Forest with no face

There is a man I have been dreaming about for the past week.
He never has a face. It is always blurred, withheld, as if the universe is saving the reveal for later.
But he has a scent.
Forest soaked in saltwater, something clean, almost soil like with a trace of baby chalk. That smell has lodged itself somewhere deep in me. Somehow, it feels more real than half the people I have met awake.

I think about him the way a child thinks about a secret bad joke. Lightly. Constantly. Without permission. I imagine small, unnecessary details. How he takes his coffee. How his hair looks when he wakes up. What he orders when he is too tired to cook. I imagine his laugh, especially the moment when something breaks him just enough that laughter and grief exist at the same time. I do not know why these details matter. I only know that they do.

Bir insanın hiçbir gerçeğini bilmezken,
tüm ayrıntılarını bilmek istemek nasıl mümkün?

Ve garip olan şu.
Gerçek hayatta kimse böyle bir merak uyandırmıyor.
Ama bu yüzsüz adam…
her gece geri dönüyor.

At first, I thought the dream was about longing. Or fantasy. Or loneliness. But the feeling was not hunger. It was familiarity. The unsettling kind. As if something I already knew was trying to remind me of itself.

That same feeling began to follow me during the day.

Not sadness. Not hope. A suspension. A quiet neutrality where nothing hurts sharply, but nothing comforts either. A state where emotions exist without direction, like sound heard through walls.

What unsettled me was that the feeling did not behave like imagination. It did not grow when I entertained it, and it did not disappear when I ignored it. It stayed consistent, restrained, patient. Like someone who exists in the world but remains deliberately out of reach. Not absence. Not presence. Something held in between.

I hate that " Gray State". I hate it most when I am forced to live in it.

I started noticing this grayness in places meant for passing through, that's why I call it a state. It's a momentum that when we feel time itself is stuck between the teeth of a personalities. That is what creating a moment that is physically indecisive. I have few examples from my observation from this state.

A noisy, annoying cricket sound that you don't know where is it coming from but had to endure.

Airports at dawn, when no one belongs anywhere yet. Faces unfinished, hair still shaped by sleep, voices kept low out of courtesy rather than kindness. People dragging their lives behind them in small wheeled suitcases. No one asking questions. No one offering explanations. Everyone temporarily anonymous.

I would sit at the gate long after boarding was called, not because I was late, but because I did not want to arrive. I liked the moment where nothing was expected of me. Not departure. Not return. Just waiting.

Hotel rooms felt the same. Rooms I did not unpack in. Clothes left folded. Curtains half open. I would lie on unfamiliar beds and stare at ceilings that did not know me, feeling strangely safe in the absence of context. I was not someone’s daughter. Not someone’s lover. Not anyone’s responsibility. Just a body resting between identities.

That grayness was everywhere once I learned how to see it.

Slowly, I understood that the dream was not trying to show me a person I did not know. It was circling around someone I already did. Somehow. I don't know.

The facelessness was not mystery.
It was timing.

He was not unfinished. He was simply not available to be fully achieved yet. And in that sense, neither was I. We were both standing in a space where definition would force something premature, something false.

What frightened me was not uncertainty itself, but how familiar it felt. Because certainty is easy. You can rush into it, name it, hold onto it. Uncertainty asks you to stay still without guarantees.

The dream did not promise love, even though it was quiet in my head for the first time when I felt his presence.
It did not offer comfort or direction, even though it felt "completed" like my search on this world is finally over.
It only asked whether I could live without forcing meaning onto something that needed time.

I know what love feels like. I know its temperature, its weight, its familiar pull.
This is not that.

This is something quieter and far more dangerous.
It does not rise from my heart. It comes from somewhere lower and older, from the place that chooses before desire has language. It is not wanting to be loved. It is wanting to belong, without asking permission. Deep from my soul, missing piece.

It feels like missing someone with a precision that hurts.
Not the ache of absence, but the ache of proximity delayed.
A longing so sharp that I wait for night not to rest, but to return. To see him again. To memorize him. The way his presence presses against mine without touching. The way his existence feels inevitable rather than desired.

In sleep, I collect him in fragments. In waking life, I carry those fragments like coordinates. My soul knows exactly where he is. It always has.
It is my body that resists. My logic that fights. My reason that calls it illusion, coincidence, projection. My body is afraid of how real this feels without proof.

And now, when I think of him, he does not feel like someone I am waiting for.
Waiting implies distance. Hope. Time.

He feels like home.

Not a place I want to arrive at, but a place I recognize the moment I step inside.He smells like watching a sunset from a balcony in August, when a small excitement builds because my birthday is getting closer. He smells like rakı mixed with olive trees, like wet towels drying under the sun on rusty metal, like saltburn on skin that has known the sea.

It smells like a cliff at the edge of a forest, waiting to be burned down for another hotel’s landscape project.

And maybe that is the point.

Some things are not meant to arrive.
They are meant to warn you what will disappear if you do not choose carefully.

Well, in the end it is just a dream, isn't it?

Reality is our beloved mother we live in it.

Hail Mother of all, we cannot breath in this thigh clothes and it's over past the Christmas Eve. Can we sleep late tonight?