I squeezed my eyes shut tightly and tried to ignore my eyelids burning with pain. Was there any way to push back the tears threatening to spill from my eyes?
As the sorrow I had locked myself in slowly loosened my knees, I searched for something to hold onto, but it was very difficult to focus on my surroundings with blurry eyes.
"Be careful," Emre warned, and I leaned against a wall and let myself go. My feet sank into a swamp, and I collapsed onto my knees. "Deva, Deva, look at me. Breathe."
Breathe? How did one breathe? For three days, I had had no reason to breathe. The world I lived in looked completely different to me. The trees, the houses, even the sky were painted black. I was an orphan again, I was alone again, I was all alone again in this big world. When I realized that the wet thing hitting my face was water, I was able to open my eyes and come to my senses a little.
We had arrived at the autopsy.
For diagnosis...
As my heart beat with this awareness, it began to sprout anew in my mind over the last three days. Awareness pierced my heart like a spear, and I turned my gaze to the scene before me. As my vision cleared, I couldn't help but swallow hard at the word "AUTOPSY" written on the small sign next to the automatic door.
"Now, my husband... My husband..." Before I could finish, Emre spoke for me, "Yes, here," he said, looking at the same spot as me. "Come on, let's go." Reluctantly, I forced myself to stand up. My knees screamed, but I tried to walk, and when we reached the door, I tried to take a small breath, but breathing had become quite difficult in recent days.
When we entered through the door, I crossed my arms against the cold that greeted us and took a timid step. The sound of the ventilation system filling the room scratched my ears, while the strong smell of cleaning products invading my nose made me feel sick. I paused for a moment to collect myself. I closed my eyes and tried not to engrave this moment in my mind.
I could have done it.
All my efforts not to cry vanished the moment I opened my eyes. There was a corpse on the table in front of me. No, not just a corpse, my husband... my husband's corpse. My heart stopped beating for a second. As the scream that escaped my lips slowly echoed between the four walls, I could no longer hold myself back and collapsed to the floor. My tears flowed freely, falling rapidly onto the cold, metal floor. As my sobs rose rapidly from my chest, finding freedom, I covered my mouth with my hands.
My heart was shattered and slipped away from my fingertips. Just like my husband's body, buried under the soil thrown onto his grave, soil had been thrown onto my heart.
I was shattered.
As I watched each handful of soil thrown onto his body, I could see the flame burning somewhere inside me right before my eyes. Somewhere inside me, the devil was sneaking up behind me and whispering in my ear. We both wanted revenge. We both wanted to breathe in revenge.
I was torn between dying and killing. The desire for revenge was growing so strong inside me.
What did anyone want from my husband?
After the funeral, when we went to the condolence house, I tried to help Harun's family. Some were whispering and gossiping, others stopped me to offer their condolences. Living with the awareness that my husband no longer breathed in this world... trying to live was very difficult.
Was being tested with loneliness again, when life was already a test for me, one of God's strange jokes?
The mourning house was packed with people, and I sat next to Harun's mother. She was beating her knees and crying. She had lost her son, and I had lost the man I thought I would share my pillow with for the rest of my life. As her wails tore at my heart, I held her hands. We hugged each other, trying to ease our pain, but no matter how much I tried to soothe her wounds, I knew I could never ease the pain inside her.
It had been three years since I left the orphanage and started standing on my own two feet. I was working part-time at a bookstore and living alone in a small house. After passing the university entrance exam, I had secured a position as a classroom teacher and had everything sorted out.
On my first day at university, I was looking left and right for the Faculty of Education, but I couldn't find it. Hesitating to ask people around me, I was walking, clutching my bag tightly, when suddenly I saw him. He was smiling and telling a group of people something. He was older than me, that was clear. I found myself walking towards him without meaning to.
I was curious about what he was saying, and when I joined the crowd and started listening to him, I couldn't help but smile, nodding my head occasionally in agreement with what he was saying.
After a while, our eyes met, and in that moment, it was as if time had stopped for both of us. It was as if we could understand each other without speaking.
But now... now neither he could open his eyes nor could I breathe.
◇
It was the sixteenth day of mourning. Days had come when I could sleep for even an hour, when I had grown accustomed to the coldness of the bed, when I could eat even a spoonful of food. Yet the numbness inside me was slowly turning into a black hole.
The thoughts that occupied my mind pierced my skin like knives, worms crawling around my heart, sucking my blood and drying it up. If I didn't die from blood loss, I had started to come up with new ideas to kill myself, all of them very creative, but first, first I wanted to find the one who killed my husband and see him die in agony before my eyes.
Since the funeral, I had been staying with Harun's family, not in our own home. Going home and breathing in all those memories hurt me too much. There was only grief and tears in that house now. I left my dreams there, closed the door, and locked it. That house was now nothing more than a coffin to me.
As I watched outside from the guest room window, I let my thoughts gnaw at my brain. In this house where Harun had spent his childhood, I was now listening to stories about his childhood from people who had come to offer their condolences for his funeral.
Death had entered my life for the first time with Harun.
Just as the word "love" had entered my life with Harun.
Watching outside the window, exhaling the oxygen I had drawn into my lungs, I saw Emre. He pulled his car quickly onto the curb, got out, and slammed the driver's door shut. It was hard to read the expression on his face, but he quickly opened the street door and went inside. He was holding a file. Hoping it was Harun's murder file, I left the window and rushed out of the room.
As soon as I entered the house, I climbed the stairs vigorously, my only hope being that he had found something about the murder, but when he slowly climbed the stairs and saw me, his face was filled with disgust. Frowning, hoping he would say something, he took a slow breath and threw the file at my feet.
"They closed the case." The words hit me like blows to the spine as I bent down and picked up the file.
"They ruled it a suicide." My hands trembled as I held the file, and I looked at Emre. It was impossible. My husband was not the type to consider suicide. Even in the worst times, he knew he would find the light; he always thought positively.
Shaking my head from side to side, the same word kept slipping from my lips: "Impossible."
I found myself unconsciously repeating the same thing over and over, as if there were only one word in my vocabulary.
Impossible, impossible, impossible.
I slowly opened the file and scanned the documents that greeted me. I struggled to comprehend words like suicide scene and suicide weapon.
What does it mean to commit suicide?
My husband wasn't the type to commit suicide on his birthday.
A few seconds later, a flash of memory struck my mind like lightning.
"That day, that day, he talked to someone and went out," I said with sudden realization.