The Applicant

It’s exhausting to be alone in Berlin, faking oneself to your family back home and another to the people around you. But she will make it work. We all do.

(Mona was my best friend—until one day she left the country without saying a word. I only found out she was gone later, once she settled into her new life in LA, as if we had been no more than two acquaintances, friends of friends.) (I guess that’s exactly what we were. I was a friend of one of Mona’s many invented selves, as she was mine.)

Berlin was going to be different. If there was anything I’d heard more about this city than its unmatched freedoms, it was that anyone could afford a decent life here on a part-time job’s salary. Universities were free for everyone. I’d enrolled in a master’s program for the visa and found a student job in my first week. I moved into a shared Altba

When I asked her why she lied, she shrugged; it was an old habit. “I usually don’t talk to anyone long enough to feel like I owe them the truth,” she said.

I came here to write. I’d known I wanted to be a writer before I knew how to read, but after college, I found myself only writing copy for advertising agencies that sucked all creativity out of me. Life was so expensive and politics so erratic in Turkey that all of my attempts at literary writing were shut down for one reason or another, each time

Or maybe I don’t want anyone to tell me everything will be okay in the language of my childhood because my childhood room is where I learned that nothing in this world would ever be okay.

Who wouldn’t have believed it? Mona had even written it on the street once, right by the entrance of Görlitzer Park. She’d spray-painted a birthday cake and written “happy birthday leyla! berlin loves you!” under it.

After I told Mia the whole story, I realized that I hadn’t told Ali any of it. Partly because he talked rather than listened but mostly, and undeniably, because it’s much more difficult to talk about failure in Turkish. It triples the pain, the shame, the drama of real life to think in that language. Because I lost everything I had in Turkish. Beca

She told me that most cleaners at the hostel were artists and often collaborated on projects. But when I told her I was a writer, she didn’t bother to ask what kind. Was it because I wasn’t dressed like a Berlin artist (my pants were black but my T-shirt was white) (and I don’t own any combat boots) or could she tell from my eyes that I haven’t wri