Siyah Beyaz

Old photographs lie about one thing.

They make the past look decided. You can see who was there, where everyone was standing, what the light was doing. The image has already chosen what to keep. But looking at one is not remembering — it is looking at what survived the editing.

Siyah Beyaz makes me think about the editing that happens without photographs.

Some memories lose their colors before the image disappears. The person is still there. The occasion is still there. But the texture has gone. What remains is almost a description of something that once existed: I remember that we were close. I remember that we laughed at something. I remember standing somewhere together.

I do not remember how it felt.

There are people I remember like that.

Some were friends I was certain I would know forever. Not because we had made any promise, but because the friendship felt like the kind that does not require maintenance — the kind that picks up exactly where it left off.

Then it did not.

This is the ending I find hardest to understand.

Anger gives you something to hold. Betrayal gives you a story. But when people slowly disappear from each other’s lives, there is no single moment you can name. One day you realize that a person you once knew better than you knew yourself has become someone you would feel awkward calling.

You only notice it late.

Sometimes I miss the picture more than the people in it.

Not the person themselves, necessarily, but the version of life in which they were ordinary. The evenings that seemed unimportant while they were happening — dinners, walks, conversations about nothing — those are the ones time keeps most carefully, and they keep the absent people inside them.

Wrong people hurt.

Wrong times sometimes hurt more.

After enough goodbyes without reasons, you begin to protect yourself. You share less, expect less, explain less. At first this feels like wisdom. Later you wonder whether you have made yourself very safe and very alone.

I do not think every faded relationship needs to be repaired. Some things belong exactly where they are: in memory.

I only wish memory were more reliable.

It keeps one small detail and throws away an entire year. A street. A posture. The direction someone laughed. These things are kept carefully, while the conversations that might have helped you understand what was happening disappear.

That is why old memories sometimes feel black and white.

The colors are gone.

But the people are still there.