We carry things in life.
Slowly, they wear us down.

You will carry this city.
It’s in your blood, the marrow of your bones,
your lovely lapidary eyes, and, yes,
even your heart.

You carry those nights that ended on the park steps,
the sun rising over the steam and the street cleaners.

You carry the man you loved,
those days when he unveiled the city.
And you carry the men you didn’t love,
the men you guided through the city as it became your home,
the men you told your stories to
while smoking cigarettes against their headboards.

You carry ferry rides at dusk
when the sky is aflame and the minarets sing
and Istanbul seems to glow from within,
as if some luminous heart beats beneath the mosques
and the bazaars and the alleyways and the tenements,
and as if some nights, at dusk, that heart pumps light
down the city’s arteries,
light borne in the eyes of its men and women.

You carry the dexterity Istanbul teaches you.
The litheness needed to glide off a curb and dodge traffic,
to negotiate underground passages swollen with people,
to endure sticky sweaty buses. But its not just physical:
this city teaches you to be solitary, to be lost and subsumed.
It teaches you impermanence.

You carry the kindness of strangers.
The men who invite you in for çay
and the women who feed stray cats.
The boys who kick you a football
and call you abla.

You carry the protests.
The songs and the banners, the pots and pans echoing in the street canyons,
the hot çay and coffee, the tents in Gezi,
the crowds swarming as the tear gas arcs down.
And you carry the strangers who wash your eyes with lemon and milk.
Maybe you can’t explain it to those who weren’t there,
but it’s in your nostrils - the way you sometimes think
you catch the scent of tear gas on the wind.

You carry the black and white hüzün of winter,
the sweltering stench of summer.
The market days buying fruit by the kilos. The late night
cigarettes and çorba. The smell of the
Bosporous at dawn. The midday call to prayer
rattling in your bones. The hidden tea gardens
that throb and pulse with noise and smoke.

You’ll carry Istanbul back to your village. You’ll
carry it to new cities and new lovers. And
you’ll leave pieces of the city with them
in the stories you tell.

And for the rest of your life, when you hear a bus rumbling down the street
or see a flag rippling in the wind like a headscarf
or smell the sea,
Istanbul will emerge and surprise you with its beauty.

You can leave Istanbul, but the city lingers in your blood,
your bones,
your heart.
It's like the light in your eyes.