Doors

One door closes.

Then another.

And then one more…

With every door that closes, the world outside becomes a little more distant. In the end, you are left standing there, wearing pajamas that are not yours, with a plastic wristband around your wrist bearing your number.

First, they take your name away from you.

Then your past.

The life you lived is no longer the life as you tell it. Your past is rewritten in someone else’s words, as though it were the biography of a person you have never known. You read it, but you cannot find yourself in it. You want to object, but you feel that you are no longer even accepted as a witness to your own life.

Then they take your future.

And after that, everything that gives life meaning, one thing at a time…

The people you love, your profession, your dreams, your choices, your privacy, your right to be alone, the ordinary freedom of opening a door and simply walking outside…
From time to time, someone comes in. They scribble a few things in the file they are holding and leave. You remain there. Inside the file they close after writing a few sentences lies your entire life.

“You have veins,” they say.

“Yes,” you say.

“There is blood inside your veins.”

“Yes,” you say.

Then they insist that there is something called “kudret” inside your blood.

And that is where you say, “Stop.”

“Stop there. That blood is mine. That body is mine. Those thoughts are mine. You cannot write down what is inside me without asking me.”

But your voice reaches no one.

You speak, but you are not heard.

You object, and even your objection becomes another sentence in the file.

And after a while, you realize:

You no longer have your name,

your voice,

the right to tell your own past,

the freedom to build your own future,

or even the boundaries that separate you from the rest of the world.

What remains of a human being when everything that belongs to them is taken away, one piece at a time?

Perhaps only one tiny place inside, somewhere no one else can reach.

The last place where a person can still say, “I am.”

The gates of the city moved me deeply.

I looked at those gates for a long time. Because for some people, a door is never just a door. A door that can be opened means being able to leave, choosing your own direction, walking away without needing anyone’s permission.

Sometimes freedom is as simple as an ordinary open door—and just as unreachable.

As I looked at the gates of that city, I thought about the doors that closed behind me all those years ago, and about the person I am today, still searching for an open door.

Twenty-one years later, I am standing in another city, before different doors.

That plastic wristband is no longer around my wrist.

I am no longer wearing those pajamas that were not mine.

But some doors, once they have closed, continue closing somewhere inside you.

Perhaps that is why the gates of the city moved me so deeply.

Because sometimes, for years, a person searches for only one thing:

an open door where they can once again say the name that was taken from them,

where they can tell their own past in their own words,

where they can decide their own future again,

and where no one will lock the door behind them.

With love,
Eylem