What If I Had Stayed

Sevgi has lived in Hamburg for almost twenty-two years, ever since she left her hometown of Trabzon at the age of twenty-four to study engineering abroad. Tonight, sitting alone in her apartment with a cup of Turkish tea, she finds herself thinking about a question she has avoided for years: what would have happened if she had stayed in Turkey?

If she hadn't accepted that scholarship in Germany, she would probably have married her college boyfriend, Ozan, and settled somewhere along the Black Sea coast. They had been deeply in love back then, and if circumstances had been different, they might have built an entirely different life together. Sevgi sometimes wonders whether she would have been happier, surrounded by family and familiar mountains, or whether she would have felt trapped by a life she hadn't truly chosen for herself.

Her career, without a doubt, would have taken a completely different path if she had remained in Trabzon. She became a respected mechanical engineer in Germany, working on innovative projects for a major automotive company. If she had stayed in Turkey instead, she might not have had access to the same opportunities, and her professional growth would probably have developed much more slowly, given the limited industry options in her hometown at that time.

However, Sevgi also recognizes what she has lost by leaving. If she had never moved abroad, she wouldn't have missed her grandmother's final years, memories that still weigh heavily on her heart. Her grandmother passed away six years after Sevgi's departure, and if flights had been cheaper back then, she would have visited more often. Instead, she had only managed two short trips before receiving the devastating phone call.

Sevgi's relationship with her own culture has also changed in ways she couldn't have anticipated. If she had grown up entirely in Turkey, her Turkish would certainly have remained stronger, without the occasional hesitation she now feels when searching for the right word. Ironically, distance made her appreciate her heritage more deeply than she might have if she had never left; if she hadn't moved to Germany, she probably wouldn't have started cooking traditional Black Sea dishes so passionately, almost as a way of holding onto something that felt increasingly distant.

Her German husband, Lukas, whom she met during her second year of university, has often asked her whether she regrets her decision. If she hadn't left Trabzon, she reminds herself, she never would have met him, and their two children, who now speak both German and Turkish fluently, would never have existed. This thought alone makes the entire question feel somehow unanswerable, since every alternative path would have erased the family she now cherishes completely.

Late that night, Sevgi decides to call her mother, still living in Trabzon, just to hear her voice. Her mother mentions that Ozan, her old boyfriend, eventually married someone else and moved to Ankara for work anyway; the quiet, stable life Sevgi had once imagined for herself in Trabzon might never have existed regardless of her own choices.

Sevgi smiles quietly, finishing her tea. She realizes that if she had known back then how complicated and unpredictable life truly was, she might have worried less about making the "right" decision. Some questions, she concludes, are worth asking occasionally, not because they have satisfying answers, but because they remind us how many different lives we could have lived, and how grateful we can still be for the one we actually chose.