A Hundred Seconds
“Come on,” she said. “Come over. Fall in love with me.”
I had nothing to do. I also had no desire to leave the apartment. The fears inside me, the small hopelessness, the heartbreaks I’d filed away somewhere in the past, the work that kept piling up and never got done, all of it was quietly killing any urge to go outside. The work, especially. Work that made me feel guilty. Work I had absolutely no interest in starting.
“No,” I said, as gently as I could. “I can’t.”
I made my voice sound light, as if I hadn’t quite taken her seriously, as if I were laughing along with a joke she hadn’t really made. But she knew exactly what I was feeling. And I knew exactly how serious she was. I felt, in that moment, like a child who needed someone to grab him by the shoulders and slap him twice across the face, hard, so he could finally cry. A child who needed to be slapped. That kind of child.
I didn’t know what it was I didn’t want.
Wasn’t I the one whose heart beat a little slower from loneliness when night came down over the windows and the worn-out couch and the buttons on the TV remote? Wasn’t I the one who felt himself grow a year older every night he spent alone? Where were all those speeches I’d given myself, the ones that went, This time I’ll give everything. This time I’ll live love all the way to the end? I erased them with two words. No, I can’t. Later would come the realization. Later would come the weight of it. Later my hand would reach for the phone again and again, and at the last second I would give up.
Get Levent Bas’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
“Alright,” she said. She let it go. She didn’t even ask why.
After that the conversation turned ordinary, the way these things do. You know the feeling. You’re holding someone’s hands and you can feel, with your entire heart, the weight a certain look leaves inside your chest, but you act as if it’s all completely ordinary. You let your eyelids drop a little. You move your mouth loosely when you speak. You let the moment pass. You could stretch that moment out for a hundred years if you wanted to, but instead you finish it in a hundred seconds. You burn through those few beautiful minutes. You want to look like someone who lives this every day, who’s used to it, who’s maybe even a little bored by it. That’s what the phone call felt like. I kept the ordinariness going anyway.
After the usual let’s see each other soon and the usual goodbyes, I was the one who hung up first.
I sat down on the couch across from the TV with a stupid grin still on my face. A few minutes later I realized I had no idea what I was doing, so I picked up the magazine in front of me. I opened to some random page and tried to read. The phone stayed in my head. My heart went thump thump. My face was colorless and blank, as if I were concentrating on the page. I read. The pages ended. I kept turning them. The magazine ended too.
Then I sat there without getting up. For hours. I sat and sat and sat.
Doing nothing.
Then I went to bed and fell asleep.
This piece was originally written in Turkish between 2004 and 2009. The English version was rendered with Claude (Anthropic), working from the original text to preserve its tone and rhythm rather than to translate it literally.
