The Girl Who Makes Lists Instead of Sense
I turn 24 on the 29th. Before life gets loud again (hello, workshop week), I wanted to mark the quiet — to honor what the past year left behind: soft memories, sharp edges, and everything in between. Some things will stay behind. Others, I’ll carry forward.
I’ve always been someone who collects. Objects, scents, thoughts, fragments of days. I archive the world not because I fear forgetting, but because I want to make meaning out of what remains. As if the universe has shattered, and I’ve been quietly tasked with gathering my portion of the pieces.
I have a tote bag where I keep things that hold meaning for me — cigarette packs, receipts from dinners I never wanted to end, cinema tickets, photo booth strips, sugar packets. Every now and then, I sit with it and select a few to stick into a dark green Moleskine. I ask people to write in it too — little notes from moments, cities, or strangers. A record of presence.
The postcards are different — more chaotic. Some were sent to me. Others I wrote and never sent. Not because I forgot, but because I hesitated. They weren’t lost; just held back. Quietly waiting.
Today, as I was updating the notebook with pieces from recent travels, I came across one of those postcards again. It was from Paris, earlier this year. I had sprayed it with the perfume I used to wear at the time. I don’t wear it anymore, but the scent was still there. Familiar. Distant. A kind of timestamp.
I remembered choosing it with someone in mind. Imagining them reading it. For a moment, it felt like I had stepped back in time. That postcard is still unsent. It even has a Parisian stamp on it, ready. Maybe if I send it now, it will mean something. Or maybe it’s enough that it once did.
Because I’ve come to believe that eroticism salvages what memory forgets. Not lust, but aliveness. Not possession, but attention. The ability to feel without naming, to see without needing to grasp. It’s in the way I reach for a postcard I never sent. In the quiet of sorting through pieces. In the urge to create meaning where there is none.
To live erotically is to resist numbness. To stay tender. To look — closely, honestly, again.
And so, as I turn 24 soon, I return to the instinct that has always grounded me: to make a list. Not to define, but to notice.
I am scared to forget.
But then again, where do thoughts go when we forget them?
Last year, a friend — someone I still care about deeply, though we’ve drifted apart — once told me something about those fading thoughts.
He said the human mind is erotic by nature. That it longs to seduce, to transgress, to go beyond.
Beyond what has already been thought.
Beyond what is already known.
Still, this is my naive attempt to keep the memory safe.
A digital postcard from who I was at 23,
addressed to the person I’m becoming at 24 —
sent, at last, with courage.
Things I felt but never said (because the timing was off):
I wanted you to ask why I stopped speaking.
I left the conversation, but stayed in the room.
You misunderstood me, and I let you.
When I laughed, it wasn’t because it was funny.
I watched people like a simpler version of me, and I played along.
Things that kept me company when I didn’t know how to ask:
The opera. Always. Even when I didn’t understand the language.
A table for one. On purpose.
The texture of paper.
A stranger’s laugh at the cinema.
The phrase “almost enough,” scribbled in the margin of a page.
Things I don’t want to explain anymore:
Why I cry in museums.
Why I know exactly where I sat that night in Rome.
Why I sent that one specific article at 2 a.m.
Why I believe memory has a temperature.
Why I left that party early without saying goodbye.
Why I get quiet when someone tries to make everything funny.
Why I needed you to ask me how I was, even when I said I was fine.
Why I loved. And why that’s no longer the point.
Things that should have felt like freedom, but didn’t:
Leaving a room without having to explain myself.
Getting everything I said I wanted, and feeling nothing.
Being alone in a city I once enjoyed with someone else.
Sleeping diagonally and still waking up on one side.
Getting my appetite back.
Saying “I’m better off without him” out loud, and hating how true it sounds.
Things that made me happy because they were ordinary:
Matching striped pajamas.
Drinking too much wine and crying because it felt safe.
Watching someone I love love a place I love.
Singing along to bad taxi radio like it was a choir.
Realizing I had nothing to hide from my friends — not even my grief.
That moment, just before leaving, when the air feels like memory.
Someone laughing at something I said and then quoting it later.
A message that said “home safe?” and nothing else.
Finishing a book and immediately texting someone “you need to read this.”
The way my friend says my name when she’s proud of me.
When I catch my reflection and think — just for a moment — “I like this girl.” (I should wear more red)
A shared look that says, “we’re thinking the same thing.”
The text that says “I’m here” before the doorbell rings.
Holding hands without thinking about it.
Things that hurt me because they were ordinary:
Saying “take care” instead of “talk soon.”
People who meant the world to me—outside of family (and a candid glimpse into how I saw them):
Zeynep V.: She believes in small gestures but loves with a kind of depth that rearranges your world quietly.
Zeynep Ç. & Sera: Equal parts FBI and stand-up comedy. They’ll hype you up, break your phone if needed, and turn every dinner into season 3, episode 6 of your life.
Zeynep Y.: We didn’t walk side by side, but somehow always ended up in the same place—thinking the same thought, reading the same line.
Klara: The only person who can love luxury, stay sane, and give advice that actually works. Grace in heels.
Sofya: Bourdain’s ex-lover turned post-capitalist witch who also burns journals
Anna: Not all soulmates come with deep talks—some come with summer dresses, late flights, and a bottle of wine and olives.
Ben: He’s the reason I still believe some men just show up and stay.
X: No matter how it ended, he was the center of my world for a while—and that still matters.
X: In Rome, he called me his revolution. I called it timing.
And then, of course, there were the others.
The ones who didn’t get a paragraph, but still gave me a memory, a phrase, a season. The ones I walked around with in Rome, who worked alongside me, who shared their Shabbat tables, who made Paris feel cinematic. Some I saw every day, some only through messages—but they were there.There were many of them. And they mattered—even if just for a line.
Places I held dear:
Via Monserrato on Sundays, religiously.
Piperno. My Saturday table. Same time, same seat. Alone but never lonely.
That shoebox of a room I had in Rome.
My current flat that I have only ever shared with people I love.
Massimo’s bar.
My home in Istanbul.
Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna: Every time I found the opportunity I would basically run back to GNAM to sit on that one specific sofa for hours and read "Ways of Seeing".
My local wine bar at Rome, where I met X
Theatiner Filmkunst
Books I loved reading:
Black Monk by Anton Chekhov
Things I don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy
As Consciousness is Harnessed to the Flesh by Susan Sontag
Agains Interpretation - Susan Sontag
If Cats Disappeared From The World by Genki Kawamura
Next Year in Jerusalem by Andre Kaminsky
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec
Things I want to learn:
When to shut up.
How to not get angry easily.
How to keep basil alive for more than a week.
To listen to people without already thinking of what I’ll write about them.
Patience. Real patience.
Not to cry when angry.
How to stop buying bags
To feel safe when I don’t have a plan.
So this—
all the tote-bag relics, the half-sentences, the half-sent postcards, the basil casualties, the opera programs that double as tissues, the cities worn like borrowed coats—is the inventory of twenty-three.
I’m tucking it into the dark-green Moleskine, pressing it flat so the next year can close without bulging.
*This document has been emotionally annotated, occasionally exaggerated, and absolutely not peer-reviewed. Side effects may include sudden nostalgia, irrational confidence, or texting your ex "hope you're well" (don't).