FINDING SHELTER IN LOVE

After her escape, Alisa returned to a life that was supposed to be safe.

It wasn’t.

After the war, our father tried to protect us, feed us, and keep us alive. Something in him broke. He never admitted it, but I knew.

He loved our mother deeply. Still, alcohol slowly took control of him.

My father could never accept that Alisa had married him in the first place. He told her again and again,

“A wolf may change its hair, but never its character.”

Our father drank every day.

His words were sharp and cruel, and they often drove her to tears.

During his drunkenness, my father attacked Alisa with words.

“I told you who he was.”

“You wanted him.”

“You got him.”

He said these things in front of her child.

She told me she could not carry the burden anymore.

After everything she endured, Alisa’s body survived, but her mind carried wounds that never closed.

The past haunted her.

The present crushed her.

One night, our mother found her lying on the floor in a pool of blood. She had tried to cut her veins—more than once.

My nephew saw everything. He heard everything. Trauma does not wait until adulthood to begin its work.

He remembers sitting in the car at the cemetery, watching his father beat his mother. He remembers fear as something normal.

Childhood does not forget.

She suffered deeply.

So did her child.

After her second attempt, Zerin saved them.

He took them out of that house.

She was hospitalized in a psychiatric institution. It was there, during her second stay, that Zerin asked her to live with him as his wife.

It was unexpected. Unusual. But something had grown between them in the shared language of pain.

Through her suffering, he fell in love.

She said yes.

In the silence of her sorrow, he became her voice.

In the storm of her pain, he became her shelter.

Zerin was not just the man she loved.

He was her rescue.

Her comfort.

Proof that light could still exist, even after everything.

They lived together for eight years.

Not long ago, he said to me,

“It was beautiful being with her, but that curse was always hanging over us.”

Today, I thank him.

I thank him for loving her when loving her was not easy. I thank him for protecting her when fear followed her everywhere. I thank him for giving her eight years of gentleness after a life filled with cruelty.

Those years mattered.