The weekend went by in a way I struggle to recollect in my memory. I was and am nevertheless happy; the past year has personally been transforming, for I remembered the importance of caring for myself. Back in the fall of 2015 when bombs exploded virtually every month in Turkey, my home, I would not want to leave the house for days and developed a range of health issues. Mostly skin reactions. When Gezi protests happened in 2013, my body screamed so loud, my smooth skin bursting into angry tears. This past weekend passed with only a minor reaction on my lips. I consider it an improvement, an unsurprising yet welcome one.

When the possibility of a military intervention was too real, I thought about how lucky I was to be in France and not Turkey. The ridiculousness of feeling safe in a place that experienced a horrendous atrocity just a day before displaced me even more. But I was lucky. My passport had all the right visas; my bank account had all the right currencies. I ran through the emergency plan once again: tell mom and dad to have their passports in an accessible place; call sisters to go to ATMs to take out money just in case. My French roommate offered to help with anything and everything, also just in case.

An escape plan by someone who escaped years ago. Why had I left? Why did I want to leave? What happened to the 17 year-old who left with the utmost desire to “go back” to Ankara — yes, even to Ankara — to become a public service official to support women’s education in Turkey?

What happened to the guilt I used to feel when I thought about relocating for good?

I study migration politics and how climate change will impact mass movements. I am drawn into disappearing islands and lands. Reading and thinking about what will happen to people when they physically lose their soil. When they are uprooted unvoluntarily. Seeing glamourous trees that have been rooted in one place for hundreds of years, some people feel joy and others add a touch of heartbreak into the pot. What happens as a greater number of us begin viewing magestic trees differently?

I have a unique and at times unsettling view of “home” due to politics in Turkey in the past 14 years but not only that. I left home at the age of twelve and have been on the move since. I have many privileges that allowed me to escape most times I wanted to. Friday, the potential of unprecedented civil conflict at home made me —and the girl within who is adaptable to relocating — sad like no previous experience. Having access, education, money did not provide the sense of security that comes all too easily from simply waking up in a peaceful environment.

Lots more to say yet words flying out of me, and my writing feels incoherent. “There is always a choice,” I want to say and believe. What all of us can do is sustain the availability of choices for people who become stuck in places that once were home. Luckily, it seems that people in Turkey dodged the bullet this time (in one way). Many around the world cannot — many around the world do not have access to friends they can reach out to. I do. I know lots of people who read the news daily, who care, and who have the means to do something about issues they care about.

Google your city’s name + NGOs that work with refugees. I am familiar with several in Chicago, such as RefugeeOne and Girl Forward. In Istanbul, Project Lift is an organization that does wonders working with Syrian children. Volunteer for a day, or now send a few dollars. Or write your representative to not give into the xenophobic rhetoric. Go and vote. Say something to your neighbor if they talk about how “the refugees” are “invading” your country.

Be creative.

“home (by warsan shire)

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here”

“wake up!,” you want to scream and hope it will replace the sound of bullets with your own
wishing you could be louder, just a bit louder than those in hatred
thinking of solutions, all solutions, through numbers and maps and charts and through the desire to show the utter absurdity
wishing those who insist otherwise can for once stand by you as you mourn
the desire to be understood, and your voice slowly disappears

you realize how your voice shivers and needs a bit of care, some warmth

the warmth, my dear friend, is around you
nobody has left you alone
lots of bodies join in to add depth to your voice and
then you get louder
through words
through your story
share yourself
share your past
share your darkest, and allow space for your brightest
let it out
you are strong — the kind that needs not yell, not kill, not fear
i am here
listening

Ankara was the place I felt connected to only through memories of childhood and fascinations that abandoned me while moving into adulthood. For instance, in primary school, every time we drove by the Foreign Ministry's brutalist gray building, my heart was pounding differently. I felt that this building and the city itself held some magic that could actualize my dreams. That feeling, albeit strong to the point of allowing my poor memory to recall it vividly after many years, left itself to deep disdain for Ankara as a city. After moving to Istanbul for high school, my imagination was captured by a good majority of Istanbulite friends that ignored the rest of the country and claimed superiority over it. While under the teenage pressure of wanting clearer identities for myself, I embraced this ignorance and concluded: Ankara had no culture, no urban life, no excitement. Everything happening in the city, including politics, sucked.

With growing comfortable in my own skin came another disillusionment: of the Istanbulite ignorance of Turkey. Living in bubbles is fine and perhaps inevitable; yet, that was not the life I desired. While waiting on a ridiculously impossible visa to visit Germany, I found myself in Ankara for four months from September to December 2013. Until then, my visits to the hometown were brief and very interrupted. I had left the city at the age of 12 and came only for holidays. At maximum, I had stayed for three to four weeks. This time, there were four months ahead of me and zero friends (besides my mother and her friends).

Turns out the city was holding mayoral elections right then. A viable and, in my opinion, very reasonable candidate emerged to contest the undemocratic and corrupt rule of the mayor that governed since 1994. Funnily enough, Ankara's local politics hold many similarities to those of Chicago. The 2013 election results brought with them major fraud allegations, and I witnessed ballots in trash cans and much more during those months. Speaking with the beautiful people of Ankara who wanted to ensure transparency and justice, I began noticing what there is to this city that naturally was invisible to the outsider's eyes. I became an insider quickly and began seeing the place rather differently.

That people in Ankara are politically engaged is not news in Turkey. During all the military coups from the 1960s onwards, Ankara students were at the forefront of protests. For me, however, the city began gaining a three-dimensional reality only during that undesired, forced stay. And recently, more specifically in the past 18 weeks, this city has become something even more different and oddly also more familiar. I am still physically an outsider, not residing there. Emotionally, however, I am with Ankara more fully than before.

On October 10th, 2015, the deadliest terror attack in modern Turkey's history took place at the heart of the capital city. Lots of news outlets covered the horrific event in minute detail. For me, what stood out was that civil society members, concerned citizens, and most importantly people who cared deeply about Turkey's present had gathered in Ankara for a peace rally. The videos and photos from that day unmask the collective intention of these people: to stand in solidarity. These words would have sound wishy washy to me until the Gezi Protests in 2013. But now I know, through first-hand experience and not solely intellectual conversations, that collective efforts of support for a cause matter greatly. Those people — those with the most beautiful of hearts — lost their lives for a still-unsolved attack in broad daylight in the middle of the city.

Today, on February 17th, 2016, another attack took place once again at a very central location in Ankara. This time, the target was military personnel leaving their work with shuttles to go home. On a Wednesday evening at rush hour, a car with bombs exploded, leaving at least 28 dead and 61 injured (according to the latest news source I found, 10pm Ankara-time). While I hold major reservations toward the military as an institution in general and Turkey's military in specific, I feel extremely sad and angry for the loss of these people who were heading home to have a peaceful evening. The details of what happened are unclear, and I doubt there will be satisfactory answers.

Right now, all I am trying to do is figure out ways to deal with the shock, the terror and the pain without falling into hopelessness. The intentions and actions of the people who met in Ankara for the peace rally 18 weeks ago are loud and clear in my mind. The sound of today's bomb is loud, too, and perhaps will remain loudest for the families whose loved ones suffered today.

However, there is something more to the city due to its changing meaning. And it makes me want to focus on the clarity of peaceful intentions and actions. The same terrorizing event could elicit countless responses among the people experiencing it. My wish for the city's response follows the reasons why people gathered here in October 2015, why university students here are deeply political, and why justice somehow runs through the streets that are occupied by officials that defy its value. Ankara is still an ugly city with poorly designed buildings, and yes there is no Bosphorus here. Today, however, it is a city mourning, a place that lost its most beautiful people in the past few months. And I mourn with it, keeping close to my heart the word "peace" and allowing it to mean what it does.