ZEYNEP YILMAZ

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DIGESTION FUNDRAISER



Oc t o  b   e r 2       0  2 2

*text gathered for Muhsroom Radio live reading - Every Mushroom is a New Beginning
*partly performed during I USED TO BE A MOUNTAIN with Aleksandra Komsta at Instrument Inventors, The Hague




I have a theory that translators are bulimic.

And that reading acts as jerking off.




Writers are on a budget. I am not as good with second-hand thoughts. I need thoughts not be thought before.




And you are so happy in your context, where else would you be?




There is a bit of water around us and I don’t know where my good pants went. I guess I didn’t forget anything but I am not doing more to remember. Our footnotes grew larger than us, stronger. Having peer review sessions on the streets. Embroidering bespoke measurements on bellies. Leaning on corners, thinking of the self in strictly fictional terms, funding the poetry. Pens never die but they do, it is a self-sorcery for amateurs. Today, we are decent enough to take turns.




You know Florencia is the only thing in this city that has no interest in being in a hurry,
or in being a curator for that matter.


There is nothing a dry cleaner can’t fix.


so
Please don’t fall in love.

I think I lost my abilities to fall in love. Everyone is so themselves and I cannot see otherwise. I even see myself as more like myself, mistaking less, dreaming less. I don’t know which is worse: this, or not being able to come when you have an erection. Maybe it was all an abusive relationship I had with myself. Getting lost in the lustful idea of being involved with someone else, so much so that the Gods grant you the freedom from your own burden of carrying yourself.

Are we in love, or in for the reward?

Still, I still feel like breakups suck. At least the ones that you had your notifications turned off for. They shouldn’t put that setting on our phones to begin with. With or without, we still click on the apps and all of us could use a bit more honesty honestly. Like this fictional friend I have that I tell everyone about. He only appears when he wants to and has never met any of my friends. In fact, I only met more people through him. He always calls in the most weird times, and I feel compelled to answer the phone because I never know when I’ll see or hear from him again. And he is honest with himself, hell, he made me agree with the fact that he was fictional, and that he would remain that way, because he knows for himself that he cannot offer more to people. Knowing your extents can sometimes be the best kind of freedom. Until someone from your past comes along, and you often feel conflicted as to whether to be inconsistent or not. Inconsistent from the image they hold of you for your own sake, or to put out a performance of who they knew for consistency’s sake?

So far, I have not figured out a more efficient way to grow as much as in these moments.

So far, I have not figured out a better role to play than a daughter. And I suck at it.

There is no trigger warning when they cut your umbilical cord, so obviously not when you leave the front door. Let’s start a logistics company.




A publishing house may make any book seem like it is an interesting read, worth the time.

I knew from a very young age that my biggest trouble would be with books, especially in my deathbed. I wasn’t a troubled kid. I was a kid who did whatever the kid was told to do.

And regardless of how packed my library would be, I knew that I would experience the biggest guilt with books before I die. I knew from a very young age that however many years were ahead of me, no lifetime would be enough to read all the books I’d want to read. This was the biggest favor I could to myself: To take off the pressure with reading, to make bookshops places of service and not of worry. To know that only the singular page ahead of me is the most important one. Otherwise, any page I’d be reading, I’d try to make it belong to all the other books I was not reading. And so I’d miss out on that very page too, the real one I’d be laying my eyes upon. Had that been the case, I would never be able to read no book at all. 

So I had to teach myself only to read the page that was open before me. All of this was essentially to not die in guilt.

And the real tragedy is that I had only taught myself to do this with books and barely with anything else in life.




Everything the writer wanted to say seems to have already been written.

(I am reading it now.)

The writer pauses the writing, thinking for good. But the writer will always come back to writing because the belief for what has not been said yet will overpower this complex. This complex of somebody else, somebodies have written what I would’ve liked to write in the exact way I would’ve liked to write that I didn’t know was available.

So the writer is having the times of silence, thinking there are all possible combinations of words out there enough the fill in all the blanks, stomachs and the lonely gaps between nighttime and daytime.

The writer resigns from producing new, forcefully interesting ideas; and instead reads, screams to her mom, takes the longer way back home by foot, goes on runs and listens the hum.

The writer just listens. With one ear.

The writer believes words are available to everyone, yet it is that which cannot be written is unfortunately not (available).

Now let’s talk about democracy.




Please come forward if you think you scared me, I want to give you a kiss on the forehead and wrap you around a white blanket, pray you, put you in my pocket, pack you in my bags, check you in at the airport desk, pray we get through, security, pray we meet again.




This is a goodbye letter. I am screaming through a cave. The secluded happiness inside the cave overbears parental disappointment, and other disappointments of other sorts. This is a goodbye letter and only I can disappoint myself. I can turn this into bright paint to smear inside the walls of the cave. Wires for electricity don’t reach there and I’ve learned to live with it. I’ve learned to pee without a bathroom. I’ve learned to call a shorter list of necessities, a decent life.

This is a goodbye letter and I’m moving back. God save the Queen and her Passport.

Big cities have blinding lights- and nature is all too silent as a model. So I would rather sit on the passenger seat of a car driving through the Aegean coast. I can put my feet or my head out the window if I want to, but not at the same time. What exactly am I allowed?




And when not only the plane but everything else lands. I demand my life jacket. looking between my legs, under the seat, I demand an emergency landing.

Then when would be the best time to potentially forget everything?




You know, I used to be a mountain. If not, I used to see them. Still, there is a chance to pile a few people up and stand on it. Though that is not what I want. I’d rather lay flat on the curves of a mountain. Pretend to be one.




ACT 1 - FIRST PERSON PASSIVE PLURAL

ACT 2 - PAST TENSE AFFIRMATIVE

ACT 3 - THE RECKONER

ACT 4 - THE TENSE BORDER, ALWAYS THE BORDER

ACT 5 - THE COMPOSER



I get my news about you from daily horoscopes. Fake news. Always check with your source. So always check with yourself.

I wish to more often not know what to say. So perhaps this is a manual not for two but one person.

This is news to me and I am struck by how, still, only, abundantly 23 I am.

According to the laws of relativity, a decent amount of things look different in Istanbul. But then again, everything looks different there.




So perhaps, I will die in guilt of some sorts, maybe that is inevitable. Though I try. I try to fall in love in places I know I will leave. Knowing that all of us will constantly be in motion, all the beautiful girls and boys I’d laid my eyes on. In full acceptance of the physical reality, the paperwork, the pyramids of priorities. I still believe in the singular page I’m holding in my hands, the singular hand that holds my hand. To move around with the knowledge that the hands and things once held are never fully lost.

Perhaps that is why when I first entertained the idea of moving countries, what daunted me the most, was how to transport my books. Because if I managed that, I knew all the others would find a way to come with me. Once all the books would be packed in boxes, I didn’t have to worry about the capacity and the dimensions and the measurements of my heart. 




In a way, this thing about books and people that came to me at a very young age, led me to writing.

I would write all the potential unread books, and about the unlived ways in which we would be together. About the before and after phases of a resting page. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about some teenage fiction here, that I would continue “unfinished” stories. But rather I would make pages after pages look like small sacks made from biodegradable material such as skin and muscles, to carry these people. I would turn each line of writing into a singular curve of an intestine so that the story as a whole would read less like a love story and more like a relieving biology book, narrating the process of our digestion system.

I figured that to be the perfect distance to hold towards your subject. Plus, no one can really physically afford a malfunctioning digestion, and perhaps this is the only cause we should all fundraise for.

To keep digesting if we want to keep eating. To fund the necessary tools to make digestion easier and more accessible for everyone. And sadly I believe writing is sometimes more concerned with what gets stuck and maintains its life in the inner membrane of our intestines. Sitting with the invisible bacteria, running experiments in your little tucked away lab that often looks like a writing desk.




I have a theory that there is no hierarchy between a runner, and a bench-sitter.




And a writer’s life does not comprise of only cigarettes and coffee, unfinished love affairs, talking about how so many books you read, parents that have never been able to understand, mild sex addiction, more coffee and more books and more cigarettes. I just made it look like one.