"I see a red door and I want it painted black…"
There’s a moment in the Stones’ Paint It Black that lingers after the final note fades—a recognition that grief doesn’t just hollow us. It stains. It saturates the world until even beauty feels like an affront. I tried to carry that feeling into The Sitarist’s Requiem, a story born of smoke, memory, and the kind of desire that doesn’t comfort—it cuts.
Set in 1960s Istanbul, this is the story of Emre, a man adrift in mourning, and Leyla, the sitarist whose music doesn’t offer healing, but something far more dangerous: a reckoning. What begins as seduction unfolds into revelation. Leyla is no passive muse. She is the orchestrator of the night, the composer of her own ritual. Her music is a blade, her body an altar, and her grief is as finely tuned as the strings she plays.
I like women who command the terms of their own mythology. Leyla doesn’t wait to be saved. She chooses. She hunts. She dares Emre, saying "Drown in me—it’s the only way you’ll breathe again".
And in that, we reach what I think of as the violence of beauty. Beauty that doesn’t soften or soothe—but wounds. Beauty that demands something from you. That strips you bare. That doesn’t ask permission before it enters and rearranges you. Leyla embodies that kind of beauty. So does grief. So does love, at its most ruinous.
The Sitarist’s Requiem isn’t a romance, although I could have written it that way. It’s a requiem. For the dead, for the past, and for the man who thought he could carry both without consequence.
The story is live now.
-Eric