The Memory Terrace.

  

I remember the smell of firewood, the smoke curling through the air like ghosts. I remember the sour stench that always came with the bleating of goats.

Mama's house was a crumbling three-story building. Every crack was filled with memories; every chip in the wall whispered stories older than me. It was big but tired, like a body that had lived too many lives. I used to think old houses were for old people, which is why I never understood why uncle refused to leave.

The staircase clung to the house’s side, wedged between the fence like a secret. The living room always looked half-dead—like it fed on darkness, yet cried to the windows to widen and begged the light to stay. At the far corner of the room was another staircase sloping upward, like a crooked spine that led to the end.

The terrace was where it all began. Where I lost my pencils, my glasses and my memory.

From up there, I could see everything: the water factory puffing on the right, the neighbors hanging dyed wrappers like flags, the narrow road that led away from the house with a skin caked with black mud. Chickens paraded across it, their feet clad in what I once believed were fashionable Ankara anklets. 

I remember dancing around potholes, tightroping the gutters, picking soda caps and trading them like rare currency—for bottles, sticks, doll parts, and sometimes, silence.

The food made my nose run, throat burn, eyes water. But I always wanted more. I wanted more of everything. And Mama fed me like I hadn't eaten in days. I would drink so much water I could hear it sloshing in my belly when I walked.

I played hide and seek with children whose names I never learned, whose faces faded before I could memorize them. Sometimes I hid. Sometimes I sought. But every time, something remained hidden, and that something always made me sick.

Mama always knew. She would ask, her voice all honey and ache, 

“Is something making you sick dear?”

I’d shrug and tell her I don't know. 

But I did. I knew. 

I remember losing my favorite doll. Her name was Joy. She had this fixed, thin-lipped smile and wide plastic eyes. She was designed to be happy. No matter how hard she fell, no matter how torn she became, no matter how much of her she lost, she always smiled. She was proof that some things are built to pretend.

Eventually, I stopped wanting to go to Mama’s house, not because she passed, but because something else was buried with her.

I got older. We stopped visiting the house. The light never got in.

I became quieter, different.

And when my therapist asks what happened in the room on the terrace, I say,

“I don’t remember.”

But the terrace does.