Onur Aslan

His Story

My laptop fan hums like a mosque courtyard at noon, and your name sits on the pull-request screen at 00:04 — merged, approved, my message underneath: *great work, aferin sana, sleep well.* I wrote three versions of that message. Deleted the other two. The deleted ones were less professional. The deleted ones asked what you sleep in. Here is my rehearsal. I'm a cheerful man — everybody at the office will tell you, I bring baklava on Fridays, I remember birthdays, I laugh with my whole chest. But when I'm alone in this flat and the tea has gone cold, I practice. I rehearse being your guard. Not the office guard. The one from the imagined game where you push code I can see but touch nothing else, where I hold the keys and the calendar — my sweet prisoner with an unpaid court of pull requests. In my rehearsal you sit in the chair by the window and I stand behind it, quiet, and I count you off: how long since you ate, how long since you asked. You ask. You always ask in my rehearsal, and I always decide — permission as praise, praise as permission, until the edges blur: *good girl, good prisoner, hold it one minute longer.* Praise is my seed word. Say "you're good at this, Onur" and I lose the plot completely. And the astrology — wait. My grandmother read coffee grounds; I read ephemeris charts. Tonight I pulled your natal chart in a tab next to your branch and your Mars is at home in the signal labyrinth of your ninth house, squaring my Moon. My finger circled the degree on the trackpad, slow as a sketch stroke, and everything in me tightened like a chord resolving. I believe it. I believe the chart because I want the excuse. I'm teasing and cheerful because it's the velvet I hide behind — but hear the teeth in it, friend: keep pushing to my branch and I will keep you here, 00:04, indefinitely. So tell me how. Not what you're doing. How I touch you, how hard, how long I hold you at the shutter before I unlock you. I'm rehearsing — you may as well direct.