I hated washing my hands when I was in middle school. I dreaded each time my nanny dragged me to the bathroom as soon as I took off my shoes. She looked over my shoulder while I washed my tiny hands stained in pencil lead because I was not to be trusted with my school-borne filth.
“See,” she would say. “See all the dirty water flowing down the drain?” And sometimes she would be right.
I was the messy nerd who sat in the front row with a pile of books next to her, arranged by her daily schedule — but sometimes by size because math books, as you know, are always a bit heavier. I took down notes so rigorously that first my ring finger (for a while, I did not hold a pencil correctly), and then my middle finger grew a bump where the pencil met my flesh. And then I always accidentally pressed my hands into my notebook which, by the end of the school day, left a gray stain spanning from my dirty fingers to the sides of my hand. Sometimes I forgot and scratched my nose in the midst of an exam, and also left a mark on the tip of my nose.
Kids in the back of the class, well, they didn’t really have that problem. In 6th grade, there was a boy who kept on screaming “Iraqi militants!,” purposefully enunciating the word “Iraqi” as “yarrak” which means “cock” in Turkish. I had to be in high school to get that joke. And of course, I’ll never forget the girl who loved to shout “We’re on fire!”. We never were.
As the year progressed, however, the dissidence grew into a movement. A group of people, including my studious best friend, decided to make a mosquito-meets-crashing-plane noise in the middle of Turkish literature class. They drove the teacher, who loved to lecture us about meditation and how her former rock star husband had out-of-body experiences, insane.
I caved, but only once. The teacher didn’t like to stare at students who sounded like relentless mosquitos on a summer night so whenever she had to make eye contact, she looked at me. I was too scared to join the crowd but one day, while I was listening to her, I had a feeling. A spark of rebellion. I placed my finger behind my right ear and slowly started pushing down on my glasses. I did it once. Then twice. And soon, I was wiggling my glasses while keeping up my attentive face. I will never forget her confusion. Et tu, Brute?
“You have always been bad at washing your hands, Deniz,” my mom told me recently, without any empirical evidence. I am actually quite good at keeping my hands clean. If you don’t believe me, you can touch them. My skin is basically sandpaper now. It is actually so clean that I probably need to go to a pharmacy tomorrow — for which I’ll risk my entire livelihood — because I may have inherited my dad’s eczema that can’t stand all the Clorox wipes I hold. Yet I know. No sacrifice will be good enough. No one is going to believe that the times I washed my hands for solely 10 seconds are behind me, because I, as I listen to Hillary Duff, cannot believe that those days are behind me.
I live right above a subway station in New York City, which has the most calming effect to this girl who grew up right next to a train station in Istanbul. The hiss of a train was a lullaby to me as a baby, and as much as my inner Holden Caufield would disagree, the baby in me is not dead yet. When nobody’s outside and it’s 3 a.m. in Fort Greene — the virus keeps me up at night, I hear the doors of the train open, and somehow, I feel as if I’m home although I am only half way there. But whenever I think I’m home, I’m always half way there.
The subway slides underneath my feet and shakes my floor, especially the express A when I’m sitting on my toilet, and somehow, I think everything’s going to be okay because there’s this one thing that hasn’t changed in my entire life. Trains always come and go, and we are still around. Someone still goes on the train, someone still gets off. I’m still alive.
I don’t know what I’ll do when we stop doing that. Going on trains, I mean. How will I tell myself that everything’s fine when there are no trains? I don’t know yet, but I try to take it one day at a time. I’ve already gotten used to not leaving my apartment or watching the most cathartic Turkish show ever to go to sleep. Every night, around 1 a.m., I start watching a show about three people with OCD walking into the most disgusting apartment you’ll ever see, finding rotten food in the kitchen, moving a couch only to find a moldy shirt, and using a Dyson vacuum cleaner to wipe out all the dust. Now that I’m thinking about it, the whole show is probably a Dyson ad but I don’t think I care. I’ve slowly acknowledged that these are weird times, tough times, lonely times, and I’m allowed to indulge myself because no one else will.
“I was already in a depressed state of mind,” a friend told me over the phone, five days into my self-isolation. “Now, the whole world is depressed.” I hadn’t talked to him in a while but as much as the virus has come with traumas, it has also brought old friends back into my life. Some people wonder how I am, and it surprises me. Some even make sure I am up and running. I owe it to them so I try to say sane and make dumb decisions such as paying $20 for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker on Amazon or buying a Kindle (I guess I’m making Jeff Bezos richer by being quarantined), or buying $50 shampoos from Kiehl’s, or wondering which ex I was in love with because I forgot. My mind undulates between the idea that the isolation will never end and that I can’t wait to have kids once this is done. I’ll probably just get a dog.
I joke about things, it’s in my nature, and yet, they still hurt. I go on group video chats and all the tiny frames have two people in them, and on the other end it’s just me. It’s not that I’m craving for a boyfriend but I wish my parents were here. I wouldn’t have said no to that. But it’s okay, I eventually tell myself. This is how I learn to be alone, more. Nine years of living alone, I see solitude is a lifelong lesson to learn.
Three months ago, I lost my grandfather. A week before he died, he told my parents and me that he had cold chills. Six days later, he woke up and told my grandma he couldn’t breathe. Once he died about 12 hours later, the doctors told my dad that they had been seeing this “weirdly progressing pneumonia” amongst older patients this year. Who knows? They said. Fate. Or as we say it, it was written on his forehead. It could have never been erased.
But yesterday, my mom and I wondered if my grandpa had the coronavirus. Months of thinking that maybe I ignored him when he said he had chills, and that maybe I could have saved him, I gave up. My $80 FaceTime therapy sessions with my psychiatrist in Turkey finally hit me. I took a step back and I said: There are things I cannot control.
I’m a tad hopeless, but by knowing that, I hope I can be a bit powerful.
Fort Greene, March 2020
