A chance to love again

XXII

Can

I left the port of Istanbul two days ago and I'm now in front of the Greek coast, I think it will take as many days to get to the Bay of Naples, I'm looking forward to it.
I've been in touch with Mr Özkan every day, but at the moment there's no news, Sanem hasn't turned his phone on again.

Emre has been investigating with Layla and seems to have contacted her only a couple of days after her disappearance, sending a text message advising her family to stay calm, she is fine and they don't need to worry about her.

It's easier said than done, I'm terribly worried at the thought of her being in a foreign land alone, without knowing the language to be able to communicate, I don't even know if she knows English so I can't imagine how she's doing.

However, I am convinced that my Sanem is strong, I am sure that even if she has to communicate with gestures, she will be able to conquer anyone with her sweetness and her beautiful smile, I am more than sure of this.

This journey is turning out to be a journey into myself and into my life.
As I imagined there is a lot to dig up and bring to light: my restlessness since I was a boy, not being able to stay in one place for long enough to not create bonds, my need to always go somewhere else, away from everyone I thought I loved, maybe even to leave before being left.
Not to face the problems but to leave, that was my way of acting, as my mother had done with her marriage, that was the example I had in front of my eyes all my life.
My very superficial relationship with women until I met Sanem was emblematic of how I was convinced that in life you cannot establish lasting, true ties, because that was how it had always been for me, with my mother and my brother.
Perhaps the only sincere and lasting relationships had been with my father and Metin, never with a woman.

When I thought I had found the right person to trust, at the first hint of problems my defence mechanisms told me to run away, to leave, this is what I experienced and this is what I learned to put into practice.
I didn't know love around me as a child and I didn't think it was possible to really find love as an adult, with Sanem, I realise this now.

It was too good to be true, I expected at any moment to find out that it wouldn't work out, deep down I was convinced that love doesn't really exist and so I made my prophecy come true, I destroyed it, I made sure it was gone.
Actually, I think I was convinced that night at the hut that it was over, because that's how it always happens, that's how it always is, love has never existed in my life and I truly believed that it could never exist.

I make these considerations while lying with my arms behind my head, on the bow of my boat, under a starry sky, the kind you can only admire at sea.
I think it was my destiny to meet Sanem in the dark of that lodge and fall in love with him without even seeing his face, it was my destiny to enter my life like a hurricane and take possession of all my emotions, mixing them and upsetting them, eradicating all my prejudices and resistance. We were destined to find each other and love each other.

Why else would I have tattooed one of those albatrosses she loves so much on my chest at heart level many years ago, to the point of making them the first thing she saw in the morning when she opened her eyes on the wall of her room?

It was her I was meant to meet, she  was my destiny, her, only her, and I will have to fight to convince her that it is still so, despite everything, she is meant for me and I for her.

We were born to be together.