The albatross journey

54 - Up to now...

Mihriban

It is not easy for me to tell our story.
Our paths crossed when the promising advertising agency Fikri Harika was approached by the charity I had just started working for to run a fundraising campaign for refugees fleeing Somalia.

I was a young woman full of dreams, ready to give my all for what I was doing and what I believed in, while Aziz was a charming entrepreneur who had started, with a lot of effort and enormous sacrifices, an advertising agency that was making a name for itself not only within the borders of Turkey.
All it took was for our eyes to meet across the table in a meeting room for our breath to stop, choking in our throats with the emotion we both felt instantly.

It was the advertising campaign during which Aziz took every possible opportunity to meet me until he found the courage to come forward and ask me out.
I remember those times as the most beautiful and exciting of my life, every moment we lived together is fixed indelibly in my mind and heart.
The memory of what we lived together has nourished my soul for more than thirty years, making me feel lucky to have been able to know true love, the one with a capital A, the one that you only meet once in your life and that you have to jealously guard in the treasure chest of memories even if it is lost forever.
If you have experienced such passion and involvement, you have been privileged and will never again find a feeling like that anywhere else in life.
We lived months of intense, deep and passionate love that I remember as if in a dream, as if we were the protagonists of a fairy tale destined to have its happy ending with the classic "...and they lived happily ever after".

I was sure that he would soon ask me to marry him and, while I was preparing for my 25th birthday party, I dreamed that he would do it that very evening, but that very evening was the beginning of the end, I only realised long afterwards.

At my party Huma had the opportunity to set her eyes on Aziz for the first time and, with hindsight, I can say that she probably decided that he would be hers at any cost.
From the very first moment she started to weave her web around him, she laid the foundations for a future collaboration of her father's IT company with Fikri Harika in order to have the opportunity to see him and spend time with him.
I didn't realise what was going on until it was too late, when I saw them leaving together for the United States where Aziz was to meet Huma's father's business partner and where the filming of various commercials would take place as requested by Huma herself.
They were away for more than a month, during which Aziz's calls gradually became shorter and shorter and more and more sporadic, and every time, next to him, there was her, every time I could hear her voice in the background as we talked.
Then came that damned e-mail.

Discovering a message from Huma in my email in the morning the day before Aziz was due to return home, I opened it with curiosity and the text of the email sent a shiver of terror down my spine.
Huma said she deeply regretted what she had done, asked my forgiveness for betraying our friendship but said she couldn't explain how it could have happened.
I opened the attached file with death in my heart, her words had already been more than revealing, but seeing the image of Huma under the sheets next to a sleeping Aziz completely annihilated me.
Something was irretrievably broken in me, a part of my soul was irretrievably destroyed by disappointment and bitterness at having been too reckless in handing over my heart to someone who apparently didn't deserve it.

I felt devastated and humiliated by that image and by the idea that I had been betrayed by my best friend but above all by the man I thought was perfect, perfect for me, who had declared his love to me over and over again, who had made me believe that I was unique and special to him and then betrayed my trust at the first opportunity.

Disappointment was heartbreaking, my broken heart seemed unable to contain all the pain that that photo had poured out on me and I wasted no time, I felt the urgent need to flee, to leave Istanbul and not be there the next day when they returned.