together softly as she twirled. I would laugh with her. Dizzy and breathless. I found temporary shelter in the warmth of her joy. In those moments, I want to be her. Or at least a part of her. I wanted it so badly it hurt my chest. I wanted her beauty. Her strength. Her fire. I wanted it without understanding what that desire meant.

At that tender age, Ahmet and I were inseparable. Two halves of one apple. We shared everything. The scabs on our knees and the dreams of extra bread and honey in the morning. In the street, we were simply The Twins. One entity with two heads. Racing side by side through the bustle. I was the quieter half. He was much more boisterous. If I hung back in childish nervousness, he would grab my hand and yank me forward. If he cried, I tasted salt on my own tongue. But as we grew, I sensed a widening gap between us. An invisible wedge neither of us had the vocabulary for.

By six, Ahmet bounded off to play soccer with the other boys in the vacant lot down the hill. He left me behind in a haze of dust and shouts. I tried to join them a few times, but the swarm of kicking legs, aggressive laughter and me being called a girl as an insult only made my head swim and my throat tighten. I gravitated instead to the sidelines. Where the neighbourhood girls bounced rubber balls and played house with bottle-cap dishes. At first, I hovered nearby, content to watch. I knew all the girls; I had grown up with them. We were mostly the same age. Soon enough, I was drawn in. I held their dolls as gently as the next lady. I drew hopscotch grids on the pavement until my fingers bled.

Among the girls, I met a boy. Though even saying he feels like razors grinding against my tonsils. But it's important, I think, to mark the evolution.

Back then, we were both called Hasan. Two Hasans, shoulder to shoulder in the circle of girls with uneven, crooked teeth. He was thin, with delicate wrists and long lashes. I remember meeting them clearly. They dropped beside me without a word. Legs crossed. We were six. Their eyes were rimmed in curiosity. We didn't ask each other questions, but there was a knowing. I feel now that we belonged to the same hunger. The same wrongness. And please understand me, what I'm alluding to was unequivocally seen as wrong. In fact, second only to murder. I was acutely aware of this even at a young age. Yet, she found me. Though she had not yet found a name. She smiled at me in a way that warmed every pint of blood that flowed within me. From that day on, as we skipped and jumped rope, we would be best friends forever.

When Ahmet came looking for me, face flushed and his bushy hair plastered with sweat, he'd find me perched on a stoop beside the girls. He would grab my arm––puzzled, maybe a little annoyed––and try to drag me back to the makeshift field. Sometimes, I went just to please him. But I'd spend the whole time looking back over my shoulder, wishing dearly that I was still in that circle of girls, laughing about nothing more important than a jump-rope rhyme and stolen pink shirts.

I remember once, a pack of older Romani kids organised a relay race in the street. They split us into two teams. Boys versus girls. Much to my misfortune, I ended up clumped among the boys. The logic was sound. I was, by far, the fastest child in the area.

Furthermore, when I started to run, I didn't stop. I had the stamina of a horse. That was as far as my athletic prowess went. The sky was orange that night. The sun was melting into the rooftops. Someone shouted Go! Ahmet bolted ahead. He was determined to win. Then, when it was my turn to run, my legs were pumping furiously. The boys were hollering behind me. The girls were cheering from their open windows. My mother, who was smoking on the stoop, clapped her hands in furious encouragement. We won by a mile.

But what I remember most is the hollowness that crept into my chest as the boys whooped and high-fived around me. I was a fraud. I was an imposter. This was not an evenly matched race; no childhood race ever is. It is a grand lesson in humility, but that is beside the point. Yes, in the jubilant swarm of sweaty, victorious boys, I was an imposter. While they celebrated, I snuck a glance at the girls' side. Some were pouting over the loss. Others were already laughing. They were linking arms and skipping off down the street to find a new game. I longed––deep and wordless––to slip away from the boys and join the girls. I would trade that rough camaraderie for a gentler embrace any day. I didn't want the trophy. I wanted to belong.

There were other moments, small but telling, that, in hindsight, were signs of a truth I had no language for. I loved playing dress-up with the girls next door. I would wrap myself in their mother's discarded scarves, swirling in patterns and colours that made me feel glamorous. We would pretend the cracked hallway mirror was a portal into a life where we were all princesses. To an outside eye, given the times, it was a wholly unnatural thing. But to me, there was nothing more natural.

I always volunteered to be the mother or the bride in our games. The girls would collapse in epileptic fits of giggles at my dramatic flair. I was camp. Very camp. In those moments, draped in lace curtains or twirling with a toy tiara, I felt a calm delight. A sense of rightness in my skin that I never found elsewhere.

Often, I would sit on the stoop, watching those same girls braid each other's hair. Their fingers deftly weaving dark locks into long plaits. I'd hand them hairpins and elastic when they asked. I was happy to be included. I was trying to ignore a profound pinch of longing in my chest. My own hair was cropped short and practical. There was nothing to braid. No canvas for ribbons.

One afternoon, as if sensing my silent yearning, the older girl, Elif, flashed me a grin. Hadi gel! Come on––Let's make you pretty, too––from her pocket, she pulled a bright pink butterfly hairclip and gently brushed my fringe to the side. She slid the barrette in just above my forehead, securing it around a tuft of my hair. It was ridiculous.

My hair was so short it barely held. The clip was just a cheap bit of plastic. We all clapped and laughed as if a miracle had unfolded before us. Elif stepped back and sang out––Çok güzel! So pretty!––My cheeks warmed. Something inside my ribcage fluttered to hear that word directed at me. Pretty. The word was a small gift. I held it close like a secret. I spun on one heel. I made my ragged Galatasaray shorts flare out like a skirt, and the girls applauded. For a few glorious seconds, I was weightless. I was part of their circle. I was shining. Eventually, twilight fell, and the voice of my mother called me in for dinner

I remember hesitating at the doorway of our building, not wanting to remove the clip. In the end, I did, of course. I slipped it out of my hair and into my pocket before climbing the stairs. I didn't tell my mother about it. Instead, I hid that pink butterfly in a box under the bed. It was contraband. It was treasure. It was both. I didn't have words for why that trinket meant so much to me. I only knew that the small ache it left on my scalp when I took it off made me feel both terribly ashamed and quietly elated.

Our poverty was the backdrop to all of this. It was as constant as the mould speckling our walls. Within its tight confines, both joy and shame coexisted. Joy was the burst of laughter when the electricity cut out, and we gathered around a candle. It was the taste of a single orange split five ways, sweet and tart on every tongue. Joy was Ahmet and me daring each other to slide down the rickety bannister of our stairwell. Barefoot. Shrieking. Heedless of splinters. While neighbours poked their heads out of their doorways to scold or applaud., we were lost in our world.

We were all crammed into this crumbling ark of a building together. There was a rough-cornered kindness in that closeness. But shame lived with us, too. Shame was wearing other children's cast-off clothes that never quite fit. The cheap plastic shoes that were broken that they let the water in. It was avoiding eye contact at school whenever peers bragged about new toys. Because what could I say? Shame was the evening the landlord banged on our door for rent, and my mother's voice told us to stay still and not make a sound. I watched her face crumble in shame. I learned to hide our frayed edges. To laugh off the things we lacked. To pretend I wasn't hungry when there was only enough food for one. I learned to swallow envy like medicine, bitter but necessary, and smile as if nothing were wrong.

That year, 2001, my mother gave birth to my third brother. The following year, a baby sister followed. With each new child, our one-room universe contracted further. The night of crowding onto one mattress grew more cramped. The air was thinner with so many breaths in a small, damp space. The noise of crying. Cooing. Fighting. Laughter swelled to fill every corner of our lives.

I adored my new siblings—I truly did. Especially when the second set of twins came along. They were my pride and joy. I helped my mother bathe all of them in the tub. I rocked them in my arms with a care beyond my years. I became an expert at shushing a colicky baby or distracting a fussy toddler with goofy faces. But every added heartbeat in that room made me feel my own life shrinking around me. There was simply no physical or mental space for secrets. Yet, I felt mine growing bigger inside.

By the age of seven, I knew for sure. So, I learned to blend in, to disappear in plain sight. I spoke less. I watched more. When my mother's patience frayed with the wails of the infants, I scooped up my little siblings and led Ahmet and others outside to chase pigeons. My eldest brother, Mustafa, was seventeen at the time. He was busy working. I tried, in earnest, to free my mother for a moment of silence. I tried to be good. To be helpful. To not add to her burdens––but in doing so, I receded. A shadow slipped along the edges of my clamorous family.

Still, in those early years of newfound responsibility and constant noise, a certain longing in me only sharpened. Late at night, once even the colicky baby's cries had finally ceased, I would steal out of bed and stand before the tiny mirror in our entryway. It was the size of a paperback book. It was hung much too high for a child, so I had to balance on a rickety stool. In the faint glow of the night filtering through the window, I'd make out the ghost of my face in that glass. My own eyes stared back, two blue pools of uncertainty. I would hold my breath and, very softly—so no one could hear––I'd whisper prenses. Just to see if my reflection would change if some girl hidden deep inside me would smile back. It sounds foolish, but at eight years old, I half-believed in magic.

At other times, I simply searched my face, looking for clues, as if the mirror might slip and reveal someone else entirely. I felt the weight of the day fall away. I wasn't a caretaker, or a dutiful son, or one of the twins––I was just me, alone, suspended in time and possibility.

Back then, I didn't understand what I was reaching for. In our world, we had no boys who felt out of place in their own skin. There was Hasan, but that went unconfirmed for some time. All I had was a quiet, persistent sense of wrongness and yearning that swelled and ebbed like the sea. That understanding––of who I really was––would be defined much later on. It would come in fragile pieces and revelations. But even in that childhood haze, something was growing. I think of it now like the seed of a wildflower wedged in a cracked sidewalk. Unnoticed. Enduring darkness. Yet still alive and pressing upward toward the light.

When the night air finally grew too cold or my legs too tired, I'd tiptoe back to bed. I would slip under the covers between my siblings. I would feel their warm, unconscious bodies lean against mine. Staring up at the cracked ceiling. I liked to imagine we were all adrift together in a great wooden ship. The cracks above us letting in threads of silky silver moonlight.

Outside, somewhere in the city, a stray dog barked and then fell silent. Inside our cramped room, I listened to the soft chorus of my family's breathing. My baby sister's whistling snores. The gentle sigh of Ahmet by my side. I felt both protected and terribly alone. I knew the morning would come soon and with it, the small trials of survival. Hauling water. Standing in line for bread. Haggling for a few eggs. Carrying my siblings through another day. I would put on the face every expected. The quiet, reliable child, and play my part.

But as I closed my eyes, I also knew that something inside me was still awake. It fluttered beneath my ribs like a caged bluebird. Patient, yet insistent. I didn't know what it was. No. Not yet. But I sensed it there every night. It was the part of me that looked in the mirror and dreamed of another life. The part of me that remembered the gentle hands and drumbeat heels of those women in Dolapdere and, indeed, Tarlabaşı. And for the love of god, I felt an unspoken kinship. It was a secret I kept even from myself. A truth coiled tight, waiting.

The way one of them kissed my hand as if it were holy. The way her bangles clinked as she reached for me — like an aunt, like an oracle. I didn’t understand it then. I only knew those hands felt kinder than any I'd ever known.

And in that darkness, with the weight of poverty and dreams pressing on my small chest, I finally drifted off to sleep. Blissfully unaware that the first chapter of my life was already written in my bones and that someday, that buried seed of self would crack the concrete and reach for the sun.

In my mind, I’m still floating in that tin tub—half in the past, half in the person I’d become.

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