Once, I asked myself how another person’s memories, recollections, feelings could ever become mine. Memories of a place I had never been to, and the emotions that wrapped around those memories. Now I am forced to ask again. The question has to be rebuilt. It has to be modified, because those memories that belonged to someone else did open a space in me. They became mine. But this becoming-mine was also, at the same time, a rewriting. And strangely, the question has had to change shape into this:

Can a person have memories, feelings, longings for a place they have never been to?

Not like a utopia. Not in the abstract.

I am sitting here now in Mecklenburg, and the memories that were my mother’s in our living room in Antep, memories that found no counterpart in Gelsenkirchen, are finding something in Mecklenburg. In this place where neither I, nor my mother, nor anyone I have ever known has lived, they are saying, right now: with these feelings, with these dreams, with this confusion, anxiety, fear, with everything, I belong here.

The world we built in Gaziantep, in my room, while wandering through my mother’s memories, that imagined world, is beginning to find its own topos here in Mecklenburg.  Houses feels like chocolate. Like cake. Places can trigger appetite, almost literally. A street, a room, a certain light can make the body want to “take it in,” as if the space itself were edible. But edible by the mind to build dreams on it.

I think I have been visiting this place for three years now. Different towns, villages, forests, lakes in Mecklenburg. How strange it is, how uncanny, to desire places that have never been lived, never been thought.

How strange that other people’s memories have become the first cocoon of how I look at people today, how I form relations with them. My mother’s stories were so beautiful. I keep saying it: when we are children we are like the first humans, so close to the people around us, and our ways of thinking are just as primitive, just as direct. The Germany my mother described to me was, for me, a land of gods, the superior beings and products of a superior world. The ice cream, for instance. She would always tell me about the ice cream she ate as a child. I knew the sound of the ice cream truck even when I was still a child. Hansel and Gretel. The lullabies, Hänschen klein geht allein. Germany, through my mother’s eyes, was always a magical world. And now I am sitting here: thirty years later, for the first time, I am in Germany, the magical world of my mother.

And the strange thing is that the whole coherence, the whole meaning of Gelsenkirchen had been compressed into my grandfather’s room. My uncles, my aunts, my grandmother, it was as if they had built one of Hieronymus Bosch’s hell paintings inside that room. In less than a week they had shown me that my mother’s Gelsenkirchen did not exist. And I think I understood the feeling of how she had been forced to escape from among them, even leaving her child behind. Because I, too, escaped without even turning back.

But Berlin and Mecklenburg were not like that. There, at least a little, I could dress my everyday life with the stories my mother used to tell at night. And all of this began to grow into something that could become trouble for me, like in Hansel and Gretel. Because I was not meeting what existed on the measure of its reality. I was meeting, for the first time, the states I once loved in my mother, the states that had enchanted me. I was trying to dress people and places with the stories born from that loving gaze.

And that prevented me from seeing how a fascism, like a vampire, had taken root right next to me, drinking my blood. The suffering I lived through in Berlin looked normal to me, because of this foolishness. I could not see that the roommate whom I thought loved me, the one I thought was taking me on walks through my mother’s stories, was a fascist and was using me. While I believed I was part of my mother’s heaven, I was being consumed by that heaven. I had to come to the edge of death in order to see it.

Today again I am searching around, of course. Searching for a buzzard, a kite, an eagle. I do see them, and it is striking how imposing, how auratic it is to look at them. The way they sway in the wind is mesmerizing. And their cries, how can I put it, like a kind of grace. Whenever I see them I clutch the camera. The strange thing is this: the moment I take the camera out, I turn my head and they are gone. When I look with the camera, they are not there.

Today I said, yes, I finally caught you. They circled, circled above me, and I filmed. I watched them gliding, gliding, and I followed them with my eyes. I kept thinking: will they appear in the footage? Anyway, I said, fine, and I stopped and checked. No video. I had not recorded. So again they had obeyed the law: I do not want to be registered.

I will go out again soon. For now I am sitting in the garden. Lying back on something like a sun lounger, they started flying above me. So close that we made eye contact. I shivered. My phone was next to me. Just as I was about to reach for it I said, no. No, it is showing itself to you. While it grants you that gliding, at least grant it the courtesy of being enchanted. So I lay back, settled, put my hands behind my head, and began to watch with a smile. I never thought it could fly this close. It was enchanting. It circled, circled. Then two more came, one a kite and one… it was unbelievable. I cannot write it. I cannot explain it. Enchanting.

Bettina took me swimming in a lake. Silke, what a tender woman. Warmly, she hugged me. As we walked toward the water, those tiny olive-green frogs were everywhere in the forest, leaping in all directions. Mecklenburg is truly a Miyazaki film for me.

Then we saw a tiny, very sweet snake. In forests, in places we do not know, it feels as if everything might attack us. The body carries a sense of the uncanny. And yet the snake was running away from us. Maybe the real uncanniness is our presence for them. Yesterday too, while walking near the Nebel, a wild boar ran away from me. And further on, the “police” of the forest start clinking anyway.

After that I went to the closed village of the rich. I crossed the Nebel (the river’s name) and on the right I saw them: deer grazing in the meadow. Unbelievable. They did not see me. I came closer, and closer, and closer. Then they lifted off, jumping as they fled, like they were flying.

Even describing the village feels ridiculous to me. How lucky those bastards are.

Then I went to the field with the horses. I told a woman there: this place is a paradise. And she answered, especially in this world, today. Again a walk through a realm of feathers.