In a time of such omnipresent crises and hardships, it hits even harder when one lands on one’s own doorstep. Help is spread so thin that one struggles all the more with all or most of the burden on oneself. There is little to do but soldier on for miracles.
So it is, those for whom a friend or loved one has gone missing, with such a unique emergency and tragedy as that. But there is at least the clarity and the certainty of the emergency: the lost person is someone outside of oneself and they must be searched for.
But that basic calculus is turned on its head when the person who is missing, and the person who you must find, is you yourself. There would be some sense of how to go about it when you are lost in an emotional sense, but what about in a physical?
Beyhan Mutlu, 51 years of age, had gone out drinking on this past Tuesday night with a friend in the town of Inegol, which lies in the region of northwest Turkey. He did not return home, and when she learned that he had become separated from his friend while drunk, his wife feared the worst and reported him missing to the authorities.
At this stage the emergency was entirely prosaic, with nothing quite as natural as an inebriated and disoriented man becoming lost and being in no condition to reunite with those who lost him either by reaching their location or by reporting his own. It could only be hoped by his worrying wife that he could indeed be found, and in good condition. Each passing minute must further exacerbate the all too commonplace stress.
Mutlu, for his part, had found a house in the nearby woods while drunk, and chose it as a location to go to sleep and ride out his intoxicated condition. Of course, being drunk, it would not have occurred to him that going to sleep in mysterious, unoccupied cabins out in the dark woods is the inciting incident of all too many grisly fairy tales, but then given how the story was to develop it was a choice that was perhaps par for the course.
Little knowing the concern that his absence had aroused while he no doubt restlessly slumbered in a strange place, Mutlu awoke later and naturally began to make his way home amid a probable wide array of physical complaints internal and external that would, thankfully, pass in time. Along the way, Mutlu found roving members of a search party, and in his magnanimous spirit he decided to join the search. His own situation, as he knew no real emergency, could wait to be resolved until that of this unknown missing man.
So caught up in the search was Mutlu that he did not initially learn who it was that was missing, and he only heard later that the missing was none other than Beyhan Mutlu- a no doubt surreal revelation to search party member Beyhan Mutlu. Second to the shock that he and all those people were in search of him was surely the delight that he, and only he, could render the discovery that all hoped and prayed for, thus making him the hero of the hour. And it would be so easy and quick!
Alas, when he told them he was the missing man, they did not believe him and continued searching. Only his erstwhile friend in drinking was able to convince the party that Mutlu was the missing and the search could end.
