Your Grace - Burak Çelik

CHAPTER 36

Weeks passed, and began to turn into months. The season finale of Kurulus Osman: Season 2 was nearing, and the cast and crew were working as hard as ever. Ayedah was putting her all into her work and effort, despite the increasingly low motivation she had. She had not only to supervise the actors' training and filming hours, but also had to start working on the plot for Season 3 along with the other screenwriters.

The event of what had happened between her, her younger brother and cousin had her mind trapped in an endless loop of regret and self-loathing that she had desperately tried to shut in a box, way before they had reappeared in her life. Her ultimate goal was to leave her past behind when she stepped foot onto Turkish territory, and moved to Istanbul to live with her aunt. True, it had been difficult for her to get out of her old habits of keeping herself in a shell, not socializing the way most would and forbidding herself from taking risks, but she had managed- especially after she started working with Mehmet Bozdag, his wife and the others for the plot and script of Kurulus Osman.

The job had changed her life immensely, and Ayedah had finally brought herself out into the light after so many years of keeping herself in the dark, walls up to protect herself from failure and getting hurt. Yet she had realized that perhaps it was worth taking risks and even failing, as long as she had tried. She had learnt so many values, principles and even basic life skills from a few months on set and barely two years in Turkey than she did all the years she lived with her family in London, since she was born.

However, Aarif and Reema's shenanigan planned by their family had triggered a sequence of emotional turbulence in her system that had not taken place for a very long time, and she found that she would get tired out more frequently with each day that passed. Despite the fact that she had thrown away her medication, she discovered that she was feeling the same thing. No real change in her emotions had taken place, and she would have the same mechanical routine when she would wake up in the morning and go to work.

Although the idea of her getting up to face the day despite what she was feeling was a brave idea, there was the addition that she was simply keeping all the feelings in- in fact, she was denying them completely; and it was beginning to take its effect on her too, just as the actual event did. And as much as she tried to pretend that she was alright, it grew clear that she was far from, in many ways- toward the beginning of it all, after that day she simply got up for work, Ozge would often have her over at her apartment to stay with her just to spend time together. But Ayedah began to deny her requests more and more as time went on. She even began to shut her aunt out, and would not even spend much time with her- when she would return from set, she would often confine herself to her room to force herself to work. She knew well that it was only exhausting her further, but she did not stop to think about that- all she wanted was a distraction from the pain and shock that still had her numb.

Even on set, it was obvious that Ayedah was different; she would no longer have the excited or interested expression on her face when she was working, nor would she be hanging around or spending time with the cast and crew members during lunch or tea. She would almost immediately go back home after she was finished with her work, and otherwise she would stay confined to either the writers' workroom or Ozge's trailer. Burak Ozcivit, Yigit Ucan, Emel Dede, Buse Arslan and the rest all frequently asked Ozge and Burak Celik what was going on with Ayedah, for they were all concerned about her wellbeing- yet both Burak and Ozge knew it was not their place to tell.

As for Ozge and Aunt Gab, the two grew afraid that what Aarif and Reema did along with their family may have her retract back into her old shell, the one that she found so difficult to leave before, or perhaps something worse. They began to recognize old traits from before she lived in Istanbul reappearing, such as shutting everyone out, and not even hearing people when they would address her, until they had to raise their voice so she could answer them. What was worse, they had recognized a new trait that alarmed them- she had stopped smiling, or rarely did. Even when she was living under the roof of her controlling, toxic family, she would smile, real or fake- it was an automatic mechanism in her facial muscles that she had made a habit to keep herself going. But what happened looked as if it had tired out that part of her too.