Yanımda Kal

Chapter 1

"Necla, kızım, are you up? You'll be late for your first day of college!" 

Arzu, Necla's mother was knocking on her door and calling her to make sure she gets up on time and gets ready for school. Well, college actually. She is just starting her journey as an architect, and is already super excited for it. And even if waking up early was almost always a struggle for her, today she is up even before her mother is knocking on the door of her room. She gives her mother a bit of a fright as she opens the door, a huge smile on her face, excitement swimming in her eyes.

"Of course I'm up annem, gotta start college the right way."

Her mother smiles at her, proud of her determination. She remembered Necla when she was a little girl, sitting in her fathers lap, looking at his drawings and projects. She always found architecture fascinating and wanted to follow in her father's footsteps, and one day take over his company. Although her father wasn't willing to hand over the company without any training involved, she opted to get a head start by being her father's right hand, and learning from him. She has two siblings, a brother and a sister, Omer and Meryem, who were each a few years older than her, so she was the baby of the family.

Omer is the oldest, so by default, he would have been the one to inherit the family business, but his heart was in the kitchen, more specifically, he wanted to go to culinary school. Necla remembered all the times when he would prepare her breakfast before school and she absolutely adored his sweet and sour sauce, always trying to figure out his secret recipe, but Omer would somehow always manage to hide it well enough for her to not find out the full list of ingredients. She tried making it herself, several times, but it was always missing something, a tiny thing that someone might not even notice, but she could.

Even with being children of a wealthy architect and their stay-at-home business mom, Necla, Omer and Meryem never had the mentailty of "money can buy you everything". Sure it makes life easier, and can get you a lot of things, but they never pretended it was something they earned and choose to go their own paths and find jobs, to make their own money. If they end up making a fortune, that's great, and if they don't that's fine too, they tried their best and were glad that if things get really tough they can count on the support of their family, but never to the extent of exploiting what their parents earned.

Meryem was the second child, three years younger than Omer and five years older than Necla. Her passion was music. She has an amazing voice and can play several instruments. Necla always loved to hear her sing or play some insturment. She was proud of her big sister for being so talented and of her brother for being so determined and dedicated to his craft. She wanted to be just like them, hard-working and focused on the things she wants to accomplish. Her goals were simple, architecture, but she also had a hobby of writting. She loved to write, weather it was short stories, full blown novels, or just some tiny piece that came to her mind suddenly.

She never really expected to publish any of her work, as she wasn't too sure of herself at times, but it felt nice. She felt accomplished whenever she would finish a book or a story, and would feel good about herself. She started writing in high school, and in the beginning she struggled with finding her rythm. She was struggling with how to organise herself and take enough time to study and enough time to write. But slowly she figured it out and opted to study during the day and write at night, even if it's just one chapter, just before bed. Even in her darkest moments, she would go to writing as an outlet, but she never connected the bad feelings with her writing, because she didn't want to taint her precious hobby with feelings of dread and sadness, because she felt that after some time, she wouldn't be able to separate them.

It would become impossible to write without feeling that same dread that she did before, when she starts writing while in a good mood if she lets it het in the way. So she found a different outlet, still writing, but more personal. She started a journal. Whenever she felt some strong emotions and didn't know how to convert them into a chapter of a book or a short story, she would write about it in her journal. She isn't super great at poetry, so describing her feelings in her journal was the best she could do. Keeping a journal also reminded her that she needed to work on her handwritting, but all in due time.