What You Do With the Power

Day ninety-five, Turkey. The symptoms are finally going. There is still honey in my head, but the worst is behind me.

I have been at Seher Odabaşı's place for almost four weeks. I met her in Montenegro at the Namaste, where our subject was psychology: relationships, and the patterns people run without noticing.

Mine is that I make myself smaller. I have done it since I was a child, and it has reliably pulled dominant people into my life. Seher points this out to me in the way a doctor points at an X-ray.

„You can tell what someone is by whether they abuse the power you give them,“ she says.

Then her friends come round. Mazlum, Bedi, Ersan, Tuba. Every time, the hospitality here catches me out. I am getting used to the fact that a stranger will hold the door when you are standing at it with both arms full of shopping, and that this is simply what happens and nobody thinks about it afterwards.

Everything the friends bring belongs to everyone the moment it comes through the door.

I spent four weeks ill in the flat of a woman I had met once. I keep turning that over.