Loneliness is a fate no immigrant can escape on foreign shores...at least during the first year or so, in most cases. You leave everything behind, your family, friends, your language, the streets of your neighborhood, the faces, the sounds, the smells and the colors that you know so well... and the songs you sang with friends who had memorized the words like you because they were songs of your common destiny. Songs you sang together in a single voice that poured out the same pain and anguish, hopes and longings...the same words of love!
In my case, that loneliness stayed with me for the thirty seven years I spent in Toronto. Like one big wound that would get better but would not heal completely. I do not know where that feeling of an incurable loneliness and a sense of not-belonging came from. Maybe I was born melancholic and sad. That first Summer and Autumn were harder than I had imagined.
After leaving the language school, I had to wait a month for high school to start. It was in a way a very boring Summer, especially daytime. My brothers used to work all day and only came back around dinner time. My father on the other hand, was going to a daytime language school. I had no friends and the whole day was spent with my younger sister and mother. I would go out to the open Mall in our neighborhood and just hang around, sometimes drinking some pop or eating a chocolate. But I was a smoker at that age. No one knew. So I would buy cigarettes and smoke a few and before going home, I would throw away the pack. Cigarettes were so cheap in those years that for a while I bought a new pack everyday…I had enough daily allowance that my mother gave me. A while later it occurred to me that what I was doing was stupid. Why throw away the packs simply out of fear that my parents would find out? So I began hiding the cigarette packs in a hidden corner inside the light panel of the elevator in our building. I would pick them up from there the next day.
The store where I bought pop and chocolate was run by a short man who never smiled. He spoke English with a heavy Accent. Many times when I used to go to buy something, I would see a young boy my age placing milk cartons and big plastic containers in the open fridge. Other times he would arrange merchandise on the shelves. I guess he was his son or helper. But what surprised me one day as I entered the store, was that the man was speaking Turkish with the boy. He sounded angry and all I remember was that the boy ended their conversation by saying “Tamam, Tamam”.
Manushag, shushig, karlopig, they were all beautiful girls but friends. Talking and sharing was natural. The girls in Toronto were like queens to me. It was as if I had to have something smart to say to approach them or talk to them. Admire and cherish from far.
The boys on the other hand, no touching, no physical contact...they were so defensive and you felt you had poor manners.
Going to the plaza, smoking in secret
