Recently I found this note in my 2021 diary: “Moved into this apartment five days ago, waiting for loneliness to catch up, but it hasn’t come.” I had written it in September of that year. I had just moved from Berlin to Istanbul, alone. It was meant to be a three-month stay – the plan was to return to Berlin by Christmas. But I didn’t return. It has now been more than three years and I’ve never felt more alive.
Before the move abroad, I’d lived with my partner for more than a decade. I was well acquainted with sharing life and space. Being truly alone within four walls was as new to me as my neighbourhood on the Bosphorus.
My simply furnished apartment – a sublet from a young Turkish couple I’d connected with on Instagram – had hardwood floors and French doors, and was located on the third floor of an old building designed by an Italian architect in 1911. The living room has a sage-green velvet sofa, a light-wood bookshelf half-filled with Turkish classics and poetry, and a fig tree that had one leaf when I arrived and 10 three months later. In the bedroom, a white wardrobe and a bed with a view of the Bosphorus. Off the living room, there’s a small dining room with a bay window and a blue-and-white-striped daybed from which you can see Galata Tower.
I remember squealing with joy those first mornings, bouncing around the apartment in disbelief. The view. The endless blue sky. The silence. These rooms that, suddenly, were all mine.
For years, I couldn’t have imagined life without a partner – and I think that’s true for many people. Once you’re settled in one way of living, it’s nearly impossible to imagine another. A life alone seemed as risky as hiking without a map. Surely you’d get lost.
In those first weeks, I explored the neighbourhood, wandered the streets and made the apartment my own with small additions such as a vase and colourful bowls for olives and nuts. After eight weeks, I got new bedding in my favourite shade of light pink, a sharp knife, four wine glasses, a bedside lamp and a stool for beside the bed. I rearranged things in the kitchen cabinets, moved the dining table closer to the window, visited exhibitions and pinned postcards of art I liked........