when i was in primary school, i had this friend who was never with us when we had religion lessons in fourth year. the teacher explained it by saying she is helping me with something in the library. i remember how envious i felt because she wasn’t obligated to take these boring lessons and memorize those long arabic prayers. i hoped and prayed to be the one who gets to help the teacher next year. and the fifth year came and it was her again. i was so jealous. then for completely different reasons, we grew closer to each other. one day, i asked her why the teacher needed her help. she was hesitant to talk at first, then she said “i’m going to tell you a secret but you can’t tell anyone.”

i nodded.

she got closer to me and whispered “i don’t take religion class because i’m armenian and a christian. so i’m not responsible for this class.”

it’s not the thing she said. it’s the way she said it. i was ten or eleven back then so i didn’t understand why was this a secret. i knew this was not like the other secrets we used to share when we were in primary school. this was way more serious than that.

this core memory came to me after the talk we had with tamara about armenian surnames ending with yan. and i remembered her surname. i haven’t forgotten that she was armenian, on the contrary it is something that i have accepted over the years so that i never thought about it deeply until now.

why did her parents felt the need to keep her and their ethnicity and religion under wraps? she is just a little kid. probably her parents feared the way other parents would talk in their houses about her if she was open with her religion and ethnicity. if the other parents discuss this in a badly manner in front of their kids, the kid would pick it up and treat her with the same bad manner. maybe looking down at her, calling her filthy, exclude her or even bully and torture her. we still keep in touch and i watched her become a secretive and a defending person. defending herself when we don’t agree, when i don’t like her t-shirt, when the music she chose didn’t fancy my ears, when i ask about how come she didn’t pick up smoking yet or have new friends, when she sits in my place… not explaining but defending. only talking about casual information about how she changed schools or started an account about gymnastics when i asked her about how was she in the months and years we couldn’t keep in touch. never getting too deep. only surface level communication.

the way she had to keep her identity a secret bothered me. how her face got serious and her eyes got scared while talking about her nationality bothered me. watching her growing into the pattern of secretiveness she had when we were in primary school bothered me.

knowing the fact that having an armenian origin is still considered a social problem bothers me. the impact this had on me bothers me.

today when we went to armenian genocide museum there was an open notebook with a pen inviting everyone to write on it. i searched for turkish entries and there were three. one of them really touched me:

“i respectfully bow before those who lost their lives in this awful humanity tragedy.”

“bu korkunç insanlık trajedyasında hayatını kaybeden herkesin önünde saygıyla eğiliyorum.”

teep compared to others in the neighborhood. as i walk slowly, i keep looking at the ground, checking for any dead animals. a year ago, when this place didn’t quite feel like home yet, i saw a dead parrot lying on the ground. it stayed there for about a month. i witnessed its decay over time. then one day, it suddenly disappeared. i guess someone took it away. i assume so, but i don’t know for sure what happened. since that day, i often walk home looking at the ground.

seeing a dead animal on the street might scare or disgust some people. but i liked it. i can’t explain why. what i liked most was seeing it there every day. despite not belonging there, it somehow continued to remain in that spot. i thought someone would see it, pick it up, throw it away, maybe even bury it, and it wouldn’t be there anymore. it felt like a secret shared only between the two of us. an abnormal finding in a normal place. despite seeing it every day for a month, i didn’t move a muscle about it.

towards the end, it became almost unrecognizable. it didn’t blend into the soil, but into the dirt and litter of istanbul streets. maybe it was still there; no one had thrown it away. it had adapted so well to the litter that i couldn’t notice it anymore. maybe, even after a year, it’s still there. its beak, claws, a few feathers… it adapted so well to its surroundings that it became invisible.