FIRE HAIRED STRANGER

Someone was shouting a girl’s name on the street, a mother calling her daughter back from the mud. The child was making mud cakes with her tiny hands, laughing, completely unaware of danger that her mother thought there is. First child I guess. And the mother was already panicking as if the world could break her child in one touch. I watched it once, and the scene never left me. Maybe because nobody ever shouted my name out of worry. I didn’t understand then why that image stayed in my mind, but now I do.

My mother left me when I was forty days old. It's explained it with postpartum depression, manic episodes, fragile psychology and doctor reposts that as long as my childhood. Everyone tried to paint her absence like a medical condition, something logical, something forgivable. They talked as if she would come back one day, as if I was being prepared for a miracle. She didn’t come back.

Not until I was thirteen.

And on that day, she arrived like a stranger out of a dream. It was July. Same like this one, I was having difficulty to breath in that heavy air. The sun was too bright. I had just come out of the shower my grandmother gave me because I was still a small child for my age. I did not know I would grow to be one 1,77 one day, or that I would have a woman’s boobs with great curves eventually. At that moment, I was just a little girl with wet hair, sitting at the table, eating breakfast.

There was a knock on the door.
I opened it.
And there she was.

A woman dressed in pure white. High heels. A cigarette burning between her fingers. Hair the color of strawberry dipped in fire, falling all the way to her lower back. She looked like someone who escaped from a movie, not from my past. She stared at me and said, “Is some named Ilayda lives here?”

I fell in love with her, instant crush. I wanted to be her, I could live inside her breast, smelling her heavy Hypnotic Poison perfume forever.

Annemin adi Nefes...a name to a person who drown in her own self.
Insan ismi ile yasarmis, o, onunla olecek.

I froze. I didn’t know who she was. She looked unreal, too glamorous, too loud for the quiet place we lived in. Before I could say anything, my grandmother stepped forward, pushed the door halfway shut and said to me, “Go finish your breakfast.” Her voice wasn’t angry. It was protective.

I went to the next room, the one facing the same street. From the window, I watched this fire-haired woman crying outside the house. “That’s my daughter. I want to see her.” She was shouting between sobs. Her voice echoed in the street like something was breaking inside her.

I didn’t know anything yet.
I didn’t know torture.
I didn’t know hunger.
I didn’t know what it meant to be beaten for speaking at the wrong moment or breathing in the wrong tone. I didn’t know I would grow up carrying cigarette burns on my skin. I didn’t know I would become a girl who learned how to survive instead of play. I didn’t know I would become a woman who hides her wounds behind languages, beauty, intelligence, and a fierce smile.

I didn’t know.
But she did.

I lived with her for two years until her own mother, my other grandmother, saved me. She took me to Mersin, to a beach house, to a softer life. The sea was there again, Every morning she walked by the sea, twenty minutes up the mountain road or down to the shore, she was smelling like that Mediterranean air that tasted like eucalyptus. When she came back, I would hear her soft footsteps, the click of the door, the Turkish coffee, nothing more.

She spent her days in her room reading those banned cowboy novels with yellowed pages and forbidden heat, books the government decided were too wild for the public. That made me love her more. She was older, but she still carried a secret fire. She had escaped her own unhappy marriage in her twenties and never let another man own a single breath of her again. She was a woman who chose herself long before I understood what that meant.

Life there felt safe in a way I didn’t know life could feel. I would sit in my room with the window open, the sea breeze sliding across my skin like a reminder that the world could be gentle, and I would listen to Etta James singing from her room, At last, my love has come along… A song too big for a teenage girl, but somehow it fit. My lonely days are over. It felt true in that house. I would read my books while the rain hit the balcony railings, the smell of wet earth mixing with the distant scent of oranges from the gardens nearby. All I had was my books, loved them, felt loved by them too.

But I was changed many houses until there to know everything has an end.

One day mother came back again.
And this time, she didn’t come crying for the first time under her agitation.
She came like a weapon.

The moment she saw me after a year, she slapped me so hard that my lip split. Then she smashed my head into the corner of the stairs. The official excuse was nail polish.

The real reason was something we both knew but never said.

She knew what I did and I knew what it cost her.

She had a lover, and not in some dramatic tragic movie way, but in the most stupid, ordinary, humiliating way a woman can cheat — with her best friend’s husband.Her husbands old friend from the mahalle.

How we ended up in that situation is a great secret of mine,
One day she had a fight with my step dad that he didn's want me in that house anymore. My mom said she will leave with me. None of us expected this.
My stepfather already sensed something was off because she was never a mom to me maybe not even a quarter that he was to me but pretended not to know, because pretending was easier than accepting that the woman in his house didn’t really belong to him. My mother was trying so hard to look like a mother for once in her life, like protecting me once or twice could erase everything she never did for me.

She moved us from Kadıköy to Ümraniye. I even had a dog — not allowed inside the house, but still mine. My Dante, named him after my favorite poet.

One day she came home early with too many grocery bags, like she was preparing a feast. And I remember thinking, “What are we celebrating exactly? Another Manic episode?” because happiness never felt real in that house.

She told me to take the dog out for a walk. I didn’t question it. Obedience kept the beatings predictable. I didn't wanna witness her anyways.

When I came back after an hour, I opened the door and saw her with that man in the kitchen counter. His hands on her waist. Her lips on his neck.

They froze. I froze. Something inside my chest tore like wet paper.

I didn’t know what betrayal was. I just felt a heavy pain I couldn’t name, so I went to my room and cried until midnight because that was the only reaction my body understood.

Betrayal, realization. She didn't left to protect me, she left her ex to live her life.
I was a tool to her, if this new guy wasn't in the frame, she would left me again.

Later she came to me and said, “This is normal Ilayda, don’t cry,” and she tried to sound soft — but the softness wasn’t for me. It was her own shame talking. I didn’t answer. God knows, I loved her even then, with every demon she had.

I didn't hear that tone not even when she broke my nose or my finger, I can read her even when I was a child. It was her own petty to herself. En aptallarindan birisidir kendisi, demagojiyi persona edinmis bir benlik.

Then the man said, “Why would I apologize? She’ll be a whore like her mother when she grows up.”

And my mother…
didn’t defend her child.
didn’t defend her self.
didn’t correct him.
didn’t even flinch.

That was the moment something predatory formed inside me. Not hatred, clarity.
I didn’t want revenge.
I wanted dignity, a power, a wake up out of the miserable animal she turned me into.

So, I decided to show them what I hide under the loyal obedience to my master.

That was the moment something cold winds of my soul formed into an ice statue inside me. Something my father knows, something he tried to protect me from by teaching me kindness.

So I acted without even needing a plan, because at that moment even the breath I take would be their end. I wasn’t a stupid kid, I knew exactly what would happen if I set the demon in me free. I called my grandmother that same night, asking her to come and get me because my mother was out of control again. My mother had been leaving me hungry for days, disappearing for nights, coming home whenever she felt like it. And I left with my grandmother the next day to Mersin, exactly as I planned. Because if I had stayed one more night, she would have killed me before she killed herself.

Before my grandma arrived, I opened a fake Facebook account using the photos of an old retired English teacher. I prepared it carefully, slowly, fed the profile everyday because if I was going to pull a trigger, it needed to be clean. I added my stepfather and pretend that I am her upstairs neighbor and told him his wife was bringing men home every night and we complain. I gave him the address he was looking for, for months been.
I didn’t imagine some innocent domestic argument. I knew the kind of man he was. I knew what violence looks like when honor breaks within trust. I knew something would explode in that house. And it did. Knives. Blood. Screams. A man trying to protect himself and lose fingers, my stepfather attacking him with a fury that didn’t belong to love but to betrayal from his own childhood friend.
My mother had to disappear from Istanbul.


When she returned later, she looked at me differently — never like a daughter that looks like her father, not like an enemy, but like something she feared. She finally realized the evil intelligence mix with high pride she couldn’t control, lived inside the child she used to torture. She looked at me like a beast from that day on.
So she beated more, by hoping the fear she build on me by wounds, would protect her to be consumed by the mistaken creature of nature, in the future.

I was a sweet little girl in my own perspective, easy not clingy, no expectations.

But they tested me for sociopathy three times because she couldn't just believe a child could cause this much chaos without malice. All three tests said the same thing:
high IQ of 135, ADHD, and my psychology knowledge that I studied with hope I can cure my mom, maybe one day. Well, people never change, I understood this.

Just too much untamed intelligence trapped in the wrong environment. Simple.
My father knew how to handle my brain, I don't. I didn't by then.

By seventeen, I left her house for good, I never talked to her again. Not because I hated her — I never did. I don't have the capacity to hate anyone. I just didn’t want to die slowly in a place where existing meant apologizing.

I didn’t want the demon that protected me to become the demon that ruined me.

People expect someone like me to worship anyone who shows a little affection.
They think a childhood like mine breeds desperation.
They think I should cling to the first hand that doesn’t hit, the first voice that doesn’t scream.

I became the opposite.

I didn’t run toward love — I ran from it.
Not because I didn’t want it, but because I learned too early that love comes in many shapes, and some of them kill you slowly. I hid the pain and difficulties behind 6 languages I learned, behind countries I traveled, behind a type of network that got me a very powerful personal PR job with a Prince of Dubai.

I built walls made of intelligence and success so no one would ever see it through.
I become the Güneş and İlayda was taken care by me only, for forever.

And here’s the part nobody understands:
Despite everything, I can love more than most people.
Not because I was loved well, but because I had to learn love everywhere I went. I changed houses like other kids change toys. I learned different rules, min 10 different families that I had to live with, different ways of being held, different ways of surviving.

I adapted to every home, every city, every culture, because I never had the luxury of rooting anywhere.

That became my coping mechanism.
That became my strength.
I laugh, as no one can find out if there is anything in this world that can break me.

I know how to shape myself without losing who I am.
I know how to read a person faster than most people can read a sentence.
I see their intentions, their cracks, their lies, their fears — instantly.
And if I want to, I can use all of it against them.
I can break someone with the same precision I use to protect myself.
Because survival teaches you strategy, not softness.

But here is the difference between me and the people who raised me:

I choose kindness.
Every time I can, I choose it.
Not because I’m weak — but because I know exactly how dangerous it could be.
So no, I don’t attach easily.
And no, I don’t fall at anyone’s feet.

I love deeply — selfless, honestly — but only when it’s safe, only when it’s real, only when someone earns the right to see the heart I’ve kept alive through all of this.
I love in a way that appreciate the small things of the sweet love itself .

That is who I am.
Not broken.
Not a demon, nor an angel.
Not hardened, not soft, not painful, not heavenly.
Just someone who still somehow kept all the love intact.

Be kind because it's not that hard to be, despite the pain to carry in everyones heart in different shapes and sounds.