Skin Deep

Photo by Camila Quintero Franco on Unsplash

Rule number one: never act on your feelings. Rule number two: always follow rule number one. Rule number three: breaking either rule means defeat.

During my nursing studies, I interned at the largest hospital in town, and two things happened: the student who was supposed to be supervised together with me dropped out of nursing school, and I was relocated from floor two to floor three in the infection ward after several nurses fell ill during a tuberculosis outbreak.

The dean of our faculty thus had to relocate everyone who was supposed to work on floor two; some were transferred to other wards but three of us were just sent a floor up. While the two nurses-in-training – my future colleagues – were supervised by the same mentor, I was, given the urgency of the situation, put in the care of one of the senior nurses who was supposed to retire the same year the epidemic broke out.

Needless to say, the old woman despised me and everything I represented. She was callous and bitter, and she took every opportunity she could to humiliate me in front of as many people as possible for the tiniest mistakes I made.

It was during this time of my life that I almost broke rule number one. It was pure coincidence that I was relocated one floor up and met the person I wasn’t supposed to meet. Like running into an old friend after many years, I knew I had to keep my distance to follow the rules I set for myself.

But the attraction between us was visible even from miles away, despite how distant and cold we appeared outwardly, and my supervisor wasn’t about to ignore it. The more she humiliated me, the closer the link between us became, like a deflated balloon that stretched endlessly and was difficult to rip with your bare hands.

I remember when she asked me to choose two or three patients to take care of for the day, and I picked one regular patient and one who wasn’t an ‘infection patient’ but was brought to our ward due to the epidemic. For her, this choice was yet another opportunity to mock me. As I was giving a brief of our regular patient’s well-being to the assistant doctor, he gave instructions on the kinds of medicine he was going to prescribe before I could give a brief of the other patient I chose.

When he was done and I had taken my notes, my supervisor stopped him and asked: “What about the other patient?” He looked at me, who was still clueless as to why he had skipped that particular patient in question and replied: “That’s not our patient. His own doctor will arrive later this evening.” I think he knew what my supervisor tried to do. And I think that was when it… when it became difficult to follow my rules.

The entire internship continued like this for a while and I was nearing the end of it. Despite strict regulations prohibiting it, my supervisor had already contacted my clinical supervisor at my nursing school and told her about how incompetent of a nurse I was. It was kind of comical when my clinical supervisor told me this, though. The patients, the other nurses and the orderlies all praised my knowledge and skills, yet there I was – a mere student whose words went against that of a senior nurse. I was bound to lose the battle.

Her demeaning behaviour affected me in ways no words could truly capture. When I learnt I failed my internship a week before my last day on the ward, I quit and dropped out of school. That woman broke me. She truly did. But it wasn’t just her – it was him too.

I hated the way I felt about him. We hardly spoke yet my walls seemed to have given in to him already. The day I quit, I went back home and decided to leave everything behind and survive this wicked world, no matter what. That was how my writing career started.

With the passing years, not only did I manage to close off my heart again, but also my mind to other people. Like a hermit living in the jagged mountains, I lived a life of enclosure and solitude. Living like this had its setbacks, of course.

There was increased pressure on my shoulders from all around, urging me to step into the spotlight and narrate my stories, my inspirations, and my aspirations in my own voice. I never accepted an award show invitation in my youth, never showed my face, and never took advantage of my position as a best-selling author, either.

That is, until I turned 54 and received an email from one of the leading magazines in the Western Hemisphere. I recognised the name of the sender, or rather, the surname I thought I had forgotten. How could I ever?

A photo of a young woman in her mid-twenties appeared in the search results as I typed her name. Goodwin. Lara Goodwin. An LGBTQ+ journalist who graduated from Harvard University with a law degree. Although the surname itself wasn’t uncommon, something in her face warmed my heart. Was it her emerald eyes, her rosy lips, or her straight, light brown hair? Or was it the shape of her face, the way her intelligent eyes seemed to seal all the secrets of the world or the way she talked?

Yet… deep down, I knew why.

Perhaps this insight, this resemblance, was what tore me apart as I noticed that she was raised by two men – her fathers. At that moment, when I realised the gravity of my belated discovery, a flood of memories washed over me.

How was this possible? As I sifted through distant memories, trying to make sense of my past and my present, all I could remember was a man in love with a woman. I knew this was the case even if I lacked the words to describe it. So how…? Had I been deceived, could my memories have been betraying me all this time—no, that couldn’t be the case!

But if that were truly the case, then how could I explain this newfound insight about the man I thought loved me? The answer came to me two years later one wintry evening when I least expected it.

The man who had almost broken me had transitioned. But it wasn’t just his body that changed – his face did too. It was like looking at a distorted mirror of my past self – of my youth – at a time when I was the most beautiful.

Then it dawned on me.

I wasn’t the one she was in love with. She was in love with my face, this feminine visage that was everything she ever wanted to see on her former face.

This happened during the 80s, mind you, when transitioning wasn’t as readily accepted at that age and time. I couldn’t help but wonder: had I given in to my feelings back then, would she have ripped my skin and put it on her own? Perhaps I knew this was the case, this was why I kept my distance all along. After all, I was so in love, so madly in love, that I’d offer not only my hollow heart but also my face to her.

Stocking

Photo by Hu Chen on Unsplash

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.