To date, my published essays have featured three names: mine, my partner’s and my cat’s. My partner doesn’t care and my cat can’t stop me (although I informed him). I have never changed a name in an essay. I lack the imagination.

Then, an essay with the real name of a good friend was accepted for publication in Sofra. I considered changing this name. Then, I decided not to worry about it. In order to stop worrying about it, I didn’t mention the essay to the woman who inspired it: Ömür.

I managed to avoid taking action until a request for Ömür’s aşure recipe hit my inbox.

The recipe was meant to accompany the essay. Publication was imminent. My mind went blank. Nostalgia overcame me.

Ömür’s version of this bean and grain-packed pudding is the best I’ve eaten.

The deliciousness of her aşure goes beyond the ingredients. It’s the joy she brings to sharing it. I aspire to give with that spirit. To make food and then trust that it’s good enough to hand to strangers. To drop my fear of revealing who I am.

Aşure is for sharing. Aşure time, like Ramadan, cycles through the year. Personally, I think aşure time is fall.

When I lived in Ankara I worked at home and lived for errands. One destination with ten stops in between. Each stop an excuse to share tea. The last time I tasted aşure, yellow leaves were stuck to the pavement. It was down jacket season. Probably.

I could have been heading out to mail a letter. Hoping that the woman who calls me canım and always takes me first was working the counter.

On my way down the hill, I probably stopped by the pastane. Then the beauty salon, where, surprise, it was aşure day. And Ömür offered me a bowl.

Or maybe it was summer.

I could ask Ömür.

We have a WhatsApp correspondence. I send pictures of my vegetable garden. She sends pictures of the plants I left in her care. It’s been five years now and the great-grandbabies of my Christmas cactus have colonized the surfaces of her shop.

There are days when I long to set out on a cold weather errand and sit with Ömür.

There are moments when I want to reach out and don’t. Because I want to feel happy—not happy and sad, together.

When the recipe request arrived, I didn’t feel happy or sad. I panicked.

Then began to fret. I worried Ömür would feel exposed by the essay. That she would read it and hate it. That she would call it lies. Betrayal.

Of course, this belies my experience of Ömür. We are all candidates for her prayers and generosity, although she doesn’t take shit from anyone (in her extremely gracious way). She has always offered me the benefit of the doubt. So, what was my problem?

My fear of telling Ömür is the same thing that keeps me from writing: I want people to approve—of me. I feared Ömür would stop loving me because of what I wrote. Or how I wrote it. I wanted to let this fear go.

I was going to have to.

In order to get the recipe I had to tell her. About the essay.Right?

Maybe I could just ask for the recipe. I actually thought this. Here was proof of my growing insanity. I took a breath. Grew myself up a little. And texted Ömür.

Stomach burbling, I confessed that I had written a story about our friendship that would appear in a book.

Then, I put my phone away and didn’t look at it for the rest of the day. I slept poorly.

The next morning, I peeked. A message.

“Ahhh,” Ömür wrote. “If it’s true about the story— that makes me so happy.”

I felt faint with relief.

I asked for the recipe.

“Well,” she wrote, “this can’t be a coincidence. I’m making aşure today.”

She typed out her recipe. Then another version, with refinements and additions. It sounded so yummy that I considered boiling some up immediately.

Sort of.

I’d rather be in the beauty shop, watching Ömür ladle aşure out of a plastic laundry tub. Listening to her visit with the mail carrier, the man from the curtain store, and everyone else who stops in for a bowl.

This year Ömür served aşure to over 30 people. “As usual,” she wrote, they all told her it was amazing.

Praise alone doesn’t motivate Ömür to sort and soak countless packages of beans and end an already long day over a bubbling vat of pudding.

On aşure day Ömür gets to share her love and faith with a wide-open heart.

I aspire to write in that spirit. Wide open. Even when no one wants a bowl.

Kirsten Voris writes in order to encourage herself – and anyone else who has ever felt they shouldn’t – to take up more space. Kirsten’s essays about Turkey have appeared in Hippocampus and Superstition Review. She is a sometime yoga teacher who completed her initial training in Turkey and is co-creator of The Trauma Sensitive Yoga Deck for Kids https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/595352/trauma-sensitive-yoga-deck-for-kids-by-kirsten-voris-brooklyn-alvarez-and-david-emerson/

Kirsten has been toggling between Turkey and the United States since 1995 and earned an MA in Ottoman History from Bilkent University. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her partner and a cat who was born on the mean streets of Gazi Osman Paşa, Ankara. Find her @bubbleate.