One Island, Two Stories: 1900+ Days in Cyprus

Some moves are not a matter of going from one place to another.

Sometimes a person packs a suitcase, crosses into another country, and does not leave most of a life behind. The house, the belongings, the habits, the plans, even the possibility of going back one day — all of it travels with them. And sometimes none of that can really be taken along. It stays behind, and the new life begins under the impression that it is temporary.

Our Cyprus story began roughly like that.

When we left Türkiye for Northern Cyprus, we did not know it would make up such a long stretch of our lives. Looking back now, I can see that the time we’ve spent on the island isn’t just a few years of living somewhere. It became a kind of in-between life.

We couldn’t fully break from the Türkiye we left behind, and we couldn’t live in Cyprus as though it were only a stop along the way.

We stayed somewhere in between.

Like Cyprus itself.

This island is in between too. It doesn’t fully belong to either of the places it sits near, and it can’t quite stand on its own. People have built lives here, built routines, and crossing to the other side of the line is still an event. The island has been living an in-between life for far longer than I have.

What I have observed and read while living here brings me to this: at the root of the divided structure we have today lie choices made by the British administration that governed the island, choices that deepened the separation between the two communities. I’m not offering that as the single cause; an island doesn’t reach this state by one hand alone. But I find it hard to believe that ordinary people, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots alike, built that separation on their own.

A community does not choose to be left in between. It is left there.

And us? Did we choose?

Part of the answer is sitting in a storage unit in Türkiye.

What’s in storage

Our sofas, our bed, our wardrobes. We chose them at the time, liked them, bought them gladly, and found ourselves here before we’d got enough use out of them.

When we put them there we thought it was a temporary solution. One day we’d go back, take them out, set up a home again. Years have passed and they’re still there.

On paper the arithmetic is simple: close the unit, sell it all, be done. But the day we sell them we won’t only have sold furniture; we’ll have parted with a piece of the possibility of returning. Closing the unit is a relief. Selling the contents stings. The gap between those two shows that this was never about the rent on a storage unit.

So we didn’t decide. We chose to postpone, and postponement, drawn out long enough, turned into a decision of its own.

The island being left in between wasn’t a choice. I’m no longer sure mine was either.

Two things can be true at once

The years spent in Cyprus are not outside our lives. We worked here, made a home, got our dogs, I made music, I wrote a book. Calling them “the years spent away from Türkiye” would be unfair to them.

But the longing for Türkiye went on living inside those same years.

Both are true at once. A person can love one place and miss another. They can build a life somewhere and feel they belong somewhere else. I suppose that’s one of the harder parts of adult life: not always being able to belong to a single right place.

Our question is no longer “will we go back?” It’s “under what conditions will we be able to?”

I don’t know the answer. But there is something particular about asking that question on an island that is itself in between.