Return to the Island

Nazlı hadn't set foot on Gökçeada in over twenty years, not since her family had moved to Istanbul when she was just twelve years old, following her father's sudden job transfer. She had always told herself that she would return someday, but somehow, life had kept postponing that promise year after year.

The decision to finally visit came unexpectedly, after Nazlı discovered that the small stone house where she had spent her entire childhood was being sold by its current owners, an elderly couple who had purchased it from her family decades earlier. Something about the idea of the house changing hands again, possibly forever, made Nazlı feel she needed to see it one last time before it was too late.

As the ferry approached the island, Nazlı found herself overwhelmed by memories she hadn't realized she had been carrying all these years. She remembered summer evenings when the whole neighborhood had gathered on the shore, and the specific smell of wild thyme that had always seemed to fill the air around her childhood home.

If she had been asked, years earlier, whether she still remembered these details clearly, Nazlı would have confidently said no. Yet here, standing on the ferry deck, everything returned to her with startling clarity, as though it had been carefully preserved somewhere she hadn't known existed within herself.

Walking through the narrow streets toward her old neighborhood, Nazlı was struck by how much had changed, and yet how much had remained exactly the same. Several old shops had been closed and replaced by cafés catering to tourists, but the same stone church still stood at the village center, and many elderly residents were sitting outside their homes exactly as she remembered.

An old woman sitting near a doorway looked at Nazlı curiously as she passed. After a moment, the woman's face lit up, and she called out Nazlı's name, though it had been more than two decades since they had last seen each other. It was Havva, a former neighbor who had apparently been told by Nazlı's mother, through occasional phone calls, that Nazlı might eventually return.

Havva explained that the house had been well maintained by its current owners, who had apparently fallen in love with the property immediately, much like Nazlı's own parents once had. She told Nazlı that if she wanted, she could probably arrange for her to see inside the house one final time before the sale was finalized.

The current owner, a friendly man named Erol, welcomed Nazlı warmly and allowed her to walk through the rooms of her childhood home. Standing in what had once been her bedroom, now used as a small study, Nazlı was surprised by how much smaller everything appeared compared to her memories, as though the house itself had shrunk over the years.

Erol mentioned that he and his wife had decided to sell because their children had grown up and moved abroad, and the house now felt too large and too quiet for just the two of them. He was quoted as saying that he hoped whoever bought the house next would fill it with the same warmth and laughter it clearly must have once contained.

Before leaving, Nazlı stood in the small garden where she used to play as a child, now overgrown but still recognizable. She realized that if she hadn't come back today, this version of the house, and this particular chapter of her own history, might have quietly disappeared without her ever truly saying goodbye to it. As the ferry carried her back toward the mainland that evening, Nazlı felt, for the first time in years, a strange sense of peace, as though something long unfinished within her had finally been properly closed.