Roots

It started when I was about to turn 6. The day when we were moving from my first home. I was losing everything, including our kitchen sink¹. The sink I was using since I was born.

Then I started school, started biking, and it was all good. For a while. I even had a girlfriend². Then I changed schools, lost some of my friends, and definitely lost my girlfriend of 1 day. Resettling took a few years. We moved 2 times during this time but the school didn’t change, hence the friends stayed.

And then I changed schools again. Lost most of my friends again. I was not terrible at making new friends but the churn takes its toll. Some years passed, then we moved again and came university. The great thing about university is that it lasts at least 4 years³ and they tend to stay in the same place. This definitely helped me to settle down a bit. I got my first job, made a few lifelong friends, met and started dating my future wife, and started to feel like I belong somewhere. On my 5th year of university though, the chaos started again: most of my friends graduated, I switched jobs, and I was very close to graduating. Then I graduated, got engaged, moved to yet another city for compulsory military service, then got married, moved to San Francisco for a new job, and then moved back to Izmir just after 11 months.

I have never been able to stay in one place (city or home) for more than about 3 years since I was 6 and I am 36. That’s a lot of years and a lot of movement. There’s no single reason for this. We moved a lot when I was a kid as my father was a military officer, then I moved to become a real adult, then I had to move across countries for work. With every move, you lose friends along with some part of you. Settling into a new place can be extra hard when it is an entirely different country, let alone a city. New people, new culture, new everything.

I guess this is the curse of trying to escape your fate in a weird, almost-developed-but-not-quite country which you cannot completely leave behind, but also cannot come back to for a safe and secure life.

I don’t know why I’m publishing this. May be I’m tired⁴ or may be it was just a long writing exercise to share one of my favorite songs, “Roots” by Alice Merton:

I like standin’ still, but that’s just a wishful plan Ask me where I come from, I’ll say a different land But I’ve got memories and travel like gypsies in the night

I’ve got no roots, but my home was never on the ground

Footnotes

1. I asked my mum whether we were taking the sink with us too. ↩

2. Yes, I took a girl to the local movie theater with a romantic walk when I was 8. It was the talk of the town — at least between 8-year-olds. ↩

3. Yes some of you have the smarts to do it quicker, and some people take longer. Topic of another story. ↩

4. Just checked, yes I am tired. ↩