I’ve worked as an investigative journalist for over thirty years. It wasn’t a dream job, but it paid the bills. My old man was an editor at a national magazine and I was his only son. He wanted me to follow in his steps and succeed him. But I wasn’t cut out for that shit.
When he passed away, I thought I was finally free. This tiring job, however, had already become a part of me by then. I couldn’t just leave a promising career behind and start anew somewhere else. Everything I built up to that point would just go down the drain.
I couldn’t afford that. So I kept doing this shitty job and put up with it.
Over the years, I saw my fair share of disturbing things. Now and then, a case would pop up and keep me awake for days. But I always found a way to cope. Whether it was drinking myself to oblivion or getting high enough to forget my bloody name.
It was these messed-up cases that ended my relationship with my fiancée. Honestly, I should’ve seen it coming.
Claire worked at a pub when I first met her. She was a medical student in her last term. A mutual friend, let’s call him Jack, introduced me to her.
I wouldn’t say she was particularly pretty, but there was something about her that intrigued me. We met up a few times without Jack and the rest is history. I liked the way she made me feel and the way she looked into my eyes when we chatted. Oh god, I really missed her.
One case, especially, was the nail in the coffin of our strained relationship. After that incident, she had enough. I had enough. I became a mess. I couldn’t even blame her. It was my fault.
I shouldn’t have let that case take up so much time in my head. But I couldn’t control it. Something about that case was beyond disturbing. It was painful. Even for an outsider like me, it was fucking painful. I never recovered from it.
I still have these stupid dreams and I… I didn’t even know what to do. Maybe somebody would understand if I recounted exactly what happened. This might be the last time anybody will hear from me.
Kamil Alparslan. A 13-year-old boy from an immigrant household. Both of his parents emigrated from Turkey during the 1980s. His father worked as an industry worker at a local factory, while his mother was a housewife.
On the morning of July 24th, 2013, the factory blew up due to an error, causing the death of 176 workers – the majority of them foreigners who sold themselves cheap.
The fatal error could’ve been detected in time had the CEO, Mr Cooper, followed protocol and listened to the workers. Despite several anomaly reports sent weeks before the incident occurred, no one did a thing.
Also, due to the workers’ immigrant background and illegal settlement in the country, only a few of the deceased’s families received compensation. The entire incident was swept under the rug.
Kamil and his mother moved back to Turkey after the accident. They lived in the countryside with his maternal grandmother and uncle.
His mother did not remarry. She toiled away in the fields, breaking up the soil to ensure a bountiful harvest. His uncle was a husbandry worker, who raised and took care of other people’s livestock.
Things were looking up for a bit. But the string of tragedies that followed them did not end there.
I was visiting their village for an entirely different reason. My good friend, Emre Kaya’s remains were scheduled to be buried in the village he was born at – or what remained of it, that is.
Claire and I had a huge fight the week before I departed. I told her I had to cancel our wedding dress appointment and travel to Turkey for the funeral. I knew what I was getting myself into, but I thought I could patch things up.
Emre was a good friend and an even better colleague. When he lost his life in Gaza back in May 2024, it took us a year and a half to retrieve his remains. His family was devastated. He left two daughters and a wife behind in order to secure footage for us at a place heavily censored in the mainstream media.
I wasn’t the only one who attended his funeral to honour him, though. Our entire team did. We owed him that much. He was a brave soul – a good man with a good head on his shoulders.
The incident that shook me happened on the day of the funeral. After bidding farewell to my friend for the final time, a commotion broke out.
This kid, let’s call him Murat for privacy reasons, interrupted the funeral during the janaza prayer. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I picked up some words I learnt from Emre.
The word that struck me the most was öldü – ‘dead’. Someone was dead. The kid wasn’t referring to my friend, though.
The locals followed the kid and my team trailed close behind them to the other side of the village to a wilted pasture, which was used for livestock grazing in its former days.
There, at the centre of the yellow pasture, a boy hung from an oak tree. Damy and Elijah, two of our camera operators, filmed the entire thing as the locals cut the kid free from the women’s stocking around his broken throat.
What was bizarre and what eventually stuck with me from this case for years, was the way he was dressed. Women’s clothes. From the stocking that squeezed the life out of him to the emerald tulle dress that reached his knees and subtly danced to the wintry high winds.
His rigid face was peaceful and at peace, as if he were sleeping, though. Like a princess, I thought. Forever young. His name was Kamil Alparslan.
I will never forget that name.
His story ended much earlier than it should have. Growing up in a traditional Turkish family in the country, his family expected him to work in the fields and take over the husbandry business.
But Kamil was different. He liked to listen to pop music and doll himself up with his mother’s dresses and makeup when she wasn’t around.
Of feminine nature, painfully visibly so, many villagers, albeit outwardly religious and against homosexuality, took advantage of his inherent nature to embrace his femininity.
A child prostitute, he sold his underdeveloped body to get acceptance from the society that shunned people like him. He didn’t know right from wrong. He just wanted to be himself, to find comfort in the fact that someone other than himself perceived him as the woman he felt like within.
When the words of his sodomy reached his uncle’s ears, the imam of the local mosque, he knew he had to make a choice. Either hide behind a mask forever or seek help from the only person he could trust – his mother.
He chose the latter. It was a mistake.
Kamil was the only thing left from her deceased husband. He was the only thing that kept her slaving through the day despite everything. When he reached out to her, begging for her to be his haven, her older brother convinced her to rid their family of this shame.
To save face and restore their honour, they smothered him in his sleep and put him in the most beautiful dress, and then hanged him with the things he loved the most.
His mother stayed with him until his eyes rolled backwards and his throat cracked. Not once did she tear her bloodshot eyes away from him as the poor thing smiled through the pain to comfort her, to assure her it was okay – what she did to him.
When everything was over, she clung to his naked legs and kissed him. If she didn’t put an end to it now, in her own way, as gently as possible, she thought he’d live a wretched existence in a community full of hypocrites, who shunned sodomites but took advantage of them still the same.
This was the least she could do for her beloved daughter, whom she watched grow into the beautiful woman she was and would forever be. Forever young. Forever beautiful. Forever lost in time.
There, in a sea of wilted grass, dancing subtly to the whistling wind, Kamil wore a serene smile as the stocking she cherished took her life time and again. Forever young. Forever beautiful. Forever lost in time.
But never forgotten.
