A daughter reflects on her father’s quiet unraveling, her mother’s silence, and the blurry space where memory, love, and madness coexist.

Sometimes, truth isn’t what happened, but how reality felt.

—

“What’s your crazy father up to these days?” she asked.
Trying not to show my irritation, I said, “Nothing. He retired, moved to the village.”

My father.
I hadn’t thought about him in a long time.

When he moved to the village five years ago, he retired from madness, too.
A person is only mad when surrounded by others.
You can’t be mad in a village.

My memories of childhood are fragmented.
I can’t tell what’s real and what I’ve imagined.
Some days, my memories change color, shift places — time and space bend.

Aunt Gülben is visiting; my mom and dad are sitting on the balcony.
I’m holding my violin.

“Elif plays beautifully,” my mom says.
“Go on, sweetheart, don’t be shy — play something.”

There’s a familiar glint in my father’s eyes — his pupils wide and gleaming.
On his head, a magician’s hat.

I play something I learned at school.
The notes aren’t clean, my A strings screech.
When I finish, everyone claps.

My father pulls me aside.
He points at the stars in the sky.
He whispers:
“If you play beautifully enough, the stars will leap from the sky and fall into my hat.”

I feel myself being pulled into the pupils of his eyes.
“Stars don’t fall into hats,” I say.
“They do.”

He smiles like it’s our secret.

Later, I asked my mother where the hat was.
“What hat, Elif?”
“You know — the one he always wore. Black, shiny, cylinder-shaped.”
“Elif, don’t be ridiculous. Your father never wore a hat.”

Some days, my father wouldn’t leave his room.
Sometimes for weeks, he wouldn’t go to work.
I remember my mother pleading with him, crying.
I used to drown out the sounds with the ones in my head.

Some nights, he’d quietly come into my room and kiss me.
His cheeks would be wet.
I’d pretend to be asleep.
He’d whisper advice in languages I didn’t understand.

When I was studying for university entrance exams, I was grown up by then.
I knew how life worked:
Study for exams, go to work, be polite, be a good friend, a decent neighbor.

Everyone said my father was mad.
I knew it now too.
My father was mad.

That year — when I was studying for those exams — I think he had really lost it.
He’d pace back and forth in the living room, muttering to himself like a caged animal.
I was deep in gravitational force, absolute value, rational numbers…

And suddenly, he burst into my room.
“Elif! Elif!” His eyes were full of tears.
“You’re an angel!”

I was checking my answers: A, A, B, D, E, A.
I didn’t even look up at him.
D, E, E, B.

I couldn’t take it anymore.
Not his behavior.
Not him.
I was exhausted from being ashamed.

Sometimes, I found myself wishing he would just die.

I hated myself.
I hated him.
I hated my mother for never doing anything.

“The pictures on the wall told me you’re an angel, Elif.”
“Dad, pictures don’t talk.”
“Of course they talk.
They told me.
They said so.
They spoke.”

“Dad, stop. Just stop!”

I stormed out of my room.
One by one, I threw every picture in the living room to the floor.

I think he was crying.
Screaming.
Everyone was screaming.

Glass from the frames bounced off the floor, catching the light.
Turning into stars.

The stars spilled into my hands.
My hands were bleeding.

He screamed like I was killing him.

I was crying.

My mom rushed in, crying too.

The pictures were crying.

Then the neighbors came.
“Sorry about the noise,” my mom said.
“My husband’s not doing well.”

They left.

And the three of us sat, each in a separate corner of the living room.
Frozen.

Same room.
So far apart.

The whispers roared through the neighborhood:
“He’s completely lost it. Keeps waking the neighbors at night.”

Now my mother’s dead.
My father’s in the village.
And I’ve grown up.

When I leave the house and wait for the bus…
When strangers say, “The weather’s turned, hasn’t it?”
When I sit in the same stuffy office every day, clicking away at my keyboard for a promotion…
When I stare at the same Excel table again, and again, and again…
When Istanbul’s cars swirl like a vortex and swallow me whole…
When I can’t see the stars anymore because of the light pollution…

Rational numbers, irrational numbers, physics, math, all the rules —
they bring me to places I can’t untangle.

Was my father the mad one?

Or was it everyone else in Istanbul except him?

What’s he doing now in the village?

Am I still an angel?

I try not to think about my father too much.
I try not to think about any of this too much.
So I don’t go mad.

I looked into the mirror — the one who’d asked me, “What’s your crazy father up to these days?”
Her pupils were huge.
And on her head… my father’s magician hat.

So that’s where the hat had been all these years.

I knew I hadn’t imagined it.

I washed my hands.
Turned off the lights.
Went to bed.

“Good night,” said the pictures on my wall.
“Good night,” I said.