Writer's Block Magazine

It is half an hour before midnight, and I am staring at the screen of my corroding laptop, awaiting my cue to click the crimson button and end the inferno. Somehow, three years of studying, over two decades of living, have coalesced into a rectangle. My hands tremble above the keyboard, keeping time with the private percussion of my heart. Awareness of an ineluctable ascent hangs: I must push through the smoke to emerge. I wait for the moment of departure to present itself, to dawn as an event, something with edges. In lieu of a threshold, there is only the gravitational force of questions without lucid answers, pressing inward, outward. I expect relief as I click submit. It does not arrive. The thesis departs; nothing takes its place. I am left with the silences of my life.

I am in suspension, peering into the museum of my consciousness, drawn to photographs of younger versions of my mother, my father, my grandmother. Photographs taken before my birth. Before my father’s death. Before the brutality of the world ceased being a wound, engraved itself as scars. I orbit around the constellations in their eyes, replete with unnurtured hopes and desires, elusive reveries lost to the past. Their unvoiced deprivations, nested within the world’s cruelty and injustice, are woven into a tapestry of unfulfilled dreams that traverses time and space. Humans’ unlived possibilities, witnessed and unwitnessed, press into me. Sometimes they feel like a pair of hands at my back, holding me steady. Other times, they are a fistfight in my ribcage.

I know my luck of the draw from its bones to its skin. A bachelor’s degree is at my fingertips, the harvest of grit and travail, but it is not my achievement alone. Circumstance, a gamble between fortune and cruelty, falling in my favor. A turn of grace, propelled by family, sustained by teachers, friends, books, poetry, nature, strangers—fleshing out sketches of the imagination. I fathom its vastness. I wonder, still, how my hands can hold it. I search for a space that can bear the weight.

Gratitude becomes a blade turned inward when I indulge in my sorrows over this world. Futile guilt. I carry a debt that cannot be resolved. My suffering helps no one; idleness does a great disservice, too. I do not want to betray the life entrusted to me, to erode what has been built. 

I ought to honor the privilege of living and learning. I can give it the best of myself, if nothing else. A modest offering, bearing a longing it cannot contain. I hope to alchemize what was lost into something that can be given again.

My thesis is a fragment of that same wish. Alongside its literary analysis, it investigates love—the kind that slips into the corners of our lives, offers glimpses of liberation, yet tends to escape our notice in our attunement to torment. It is rooted in decolonial feminism, attending to the concerns that kept my younger self awake at night. I find my way home to the version of myself who did not yet have the language for what she witnessed, but who bore its weight in her bones. I offer her what she needs. The experience of researching and writing about questions that gnaw at the mind of a young girl of color. A few answers, where possible.

I say to her: you endured a lot, and you made it out alive (which feels near miraculous). Really, you’re doing quite well for yourself. And I promise to make all your struggles worth it. I become ineloquent in front of that child, with her big brown eyes and bushy eyebrows, her gaze brimming with hope and something I have long forgotten—secrets of the universe only children seem to be in on. But that’s okay. In between the words of my thesis lives a loud silence that reverberates, filled with the love that carried me here—the love offered by family, friends, strangers, and, in time, myself; the love I bear for my family, my friends, and for reading, writing, learning, and the world. An act of alchemy that holds the sacrifices, the aches, and the joys, reaching into what precedes language, into the marrow of things.

I return to myself, coughing out the remnants of smoke. What remains, after all of this? The future is unknowable, and on my worst days, I face it with trembling hands, ash in my throat. Yet I know that what carried me here will continue to carry me forward. Grace, the river that passes itself forward. I live in the wondering of how to do justice to all that has nurtured me. In that home, I find that the responsibility is an honor in itself. And so I persist, in tender duty.

The laptop is warm after I close it, radiating the heat of the spell. For a moment, I hold it like a small animal whose heart is still beating. Here I stand, at the end of the beginning.

“Look beyond your tasseled caps

And you will see injustice.

At the end of your fingertips

You will find cruelties,

Irrational hate, bedrock sorrow

And terrifying loneliness.

There is your work.”

Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

Written by Emel Peksöz