It had been three months since I'd seen anyone I knew. Naturally, I was anxious. Things had been seen and things had been done. There was growth. How would these new branches twisting away from the perceived rocky crag of "old life," cast their shade? Am I different? Is everyone still...the same? This is the silent sound of one man wringing his hands in the Istanbul airport. The old one, not the new one. Airports I mean.
Christine is one of my dearest friends. I usually do my best to make that job, and it is a job, as difficult as possible, but Christine seems to tolerate me. She has a knack for not taking my shit, and in turn, she can sling turds right back. She was my best friend's girlfriend at one time. As me and this fellow are best friends, we both excel at having no real girlfriends, but a legion of future ex-girlfriends. I was on #teamJW all the way, but Christine always seemed okay. Nice. Then we went to India together. Our mutual friends, now husband and wife, invited us to go. Our itineraries differed from theirs for a few legs, and Christine and I found ourselves with extended periods of time to spend...together.
In that time I came to know a person. A person I respect and admire with her wits, charms, and beauty within and out. A person who I felt fortunate to share what would be a cornerstone experience in my adult life. Since then, we've been friends. Real friends. And to think I wasn't accepting new applications. She really is lucky that girl.
And there she was. Travel pants on, big green backpack filled to the hilt, blonde hair pulled back. When you see someone before they see you, you have an unfair advantage. I got to see her for a moment free of the context of "hellos," and "how have you beens," and in my stolen moment I saw my friend. And it made me happy.
We found the car Christine hired to take us from the airport to the apartment. We were both surprised it wasn't a sedan. We gossiped a bit.
Alarm Clock
"What time should I set the alarm?"
*The fuck? I've been traveling for three months and set an alarm zero times.*
"We have a big day," she said well cued into my non-verbals. "Six?"
*Six? Are we...is tomorrow like, business hours?* "Ummm...how about eight?" I replied trying to keep in mind this was her vacation. I'd done nothing but what I'd wanted for the last three months--or thirty years depending on perspective--I could live through one early morning.
"I'll set it for seven."
During Ramadan, in the wee, small hours a noisy procession drums through the streets. A gentle, rhythmic reminder to eat before sunrise. Istanbul decided it was going to be six after all.
Lost
We saw the Blue Mosque and the Basilica Cistern and then went to the Grand Bazaar. The Grand Bazaar is an intriguing bit of capitalism run amok. Hectic even. Christine found some necklaces she liked and bought them. Afterward we wanted to make our way to Mini-Turk. I'd read about it in advance and it seemed like the sort of absurd tourist novelty of which I cannot get enough. I'd taken a screen shot of a map and we got lost. The punchline was where Google found Mini-Turk, Istanbul had decided it was elsewhere. After this we decided to visit the spice market, and that's when we got really lost.
By the ocean, planted in the rocks, two wooden poles were strung with taught metal wires. Three rows, some were hung with balloons and cans dangled from others. Planks were set across other rocks on which bottles were lined up like see-through soldiers. Shards of glass glittered from between the rocky shore. An impromptu shooting gallery, local children could rent a BB gun and sharpen their aim. Any and all missies were committed to the blue of the Sea of Marmara falling well short of the shipping containers crowding the horizon. As long as physics and imagination remain divergent, anyway.
Three children followed us for a while trying to sell us things. We never found their adults.
Istanbul is wildly compartmentalized. Every city block appears to be a different stretch of retail goods. One area is for plumbing, one area is for lamps, one area is for shoes, one area is for jewelry. It's like the Grand Bazaar model spread to the town. We stumbled into the children's fashion area. Both of us childless, it was eerie. Tiny clothes for tiny people with no money filling an entire city block. Half dressed toddler mannequins in every window, the youthful innocence under glass was the artifact. Ancient cities make no children.
We stopped at a corner store and I bought some Doritos designed for the Turkish market. They were supposed to be flavored with some kind of local spice, but they just tasted like corn chips. Christine found a large, green plastic half-dome with a working phone inside. She adored it.
Mini-Turk
There was an argument at the bus station. While waiting to buy tickets the ticket agent and an unknown woman started screaming at each other. Full throated contention. The unknown woman was inconsolable, sobbing, and an old man ahead of us charged the line to add his outrage to the din. When we got to the front the ticket agent was frayed, but polite. His kids were in the booth with him. He sold us our tickets. We never could figure out what the ruckus was about.
Our bus dropped us off across from Mini-Turk. In short, Mini Turk is a park housing scale models of Turkey's famous attractions. You can also pay extra for a 3D simulated helicopter ride across the country. Istanbul, home to some of the greatest architecture in the world, structures bridging the gap between the Arab and European world, the city of Constantine and Mehmed II, and I want lay down hard earned Lira for a gimmick. The miniatures were artfully rendered, the attention to detail uncanny, but this is not what captured my imagination so. Not one, or even two meetings were held about Mini Turk, but several. Grown adults, business owners and city patrons, got together on multiple occasions to discuss the logistics and viability of a park dedicated to miniature models. What's more interesting, the boondoggle or the universe of ego inside it?
A long serpentine path wandered through the park. A devout Muslim family was there the same time as us, one man followed by a line of women in black burkas. They made quick work the park. Christine enjoyed the novelty for a moment, but I was consumed. With every model, seeing the insignificance of the monuments recreated, the complete void of historical import, my imagination whirred around the high stakes political game unfurling before my eyes. Did each little village have to lobby to have their useless clock tower included? Do the big boys--the Cappadocia's and Mardin's--make them dance, make it hurt a bit? How many miniature model makers fought tooth and nail for these contracts? When did...
"You're never gonna look at all those pictures again," Christine commented from the next crook over in the path.
"This place is fucking awesome." I replied removing my camera from my eye for the first time since entering the park.
"How many photos have you taken?"
"I'm like Danny Granger, I'm a volume shooter."
The parks immensity eventually eroded even my enthusiasm. We posed for photos on a large, mini bridge where a young Turk was taking arm-around-their-shoulders photos with women he didn't know. We strolled through the gift shop--miniature of miniatures, we've entered the void--and Christine decided to buy some popcorn from a vending machine. She asked if I wanted any, but I declined. It seemed, well...it seemed gross. She dumped her lira into the Mr. Pop machine, he offered us what was an undeniably dancey little tune, and Christine soon had her red and white carton in hand.
"I've got to take a picture of this," Christine grinned.
She crooked the popcorn in her arm while she fished the camera from her purse. As she framed the photo, the camera slipped from her fingers and bounced on the ground. Day three of her vacation and Christine's camera was broken. Beyond nonplussed, she put a good face on it, but the popcorn was awful.
Hagia Sophia
From the outside, the Hagia Sophia is huge. Unlike the Blue Mosque, still used as a house of worship, the Hagia Sophia is 100% a tourist attraction. Representing the crossroads of two separate faiths, the building has historical cache for visitors of all stripes. Even the exterior looks piecemeal, with contrasting aesthetics, poorly matched colors, and an oddball minaret. Reminiscent of a patchwork quilt, especially set against the stoic uniformity of the Blue Mosque immediately across the promenade, it's imperfectly combined elements are Istanbul.
A collision of pink and green marble, some banded like finely polished wood grain, the corridors are awarew of their standing. "Oh Solomon, I have outdone thee," Constantine remarks, while somewhere else in time Mehmed II enters with dirt sprinkled on his head. I've no humility of my own, not in the sight of such grandeur, but I maintain the appropriate sense of my minute historical consequence. My quotations won't embed in these halls. Hell, my photos of the joint won't even be particularly memorable.
The seraph, a six-winged angel--a strange, archaic bit of iconography--stares down from the ceiling. A large black circle painted with gold calligraphy, the name of the Prophet Mohammed, is mounted on a column outside an alcove where Mary and the Christ Child sit on a throne. The illuminated Sultan's Loge overlooks the Omphalion where every emperor of the East Roman empire was crowned. A restored mosaic, Christ the Pantocrator, is lost in the shadow of a minaret stretched across midday sun. Scaffolding, the sutures holding the entire old world together, ascends into the great dome. Some windows are not windows at all, but only paintings of windows.
I took lots of photos, but Christine had no camera, so I let her use mine. "You can tell which ones are my pictures, because they'll be the good ones," she quipped.
Shine Blockas
"You know what history is? It's a bunch of motherfuckers just trying to shine block. You come in, you tear all this cool old shit down, cover it up with your whole deal, and then someone else comes in and does the same. Just a bunch of fuckin' shine blockers, man." -- Monte on the Hagia Sophia
Public Transport, or Blonde Woman's Lament on a Crowded Istanbul Tram
"I swear to God, if one more guy grabs my ass, I'm gonna punch him in the face." -- Christine
The Ghost of Brooks Joad
At Christine's request, we watched the Bachelorette season 9 series finale while in Istanbul. Like pornography, psychosexual and emotional in its timbre, it's not the illusion, but the manufacturing of the illusion. With our bizarre human intimacies on display, the nature of exploitation is obvious, but it's the two way mirror pornography and the Bachelorette alike use to disgorge said exploitation. Viewing the finished product from the outside in, we can lose ourselves in the belief this is a moment for us alone. All the while, in actuality, crew and handlers and the always impersonal eye of the camera peer into these moments. Edited for consumption, populated with purposely thin approximations of human beings, the tears and cumshots become interchangeable payouts on a narrow spectrum of catharsis.
All the same, I told her I was going to dress as the ghost of Brooks Joad for halloween. Brooks--jilter, master manipulator, opportunist, decent looking--emerged as a hero of sorts. Anywhere there is an easily duped hot girl enmeshed in her idealization of a man, the Ghost of Brooks Joad will be there. Desiree Hartsock shouldn't have a Halloween costume, but she should make Chris don a man-sized manila folder that reads--in big red letters--"Plan B."
Water Heater
"I think I fixed the water heater," I said. He'd warned us, the landlord, the apartment's water heater was sensitive, but we didn't listen.
"You did?"
"Yup. My balls are so huge right now."
I'd looked up the manual online, reset the heater, sprayed my iPad with water, but none of us came out worse for the wear. Exultant, I returned to the bathroom to enjoy my hot shower.
"It's cold again!"
"So you didn't fix it."
"No, hot water came out for a second, so I did fix it, just...temporarily."
I checked the water heater, it was flashing the same error message as before and leaking.
"Yeah, I fixed it, but I don't think I let it fill up long enough."
"That means you didn't fix it."
"But hot water came out, that was the goal."
"Is it still hot?"
"No."
"Well...you might want to check your balls again."
Walk to the Airport Shuttle
The morning we flew to Cappadocia was the day of Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan. We trundled out of the apartment around 5AM, and the streets of Istanbul were live. I suggested we walk. Our neighborhood was weirdly inaccessible to taxis, and the bus station wasn't too far.
The main road, a road running just to the south of Taksim Sqaure, was filled with reveling Young Turks. Street food vendors sold kebab and simit. One vendor sold raw oysters, and it's clear we have different definitions of drunk food the world over. A street musician played Turkish music out of a small amp and a man gamboled around him, hung on the circular rhythm. Dance beats pulsed from behind anonymous facades with the occasional window spilling technicolor club lights into the darkened streets.
Drunk men, with smoldering eyes, walked with their chests puffed. Drunker men sat in front of shuttered storefronts draped with slurred eyes and slurred words. On the edge of Taksim Square, a coterie of vendors were posted up trying to catch any stray lira falling out of lubricated pockets. One vendor was yelling at a boy and striking him on the head. No one seemed concerned, and no one intervened.
We made it to the shuttle bus on time, but we almost went to the wrong airport.
Cappadocia
I slept most of the way to Goreme. Christine said the music humming from my headphones sounded like, "jam band music." It was Thin Lizzy, so I don't even know what that means. Our shuttle bus unloaded patrons at what must've been their stop. I didn't know otherwise, but people continued to disembark. When the driver arrived at Kelebek Hotel, it was our stop. We arrived early in the morning, so our room wasn't ready. The manager invited us to enjoy the breakfast buffet. Up a flight of stairs, the dining area was set on a terrace overlooking the valley, overlooking the surface of another planet.
A lone plateau jutted into the horizon, the depth of sky so heavy the table mountain was merely a platform to keep the heavens from crashing to earth. Rock formations fell away from the upland like a network of roots; knotted fingers of volcanic ash, promontory sentinels standing alone, and calcified snowdrifts as white as sun bleached bone. A monochromatic wonderland, even the subtle variances lent to the landscape by vegetation were an intrusion into this kingdom of stone. I've been to some beautiful places in my life, and none are like Cappadocia.
After we settled into our room we went to the Goreme Open Air Museum. The history of Cappadocia is the history of these rocks. Soft to tools yet resistant to the elements, rocks became caves and caves became homes. Even our hotel room was a cave.
The historical narrative is that of persecuted Christians once hidden in these hills.The Goreme Open Air Museum is their many preserved cave homes and cathedrals. The homes, complete with windows, kitchens, and burial plots served as a familiar testament to man's unbending, irrational need to make life. The cathedrals were something far more surreal. After all, heretics and zealots always make for the hardest histories to grasp.
With frescoes from floor to ceiling, painted with crude representations of biblical figures, few of these haloed visages survived. As a byproduct of Islam's staunch anti-iconography beliefs, prophets, martyrs, and Christ looked down faceless from their effulgence on high. I couldn't help but wonder if this literal defacement was exacted by a lone fanatic or a detachment of troops, but the identity of the perpetrator is of little practical concern. The moment with any usefulness is the milliseconds before defacement. Is there a hint of awe? Does regret fit in the space between chisel and wall? Is the scene so corrupt sword reflexively comes from scabbard because the lurid blaspheme is too much to bear? I'll never know any of these answers, but to this curious non-believer, the void where Christ's face should be is simply an eddy punched in the heart of a swollen, tempestuous conflux. And Chance the Rapper asks, "What's good Good, what's good Evil?"
An Exquisite Cadaver
My 31st year began in Cappadocia. Christine's gifts were beef jerky and a card. She'd also engineered my exquisite cadaver. Line by line, a far better looking corpse than my 31 years are entitled.
"The grass glowed purple under a midnight sun as I loaded my rusty revolver, trying to remember if the rounds were live or blank."
"Ultimately, that didn't matter - live or no, this was to be an admission, a release akin to ejaculation, a brutish, primitive cave painting of a statement, or whatever cheap copy I was capable of mustering."
"So I jumped. I just closed my eyes and jumped. But what I didn't know at the time was that I was jumping into the gaping maw of the Sarlacc."
"Miraculously, I passed though its razor sharp teeth unscathed, but I tumbled deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast."
"I felt a little sick to my stomach as the smell of rotting fish filled my nostrils. 'Ew,' I thought."
"So I ran from the beach and into a cave, where I found an old man. What he would tell me changed everything."
"He said, 'It's time to stop running."
"Stop running? Tramps like us? Never. Baby, we were born to run."
"After speaking those words, he flipped on the shuttle's ignition and steered the vessel toward the sun."
"He felt the weight of the shackles that once pulled him toward the ground diminish; he felt the weighty steel of the shovel in his right hand disappear and thought of the words a dear friend once spoke, 'Remember, there are no passengers on the ascent toward the sky. Only drivers.'"
"He dove in head first without inhibition, knowing damn well that this moment would define his life and legacy."
"He knew that seducing the presidential intern would come back to haunt him, but he could not resist the primal urge."
"Many years later, with an erection that no longer stood at attention and a trigger finger broken in three places, he looked out over the azure shores and said to himself, 'Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."
Hot Air Balloon Ride
"My money is on them," I said as I pointed to the couple in front of us, a bearded fellow and a brunette woman.
"Why do you think someone is going to propose?" Christine queried.
"Because people are ridiculous and cliche. I mean...it's a fucking hot air balloon ride! In Turkey!"
This was the centerpiece of Christine's Turkey trip. Hot air balloon rides are one of the predominant fixtures of the Cappadocia experience. They load you up in a van before sunrise, drive you out to a field, and send you aloft in one of fifty or so hot air balloons.
Our quintet of balloons were on a hill being given life by bursts of fire, a stark contrast to the ambient dark of morning. In the valley below, countless other balloons were being animated while other tourists ambled about. Our pilot was Gunal, a handsome Turk wearing a crisp white shirt with captain's bars on the shoulder. We were the second balloon in the air, and our basket held eight people including the pilot. For the most part everyone was silent, but we all had our cameras in tow.
From the air, scar tissue of rock lifts from the valley floor. Conventional wisdom tells you the rocks have receded over the millennia--eroded by the wind, rent asunder by tectonic shifts--but looking down the complexity of the organism defies that reality. Not an artifact, not a geographical feature, these petrified ashen peaks are a lotus flower. From above, you realize the scope of grace and beauty balanced on these delicate stone petals.
Photographs snapped themselves, the balloon rose and fell, and we all kept quiet. Gunal dropped our basket in a field, and we had champagne and cake. As the flutes went around, I kept eyeing my horse in the race, the brunette and her bearded fellow. Drop to your knee, asshole! Do it! But he never did. As we later found out, they were already married. And somewhere in the valley the cheers of a group reunited with the ground ricocheted off a not too distant hill.
"That's bullshit!," I said as I forked another plate of complimentary hotel breakfast buffet into my face.
"Why were you so convinced someone would propose?" Christine rightly queried, my insistence on the matter one of many irrationalities she's probably too well acquainted with by this point.
I had no response, but I sipped my coffee and looked out on the warming stone valley from the veranda. It was early and most other couples dining had seen the sunrise from a wicker basket suspended in the air. Old couples whirred about the sense of adventure. Middle aged couples wrung their hands over a fatal hot air balloon a few months before. And a young blonde with a bloke who looked like he belonged with a young blonde settled onto the cushioned benches at the back of the terrace.
"Mum," she said, as she made what must've been a very expensive phone call to Australia, "I've got a big surprise."
And with that, she held out the glittering emblem of their recent union in front of her as though her mother could see it thousands of miles away.
"We went on the hot air balloon ride this morning, and he planned it with everyone else in our group and...Mum, you're crying."
There are grins, and there are shit-eating grins, and then there was my grin.
"I hate you," Christine murmured. And rightly so.
Refinition
"It has a certain...refinition to it," I said.
"Refinition? That's a made up word," Christine added.
"No it's not. I know it's a real word. I read it somewhere before."
"Where? Where did you read that?"
"I dunno, but, like, if you define something, it has a definition. You refine something, you get refinition."
"Look it up."
...
"Look, just because Google doesn't recognize it, that doesn't count for much. We'll say we were both right. I mean, it's an anachronated term."
"Anachronated? That's not a word either!"
The King of the Cotton Castle
"Pamuk is the Turkish word for cotton, and kale is the word for castle, so Pamukkale means cotton castle. Pamuk, cotton. Kale, castle. Pamukkale."
This was one of our guides go to's, his other:
"Aydin is a common men's name, but the way you say good morning is Gunaydin. GUNaydin."
He was a man in a van who had lived most of his life in the front seat. He had his well-worn bits. You could tell they came out of him the same way breath or indifference come from any no account Turk whose life is spent holding tourists' hands. And tourist hands he did hold. The hostel where we stayed--the only one we visited while in Turkey and the subject of a drama still too ridiculous to recount here--sold these tours like hot cakes. For around fifty american dollars a van picked you up, took you to a lunch buffet, dropped you at Pamukkale, and took you home. We traveled with a Malaysian woman from our hostel, a couple from Brazil, an older couple from South Korea, and a mother and daughter from China. The capacity for English, the language spoken on this particular tour, is represented in descending order.
On the way to Pamukkale we played M.A.S.H. and hangman and I saw three young Turks contemplating a tractor missing a wheel. It is undoubtedly my favorite image I collected while in Turkey. I wasn't able to snap a photo, but it was too beautiful to render into something permanent anyway.
In hindsight it's obvious, but we should have started asking questions after he collected everyone's money. Of course there were Pamukkale related activities he offered us, a hot spring bath, a fish-eat-your-feet spa treatment, paragliding, all hard sold in his signature monotone. He could tell none of us were interested, but it was the way he collected money for the tour itself. Somewhere beyond discreet yet still just south of suspect, he quietly went to each passenger and pulled away with a few lira peeking out of his hand. Someone would raise a question about the price, but before their query made it to half mast, he cut them short. We handed him exact change, a reasonable price set by our hostel.
At the lunch buffet, the Brazilian fellow asked first. Breaking the silent traction of strangers bound to each other, he said it. How much had we paid? Well, Christine and I paid the same. And the woman from Malaysia was in our hostel, so she paid the same. Well, she paid in US dollars, and they...he, the man in the front seat, he said he'd get her change. The Brazilian couple paid a little more than us, but had been charged in US dollars as well. The South Korean couple had been charged more than double the rest of us. They were coming from Izmir, but the price didn't make sense. Back in the van, the air was tense.
"And there it is." He pointed toward an earthen mountain with stark white ridges spilling down its face. "Pamuk is the Turkish word for cotton, and kale is the Turkish word for castle. Pamukkale means cotton castle." He bristled with indifference. "Of course, the only way to enjoy Pamukkale is from the air. The only way to see all of the travertine terraces at once. With our paragliding tour you can get the best photos."
We disembarked from the van and entered the park. The park is comprised of two features, the ruins of Hierapolis and the terraces. The terraces were formed by a hot spring rich with calcium carbonate. The minerals once exposed to oxygen became deposits, the deposits became a shelf, and the shelves overtook the mountain in their elaborate folds of organic geometry. Hierapolis was built by man and felled by earthquakes. And given his moment, the man in the front seat spoke with passion. No sales pitch, no devious agenda, simply the history of a place for which he felt a great deal. The ruins, an assemblage of rocks and a crumbling amphitheater suddenly irradiated life. Context and dates and historical figures were woven into his hypnotic shroud, and as good feelings ascended, we arrived at the hot spring and he tried to sell us spa packages. Including fish-eat-your-feet treatment. And paragliding, always paragliding.
He turned us loose. Christine and I got separated. I took far too many photos. Russians were there in massive numbers and they take photos with no sense of irony. Later, we reconvened at the van. As we loaded in he barked at the driver, "zero, zero, ZERO!" I could only guess they were his figures for hot spring dips, fish eaten feet, and paraglide adventures sold. He resumed his place in the front seat. The Malaysian woman was paid her change in Lira at an unfavorable rate. She took umbrage, and he castigated her. Yelled at her, and the conversation was over. We rode in uncomfortable silence back to Aydin where the man in the front seat ended his day. As we passed through the town, he brightened once again as he had one last story to tell, this time with feeling.
It was a story of a bandit, a common thief, who was likened unto a Robin Hood. He would dart from the mountains, steal from the imperialist interlopers, and return to his hiding place to share the loot with real Turks. During the Greco-Turkish war, he rose to the occasion. With guerrilla tactics he and his band beat back the Greeks. Because sometimes, the thieves are the only true heroes.
Chicago Blues
"You know what Turkey is? It's Chicago Blues. Where the Arab world, Mesopotamia, is like delta blues, and where Europe is like rock and roll, Turkey is Chicago Blues. So essential, such a critical bridge in human history, it gets overlooked." -- Monte leaving Ephesus
Bitez
Our hotel was within walking distance to the beach, and beach days are the happiest days of all. We were in Bitez, an enclave near Bodrum, and our goal was a small one: wind down our Turkish vacation by the beach. All of the beachfront property in Bitez belongs to businesses. You can use their beach chairs and umbrellas for free, but they try and force overpriced food and drink on you. The caveat? You can't bring in any food of your own. I sneaked in beers anyway, because...fuck 'em, that's why. This is the beach and these are our last days, these happiest days of all.
An unbroken crescent of beach umbrellas forested the strand. The water was not the blue of your imagination, but a murkier blue. Little more than the the low hills fortified with terraces of white condos dripped and drabbed into the shallows. Turks were on holiday, and they glistened in the sun. Bikini clad, they frolicked in the pencil straight shadow of the minaret protruding from the stock beach scene.
Half drunk on contraband beers, some amount of degrees in Celsius I can't convert filtered through me. Agatha Christie, so much more than a name, laid open on my chest. The ever unreliable narrator, Dr. Sheppard and I have a lot in common. We like to tell our story, not the story. Call to prayer jumped to life like an air raid siren. Another mosque in the distance, milliseconds behind, created an aural drop shadow on the prayer lilting through the protected harbor.
A family grabbed a beach chair next to us. Mother and Father and Daughter. Father was a pronounced belly, full not fat, stacked on top of skewer legs set under a salt and pepper mustache. His wife was a kind face swaddled in a suit for bathing. Even subdued in color, the dark brown spandex wrap revealed only her face. I pondered the marketing tack these companies take. 'Bathing costumes for the true Muslim woman.' 'Modest swim wear for the woman of faith.' Is the value created in adhering to one's faith, or faith defining every decision one makes? It hardly matters when you have a captive audience.
Mother made her way into the surf. She floated and splashed about and her shape broke the surface in trio of gentle curves, bosom and belly. Serene, on her back, it occurred to me the sun has only touched her hands and face. I swear science once told me sunlight can be thousands of years old. Before the angel Gabriel descended to teach Muhammad, before antiquity, Byzantines, Seljuks, Ottomans and Ataturk, a process began in the Sun's furnace belly. A chain reaction echoing through epoch upon epoch--releasing power enough to cleave human history down to ashes millions of times over--yields sunlight. Made to withstand the darkness, taking seconds to traverse the indifferent expanse of space, this remarkable life story ends rebuffed by a Lyrca swimming shroud. And where it's not mine to understand, or claim my enculturation is more correct, I'd safely wager her life makes sense. At least to her.
Daughter finally rose from her shaded bed, and uncovered. Her swimsuit, modest by even the most prudish standards, showed her shoulders, neck, and legs. A generational gap measured in actual inches. Who had it hurt the most, Mother of Father? I thought Mother, the bond of gender, the bond of mother and daughter, affronted by this risque show. Christine felt it was Father, because fathers always think they have more to lose when it's their daughter. I'd like to hope they both we're proud, if even in secret. They'd raised a young woman who stood tall in the surf with sun on her shoulders.
As dusk wreathed the inlet and the water grew cold we went back to the hotel. After showers we ate fajitas, and the remainder of the warm night was whiled away at the hotel bar watching Turkish MTV and drinking Raki.
Our Marital Bed
"Holy shit! I think the hotel people think...we're married." - Christine commenting on this:
Farewells
There was a flight back to Istanbul and an airport shuttle where a domino effect of puking toddlers almost broke me. There was a hotel debacle, an excruciating cab ride through rush hour, and some very banal kebabs--almost like foreign food they were so western facing. There was a fantasy football draft executed from the computer in the hotel lobby at 3AM Istanbul time. There were two separate flights and two different cabs. Before Christine left, in my half asleep stupor, we said our goodbyes. In my underpants, Christine strapped into her full frame backpack, I said all the right things. How much she means to me, how much I needed to see a friend, the impact of this journey within my journey. And Christine replied, "come say bye to me."
I opened my eyes, saw her standing over my bed, and realized it had been a dream. A dream I once had about two dear friends on holiday.
"Real life is way less fun." - Christine
