Absence and Presence
'That space, which shaped me and defined me and turned me into what I am, has closed up behind me and there is no going back.'
'We must know where we come from and where our earth comes from. The archaeology of love.'
- Andre Brink
You should write something about going home, about when home is no longer home anymore. But you’re not sure where to start. Do you start with the nephew who thinks you live at the airport? Do you start with the girl?
No, you start where you spent most of your time. You start on the road. It is late at night, December, the suburban homes framed by Christmas lights, the trees barren and the stars clear beyond them. A thousand thousand nights like this before, an endless narrative of them, running unbroken. This is what you’ve lost, and left behind. You’ve lost the habit of these drives, these nights, the space they’d carved at the center of your life. What is that space anymore? What has it been filled with? Is there room for another space?
These are things you’ll ask later, back in Istanbul.
You’re driving down the old streets. There’s the home where you spent three years of your life - fell in love, made love, wrote the short story that would get you published, ate a thousand egg and bacon breakfasts while watching the sun creep over the rooftops - and now it’s full of other lives, other dreams and narratives.
Here’s the route you took to L's house. Four turns - right, left, right, right. A hundred hundred times you made this drive, the windows down, the smell of the suburbs in her hair, on your skin. Down into the hollow where you cross the creek. Past the park where the two of you used to watch storms. A hundred hundred drives, and what remains? Her hand out the window. Maybe a general sensation - of being young, of life being still on the horizon, of wasting time.
What remains of these mundane details when we break from them? What are they worth? The very fiber of our lives, the stones that build the foundation of our identity. And then, suddenly, they’re gone, vanished.
~
The nephew follows you everywhere. Takes you by the hand and drags you into his bedroom, to play with the train set. Or behind the Christmas tree, to turn on the lights. Or under the dining room table, to lie with the dogs. Or into the closet, to hide from his father, your brother.
He follows you everywhere. And it’s a strange confluence between joy and anxiety. Joy that you’re here, anxiety that you will leave, the nervousness of how to explain it all - the guilt of leaving the foundation behind. You wonder, in fifteen years, how he will remember you. Whether he’ll think you were absent and selfish.
But for now, there is only joy. There is laughing and whispering in the closet while the dogs bark and your brother tramps around like a giant, searching. There is the way he nestles up against you on the couch, wanting to read, to be told a story, to be close to a body that he loves, though why he loves a body that is so often absent is something you cannot understand. And you wonder how long it will last.
~
Absence. It’s a word that, you suspect, defines you. You are absent. You are absent at family dinners. You are absent at church on Sunday mornings. You are absent when your brother needs counsel, or maybe just someone to share a cigarette with. You are absent when your friends needs to hear a helpful voice. You are absent in the heart of the girl. You are the absent presence your nephew tells strangers about, the uncle who lives at the airport. You are absent from the people and places of your life.
~
This, then, is perhaps the balance you’ve chosen: the writing over everything else. The pursuit of the writing over everything else. We are creatures of values, and our choices reflect those values. We value comfort, or we value community, or we value faith. You, you value stories. You value the pursuit of stories. And you’re not sure why. You’re not sure how this idea got in your head that stories were the most important thing you could do.
You rationalize it. There are plenty of fathers in the world. There are plenty of good men - like your father, your grandfather, your brother - in the world, men who work unglamorous jobs and live the monotony of family life, who are present in their communities, because it is what good men do. They are present.
But the world needs storytellers, too. It needs absence. It needs people to report back from out there, the outer boundaries of the imagination, the places you imagined on those thousand thousand late night drives through the suburbs, past the girl’s house, past the Wawa’s, past the high school football field, past the quiet churches and slumbering golf courses.
This is what you tell yourself when you put on your coat to go out the door and your nephew takes your hand and says,
“No, don’t go. You can’t go.”
~
At least, then, report on what you have seen. Surely you’ve seen something worth reporting on, something more than beautiful women silhouetted by the residual lights of the city in those sleepless, verbose hours before dawn.
I’ve seen Aya Sofia in the snow, with the stray dogs as my only companions, sheets of snow coming down in the wind like curtains, an impossible field of white draped over the old church, over the sultan’s mosque, the dogs wrestling like children, the roads abandoned, old Constantinople empty but for me.
And what’s that worth?
I’ve seen a Syrian woman in the smoky basement of a bar, her hair pulled up like a blonde beehive, stand in front of a room of strangers and tell us about the sounds of war, the music of it playing over her head while she went to school, while she went shopping. I’ve listened to her sing us a song, her voice shaky with nerves - a woman who had survived war nervous to sing in front of strangers; how strange we can be - an old folk song that her mother would sing to her when she was a girl and couldn’t sleep.
And that’s worth being away from your nephew?
I’ve seen an Iranian friend sitting in the corner of a dinner party, watching us dance with a smile on his face. And when I asked him why, he said that he never would have imagined being here, in Istanbul, with us, during those endless days in prison, when he didn’t see light for six months. “It’s time you miss most,” he said. “The call to prayer. Those markers of time.”
I’ve drank tea with a boy who walked three thousand miles across the mountains of Afghanistan, the deserts of Iran, the rocklands of Turkey.
I have, for what little it’s worth, seen women silhouetted in the lights of the city before dawn, cigarettes in their hands, and listened as they told me about their families, their fears, their hopes.
I’ve seen a group of boys exchanging liras while they cheered on two cocks fighting in the street, parabolas of blood everywhere - in feathers, on t-shirts, spattered like paint on the pavement. I’ve seen gypsiess dancing in their slums from the balcony of a barricaded apartment. I’ve seen a mosque full during the heat of Ramadan, the men with their bowed heads, and out the window, the green of a poplar rustling in the wind, the geometric imperfection of Istanbul tumbling away beyond. I’ve seen that city, endless on the horizon.
I’ve watched myself fall for a woman whose hair I never even saw, and then watched as she married a man she did not love because her faith required her to do so.
I’ve bought flowers from a twelve year old girl on a street in Greece, her frail body wrapped in dirty rags, and wondered about how she came to be here, and whether the German tourists that flooded the island during the summer paid to go to bed with her.
I’ve watched Greek villagers dress up like terrorists and in black face, and then I’ve watched them dance until five in the morning, dance the way that my Midwestern relatives used to dance in barns and church basements - with drunken abandon.
I’ve eaten dinner in a house built of scrap metal and cinder blocks.
I’ve laughed with women dressed in full burqas.
I’ve seen the sun come up over the Mediterranean. I’ve seen many, many people cry. I’ve asked God to save me and to forgive me and to give me strength. I’ve prostrated to him in mosques and atop Greek mountains and on many planes. I’ve seen ten thousand people scatter like animals while tear gas canisters glint in a bright summer sun. I’ve run through clouds of white gas, choking, my whole body aflame, and wondered how I’ll ever breathe again. I’ve eaten fresh figs for breakfast, sheep’s intestines as a late night snack. I’ve caught and cooked my own mussels. I’ve danced with the most beautiful woman in a bar and then gone home with her. I’ve ridden in the back of a truck with the children of shepherds, and their dogs, and we’ve communicated with our hands and shared cigarettes and tea. I’ve seen the sun set over St. Peter’s and then seen it rise opposite St. Peter’s the next morning. I’ve seen trannies hanging out the windows of old Ottoman homes, fanning themselves in the summer heat, their make-up turned to mud, their voices falling down like early morning birds, serenading the orchestra across the street. I’ve stood on a roof with a strange new woman, the Bosporous beneath us, Istanbul all around us, and waited for the call to prayer.
Yes, and what has it been worth? What have you learned? What has the point of it all been?
~
You're not certain that you haven’t imagined all of it, that it hasn’t all been some grief-stricken dream, something you’ve created every night on long, lonely drives through the place that was once your home. And more than that, you wonder if it even matters - if there’s any difference between the world out there and the one you imagined for so many years on these drives.
~
You and your best friend walk through Philadelphia. Past the old apartments, the old watering holes. Down to Independence Hall, then out to Rittenhouse, where you stand in the drained fountain like you would have all those years ago, all those nights when you talked about women long forgotten, futures long abandoned. You remember coming here with the Palestinian woman who was in love with a different man, sitting and watching the drug dealers and the musicians playing Four Square, sweating in the late-day heat of Philadelphia in July, wishing she loved you instead.
A man approaches you and your best friend. He speaks to you for ten minutes, and only in riddles. And then he vanishes. Then two prostitutes take a photo with you, press their fake tits into your chest. Then they, too, vanish, walking precariously on six inch heels.
“Philadelphia,” your best friend says, shaking his head.
Philadelphia.
The two of you drive to the art museum in silence, wind whipping snow across the empty street. You remember sitting on these steps with the girl you thought you were going to marry - the second girl you thought you were going to marry - who is now a doctor in Colorado and who you will never see again. You remember sledding down the steps. You remember throwing a baseball up here. You remember these layers upon layers of memory, all of them so muddled together. This, you think, is what makes a place home - these layers, that muddle. Memories so deep, so heavily accumulated, that you can’t scrape them all away, can’t cut through them to reach the blankness of new experience. You’ll never again see Philadelphia for the first time. You’ll never again climb these steps for the first time.
Your best friend hands you a cigarette. The city is down there, your old city, shimmering like ancient ice in the cold.
“We’re getting old,” he sighs.
~
It makes you remember the first time you saw Istanbul. A rainy, grey morning at the end of March, following a long, sleepless bus ride. The city was nothing to you then, a sprawling, nameless canvas, a monolithic word - Istanbul - that symbolized something, though you didn’t know what. You didn’t know its shape, you didn’t know its neighborhoods. You didn’t know the Bosporous, or Aya Sofia in the distance, or Ortakoy beneath you, Besiktas crawling away from the water, Galata Tower far off, Cihangir mosque looming like a sentinel over the water, the homes of Uskudar stacked like a messy child’s blocks. Back then, it was pure mystery, like life before language. Primordial.
Slowly, you began to name it, in the way we name places - after the people we’ve loved in them. N’s street; L’s stairs; A’s restaurant; P’s tea garden; M’s basement; G’s roof. Every city is nothing more than a map of our heart’s geography.
~
You are back in Philadelphia, walking down A’s alleyway towards C’s dive bar. What strikes you, after this year away, is the quiet of Philadelphia’s streets, the emptiness.
Like all good dive bars, this one has not changed. You remember a February afternoon, snow flurries outside the door, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and talking about writing.
You wonder if this could be enough for you again. The quiet of the streets. To spend a modest evening walking and talking about nothing specific with a good woman, a woman whose ambitions for life are realistic, as opposed to yours: children, a steady career, a loving spouse, a comfortable house. These are good things, you remember. These are the things you grew up with. But even while you two sit, slightly punchdrunk, together after these years apart, talking easily, the way old lovers sometimes can, you feel something pulling at you, pulling you a way. A whisper in the back of you head.
“You miss home, don’t you?” she asks. There have been many nights - in Istanbul, in Greece - when you’ve measured the weight of a possible life with her, tried to decide whether it would be enough, enough to quiet that whisper, the one that only writing seems to quell.
Not exactly, you don't tell her. I miss having a home, feeling like a place was mine, like I fit well there. But that had already been lost here, before I left. It’s not that I don’t have people I love in Istanbul. I do. And they love me, too, I think. But I miss my nephew. I miss sitting with him in front of the fire place, reading. I miss the long, nighttime drives, and the quiet of winter in the suburbs. At times, I miss the depth of the relationship I had with L, before things went bad. I miss talking like that with someone, which isn’t an easy thing to find, and very frail, tenuous. I spent a night once with a Czech woman, sitting in bed, giddy with sleeplessness, waiting for the first light of dawn, the call to prayer, telling stories about our lives. It reminded me of how much I’d missed being able to do that. To talk about anything, to feel like anything was possible, to feel like I was completely myself, without wounds or pretense or vanity. But when we woke up in the morning, having fallen asleep before the call to prayer, it was gone, whatever it was. We were outside of it. Or, we were back inside whatever we normally were - back in our narratives, our identities, our carefully crafted languages.
What I feel is not a longing for a specific place. It’s more a feeling of placelessness, of being alone in a very fundamental way. Which is beautiful sometimes, but also very difficult. It’s not special, either. But I think it’s something most of us have felt, at one point or another. That we’re out here all alone.
~
You see L, which really isn’t all that remarkable. Mostly, she feels like a stranger, and you wish that weren’t the case. But it is. You feel like there should be some word you can find, some bridge, that will make your bodies remember what was once there, the language you once shared. But that language is long extinct.
In a way, it’s a word that has brought the two of you here, on opposite sides of this chasm, your separate lives. You’d like to tell her about a lot of things - Aya Sofia in the snow, for instance. But where would you even start? She hasn’t changed. She hasn’t grown up. She hasn’t forgiven you. All of which you knew would happen, but still makes you sad in a kind of bottomless way. You wonder if you’ve changed, if you’ve grown up. You wonder if you’re turning into your father, if your vanity now outweighs your humility; your insecurity your confidence. You wonder if there’s anything constant in our lives, or if every moment is, in hindsight, like trying to grab a handful of water.
“When we were together,” you want to tell her, but don’t, “you felt like a dream. Lighter than that. Insubstantial. Some lovely ghost that had wandered into my life and haunted it with beauty. And what’s left in the wake of that?”
Silence, mostly.
~
You’re driving again, late at night, because this, maybe, is what you miss most. The comfort of a car, the quiet of the suburbs, the softness of other lives at rest. Snow is coming in, down from the Arctic. Here’s two memories, concrete things, stories that may or may not matter to anyone but you. The first is about snow. Two feet of it came down, some years back. You were at your best friend’s house, before he left, before all of you left. You loved that house, how isolated it was, the tall elms and oaks in the backyard, how they swayed in the wind and how clear the stars were beyond them. You loved leaving that house in winter, looking skyward.
You, your best friend, his girlfriend, and a few other friends congregated there. The snow came down. All of you trudged through it, lugging a sled of beer, hiking to the nearest bar. Sitting there, shaking yourselves dry. Laughing, effortless together - kids, really. After the beer was gone, you went sledding by moonlight. Then you stayed up until dawn, cooking eggs and bacon on a cast iron stove.
“Do you remember that?” your best friend asks you, these years later, the girlfriend long gone.
“I do,” you say, smiling as he hands you a cigarette.
“Those were good days. Some of the best days.”
The second story is about L. It was your second night with her. You were strangers, then, as now, but strangers in a different way - strangers of possibility instead of exhaustion. Strangers waiting to be filled, instead of drained. You went for a long drive, like this one. Went down to the airport, kissed and watched planes land. Then you drove out into the farmland beyond the city, where the Quakers still have meeting houses, and you lay in a graveyard and looked at the stars and talked until nearly dawn. These things matter, in some way, but mostly they matter because they provide those layers of history, both inside of us and in a place, and they bind us to that place, even as those we love drift away.
You drive by her house on this, your last night here. Make the four familiar turns, some memory of all those forgotten drives worked so deep into who you are that, even if nothing specific remains, those drives are there, some general impression, some moment in your life when you felt a little bit less lonely and thought that, maybe, with a little luck, it would be possible to be present.
Both of you are leaving in the morning, for your new lives, far away from this place, this place that is so marked by each of you, will forever be mapped by the other, no matter how far away you run. Her light is on. She’s up there, packing, wearing a black tank top - the familiar shoulders, which you once knew so well - her hair pulled up.
You keep driving. There’s nothing to stop for.
~
What has it been worth? What have you learned?
I guess I couldn’t say with any certainty. I guess I’ve learned that some people will walk 3000 miles for a new life and that others can endure 6 months in an Iranian jail and that, sometimes, when there’s a war going on over your head, you just want to break into song. That I’m not sure whether I would have the courage to do any of those things, but that I was selfish enough to move 5000 miles away from my family to write a book and mend a wounded heart. That there are limits to love, and kindness, and that though lovers become strangers, the memory of who they once were is a tougher thing to shake, perhaps even impossible. That one year weighs less and less as you get older, and that sometimes you’ll be grateful for this, but other times you’ll wish it was heavier, the way it was in childhood. That Czech women are outlandishly pretty. That kindness will often surprise you with its depth. That strangers will sometimes nurse you back to health. That people, everywhere, like to dance. That sex can be so good it leaves you unable to speak. That even sex that good still leaves you yearning for a beautiful conversation. That love, oftentimes, isn’t enough. That they party the same way in Greek villages as they do in Wisconsin villages. That some men will do almost anything for money - sell twelve year old girls on the street, kill one another, throw tear gas at children - and that some will do almost anything to avoid it. That tear gas tastes like shit. That we are so afraid of death and nothingness that we will marry people we do not love. That few things in life are more enjoyable than laughing until you cry with an old friend, over endless wine, in a Roman trattoria. That the sky in Istanbul, in May, is the same as the sky in Philadelphia, in October, is the same as the sky in Wisconsin, in August, is the same as the sky in Greece, in March. That most people, including me, are mainly looking our for themselves. That you can love a person enough to know that you would only fail them and hurt them. That I will never fully grasp the scope of the privilege I was born into, and the leeway it has afforded me. That most men don’t care to know beautiful women beyond their beauty. That editing a book is harder than writing it. That I was right: I could be alone with nothing but my writing and still be happy. That even this joy has limits; that I’ll always be called back to life again, to the messy intertwining of love and friendship and sex. That some part of me craves the validation of female attention more than almost anything else, and that this resemblance to my father, more than any other, terrifies me. That if left unresolved, anger will fester inside of you, and it will infect everything. That good memories can be ruined by things outside your control, but that with time, some of them will be returned to you, like petals falling from a cherry tree in spring - gifts of grace.
I’ve learned that little children have good memories; that in our absence, they make up myths and stories, just as adults do.
I’ve learned that there is no joy quite like the ease of being with your family at the dinner table, even if that joy diminishes with repetition. That it’s this familiarity - the years and years of thoughtless, forgotten meals - that now gives these aberrations their power. That maybe the whole point of childhood is to be forced into familiarity so that later, you can appreciate the necessity of absence.
~
Back in Istanbul, you meet a new woman, lovely, brilliant, and you lead her through an ancient passageway, where an old man unlocks an ancient door, and then you emerge onto a roof, into searing sunlight, and you watch the boats silently plying about the water, and your heart feels, temporarily, set alight.
You see an old lover and you wonder if she’s dying - she’s so thin, so pale - and you lie in bed with her while she cries for reasons she can’t articulate in English and it scares you, to have someone holding onto you so tightly, someone that you know so little about, to feel the weight of our loneliness, the weight of the void, which you do such a good job ignoring, even when it knocks on your door - that dull pain in your chest after a run; that ache in your liver after a long night of drinking.
Another friend cries beside you on the bus. She wonders how she would ever leave this place, which she’s mapped so thoroughly, with love and loss. How she could bear shedding the weight of all those layers. Clumsily, you fumble for her hand. But it doesn’t help. You’re reminded of how insignificant love is, how frail it is, how weak when compared with our solitude. There are limits, you see. To what we can say with language, to what we can express. To how much we can see through another person‘s eyes. There are limits beyond which love doesn’t matter, beyond which every single one of us is alone with the maps of our lives, the geography of our hearts and memories. Everything can be taken from us. Everything will be.
She leaves without a word and, lost, you work your way down to the sea, onto a boat. The clink of spoons stirring tea, the soft murmur of late night conversations, sleepy couples talking in their own specific tongues. You move to the back of the ship, down the stairwell, down to where the engines hum and throb, where you are alone with their noise, with the dark surface of the sea, with the lights of the ancient city all around you. Ortakoy, Besiktas, and, distantly, Sultanahmet. Uskudar, Galata, Kuzguncuk. G’s stairs, A’s roof, and N’s balcony. P’s mosque, L’s park. The lights, the melodies of other lives, sing on the water, and suddenly, there is the call to prayer, resounding like a bell.
You‘ve learned that you can come home again, even if it’s a little scary, even if it makes you wonder whether there’s any reality to your new life. Even if it makes you wonder whether all of this is something you made up - some myth you’ve created on one long, heartbroken drive through the suburbs.
No, you start where you spent most of your time. You start on the road. It is late at night, December, the suburban homes framed by Christmas lights, the trees barren and the stars clear beyond them. A thousand thousand nights like this before, an endless narrative of them, running unbroken. This is what you’ve lost, and left behind. You’ve lost the habit of these drives, these nights, the space they’d carved at the center of your life. What is that space anymore? What has it been filled with? Is there room for another space?
These are things you’ll ask later, back in Istanbul.
You’re driving down the old streets. There’s the home where you spent three years of your life - fell in love, made love, wrote the short story that would get you published, ate a thousand egg and bacon breakfasts while watching the sun creep over the rooftops - and now it’s full of other lives, other dreams and narratives.
Here’s the route you took to L's house. Four turns - right, left, right, right. A hundred hundred times you made this drive, the windows down, the smell of the suburbs in her hair, on your skin. Down into the hollow where you cross the creek. Past the park where the two of you used to watch storms. A hundred hundred drives, and what remains? Her hand out the window. Maybe a general sensation - of being young, of life being still on the horizon, of wasting time.
What remains of these mundane details when we break from them? What are they worth? The very fiber of our lives, the stones that build the foundation of our identity. And then, suddenly, they’re gone, vanished.
~
The nephew follows you everywhere. Takes you by the hand and drags you into his bedroom, to play with the train set. Or behind the Christmas tree, to turn on the lights. Or under the dining room table, to lie with the dogs. Or into the closet, to hide from his father, your brother.
He follows you everywhere. And it’s a strange confluence between joy and anxiety. Joy that you’re here, anxiety that you will leave, the nervousness of how to explain it all - the guilt of leaving the foundation behind. You wonder, in fifteen years, how he will remember you. Whether he’ll think you were absent and selfish.
But for now, there is only joy. There is laughing and whispering in the closet while the dogs bark and your brother tramps around like a giant, searching. There is the way he nestles up against you on the couch, wanting to read, to be told a story, to be close to a body that he loves, though why he loves a body that is so often absent is something you cannot understand. And you wonder how long it will last.
~
Absence. It’s a word that, you suspect, defines you. You are absent. You are absent at family dinners. You are absent at church on Sunday mornings. You are absent when your brother needs counsel, or maybe just someone to share a cigarette with. You are absent when your friends needs to hear a helpful voice. You are absent in the heart of the girl. You are the absent presence your nephew tells strangers about, the uncle who lives at the airport. You are absent from the people and places of your life.
~
This, then, is perhaps the balance you’ve chosen: the writing over everything else. The pursuit of the writing over everything else. We are creatures of values, and our choices reflect those values. We value comfort, or we value community, or we value faith. You, you value stories. You value the pursuit of stories. And you’re not sure why. You’re not sure how this idea got in your head that stories were the most important thing you could do.
You rationalize it. There are plenty of fathers in the world. There are plenty of good men - like your father, your grandfather, your brother - in the world, men who work unglamorous jobs and live the monotony of family life, who are present in their communities, because it is what good men do. They are present.
But the world needs storytellers, too. It needs absence. It needs people to report back from out there, the outer boundaries of the imagination, the places you imagined on those thousand thousand late night drives through the suburbs, past the girl’s house, past the Wawa’s, past the high school football field, past the quiet churches and slumbering golf courses.
This is what you tell yourself when you put on your coat to go out the door and your nephew takes your hand and says,
“No, don’t go. You can’t go.”
~
At least, then, report on what you have seen. Surely you’ve seen something worth reporting on, something more than beautiful women silhouetted by the residual lights of the city in those sleepless, verbose hours before dawn.
I’ve seen Aya Sofia in the snow, with the stray dogs as my only companions, sheets of snow coming down in the wind like curtains, an impossible field of white draped over the old church, over the sultan’s mosque, the dogs wrestling like children, the roads abandoned, old Constantinople empty but for me.
And what’s that worth?
I’ve seen a Syrian woman in the smoky basement of a bar, her hair pulled up like a blonde beehive, stand in front of a room of strangers and tell us about the sounds of war, the music of it playing over her head while she went to school, while she went shopping. I’ve listened to her sing us a song, her voice shaky with nerves - a woman who had survived war nervous to sing in front of strangers; how strange we can be - an old folk song that her mother would sing to her when she was a girl and couldn’t sleep.
And that’s worth being away from your nephew?
I’ve seen an Iranian friend sitting in the corner of a dinner party, watching us dance with a smile on his face. And when I asked him why, he said that he never would have imagined being here, in Istanbul, with us, during those endless days in prison, when he didn’t see light for six months. “It’s time you miss most,” he said. “The call to prayer. Those markers of time.”
I’ve drank tea with a boy who walked three thousand miles across the mountains of Afghanistan, the deserts of Iran, the rocklands of Turkey.
I have, for what little it’s worth, seen women silhouetted in the lights of the city before dawn, cigarettes in their hands, and listened as they told me about their families, their fears, their hopes.
I’ve seen a group of boys exchanging liras while they cheered on two cocks fighting in the street, parabolas of blood everywhere - in feathers, on t-shirts, spattered like paint on the pavement. I’ve seen gypsiess dancing in their slums from the balcony of a barricaded apartment. I’ve seen a mosque full during the heat of Ramadan, the men with their bowed heads, and out the window, the green of a poplar rustling in the wind, the geometric imperfection of Istanbul tumbling away beyond. I’ve seen that city, endless on the horizon.
I’ve watched myself fall for a woman whose hair I never even saw, and then watched as she married a man she did not love because her faith required her to do so.
I’ve bought flowers from a twelve year old girl on a street in Greece, her frail body wrapped in dirty rags, and wondered about how she came to be here, and whether the German tourists that flooded the island during the summer paid to go to bed with her.
I’ve watched Greek villagers dress up like terrorists and in black face, and then I’ve watched them dance until five in the morning, dance the way that my Midwestern relatives used to dance in barns and church basements - with drunken abandon.
I’ve eaten dinner in a house built of scrap metal and cinder blocks.
I’ve laughed with women dressed in full burqas.
I’ve seen the sun come up over the Mediterranean. I’ve seen many, many people cry. I’ve asked God to save me and to forgive me and to give me strength. I’ve prostrated to him in mosques and atop Greek mountains and on many planes. I’ve seen ten thousand people scatter like animals while tear gas canisters glint in a bright summer sun. I’ve run through clouds of white gas, choking, my whole body aflame, and wondered how I’ll ever breathe again. I’ve eaten fresh figs for breakfast, sheep’s intestines as a late night snack. I’ve caught and cooked my own mussels. I’ve danced with the most beautiful woman in a bar and then gone home with her. I’ve ridden in the back of a truck with the children of shepherds, and their dogs, and we’ve communicated with our hands and shared cigarettes and tea. I’ve seen the sun set over St. Peter’s and then seen it rise opposite St. Peter’s the next morning. I’ve seen trannies hanging out the windows of old Ottoman homes, fanning themselves in the summer heat, their make-up turned to mud, their voices falling down like early morning birds, serenading the orchestra across the street. I’ve stood on a roof with a strange new woman, the Bosporous beneath us, Istanbul all around us, and waited for the call to prayer.
Yes, and what has it been worth? What have you learned? What has the point of it all been?
~
You're not certain that you haven’t imagined all of it, that it hasn’t all been some grief-stricken dream, something you’ve created every night on long, lonely drives through the place that was once your home. And more than that, you wonder if it even matters - if there’s any difference between the world out there and the one you imagined for so many years on these drives.
~
You and your best friend walk through Philadelphia. Past the old apartments, the old watering holes. Down to Independence Hall, then out to Rittenhouse, where you stand in the drained fountain like you would have all those years ago, all those nights when you talked about women long forgotten, futures long abandoned. You remember coming here with the Palestinian woman who was in love with a different man, sitting and watching the drug dealers and the musicians playing Four Square, sweating in the late-day heat of Philadelphia in July, wishing she loved you instead.
A man approaches you and your best friend. He speaks to you for ten minutes, and only in riddles. And then he vanishes. Then two prostitutes take a photo with you, press their fake tits into your chest. Then they, too, vanish, walking precariously on six inch heels.
“Philadelphia,” your best friend says, shaking his head.
Philadelphia.
The two of you drive to the art museum in silence, wind whipping snow across the empty street. You remember sitting on these steps with the girl you thought you were going to marry - the second girl you thought you were going to marry - who is now a doctor in Colorado and who you will never see again. You remember sledding down the steps. You remember throwing a baseball up here. You remember these layers upon layers of memory, all of them so muddled together. This, you think, is what makes a place home - these layers, that muddle. Memories so deep, so heavily accumulated, that you can’t scrape them all away, can’t cut through them to reach the blankness of new experience. You’ll never again see Philadelphia for the first time. You’ll never again climb these steps for the first time.
Your best friend hands you a cigarette. The city is down there, your old city, shimmering like ancient ice in the cold.
“We’re getting old,” he sighs.
~
It makes you remember the first time you saw Istanbul. A rainy, grey morning at the end of March, following a long, sleepless bus ride. The city was nothing to you then, a sprawling, nameless canvas, a monolithic word - Istanbul - that symbolized something, though you didn’t know what. You didn’t know its shape, you didn’t know its neighborhoods. You didn’t know the Bosporous, or Aya Sofia in the distance, or Ortakoy beneath you, Besiktas crawling away from the water, Galata Tower far off, Cihangir mosque looming like a sentinel over the water, the homes of Uskudar stacked like a messy child’s blocks. Back then, it was pure mystery, like life before language. Primordial.
Slowly, you began to name it, in the way we name places - after the people we’ve loved in them. N’s street; L’s stairs; A’s restaurant; P’s tea garden; M’s basement; G’s roof. Every city is nothing more than a map of our heart’s geography.
~
You are back in Philadelphia, walking down A’s alleyway towards C’s dive bar. What strikes you, after this year away, is the quiet of Philadelphia’s streets, the emptiness.
Like all good dive bars, this one has not changed. You remember a February afternoon, snow flurries outside the door, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and talking about writing.
You wonder if this could be enough for you again. The quiet of the streets. To spend a modest evening walking and talking about nothing specific with a good woman, a woman whose ambitions for life are realistic, as opposed to yours: children, a steady career, a loving spouse, a comfortable house. These are good things, you remember. These are the things you grew up with. But even while you two sit, slightly punchdrunk, together after these years apart, talking easily, the way old lovers sometimes can, you feel something pulling at you, pulling you a way. A whisper in the back of you head.
“You miss home, don’t you?” she asks. There have been many nights - in Istanbul, in Greece - when you’ve measured the weight of a possible life with her, tried to decide whether it would be enough, enough to quiet that whisper, the one that only writing seems to quell.
Not exactly, you don't tell her. I miss having a home, feeling like a place was mine, like I fit well there. But that had already been lost here, before I left. It’s not that I don’t have people I love in Istanbul. I do. And they love me, too, I think. But I miss my nephew. I miss sitting with him in front of the fire place, reading. I miss the long, nighttime drives, and the quiet of winter in the suburbs. At times, I miss the depth of the relationship I had with L, before things went bad. I miss talking like that with someone, which isn’t an easy thing to find, and very frail, tenuous. I spent a night once with a Czech woman, sitting in bed, giddy with sleeplessness, waiting for the first light of dawn, the call to prayer, telling stories about our lives. It reminded me of how much I’d missed being able to do that. To talk about anything, to feel like anything was possible, to feel like I was completely myself, without wounds or pretense or vanity. But when we woke up in the morning, having fallen asleep before the call to prayer, it was gone, whatever it was. We were outside of it. Or, we were back inside whatever we normally were - back in our narratives, our identities, our carefully crafted languages.
What I feel is not a longing for a specific place. It’s more a feeling of placelessness, of being alone in a very fundamental way. Which is beautiful sometimes, but also very difficult. It’s not special, either. But I think it’s something most of us have felt, at one point or another. That we’re out here all alone.
~
You see L, which really isn’t all that remarkable. Mostly, she feels like a stranger, and you wish that weren’t the case. But it is. You feel like there should be some word you can find, some bridge, that will make your bodies remember what was once there, the language you once shared. But that language is long extinct.
In a way, it’s a word that has brought the two of you here, on opposite sides of this chasm, your separate lives. You’d like to tell her about a lot of things - Aya Sofia in the snow, for instance. But where would you even start? She hasn’t changed. She hasn’t grown up. She hasn’t forgiven you. All of which you knew would happen, but still makes you sad in a kind of bottomless way. You wonder if you’ve changed, if you’ve grown up. You wonder if you’re turning into your father, if your vanity now outweighs your humility; your insecurity your confidence. You wonder if there’s anything constant in our lives, or if every moment is, in hindsight, like trying to grab a handful of water.
“When we were together,” you want to tell her, but don’t, “you felt like a dream. Lighter than that. Insubstantial. Some lovely ghost that had wandered into my life and haunted it with beauty. And what’s left in the wake of that?”
Silence, mostly.
~
You’re driving again, late at night, because this, maybe, is what you miss most. The comfort of a car, the quiet of the suburbs, the softness of other lives at rest. Snow is coming in, down from the Arctic. Here’s two memories, concrete things, stories that may or may not matter to anyone but you. The first is about snow. Two feet of it came down, some years back. You were at your best friend’s house, before he left, before all of you left. You loved that house, how isolated it was, the tall elms and oaks in the backyard, how they swayed in the wind and how clear the stars were beyond them. You loved leaving that house in winter, looking skyward.
You, your best friend, his girlfriend, and a few other friends congregated there. The snow came down. All of you trudged through it, lugging a sled of beer, hiking to the nearest bar. Sitting there, shaking yourselves dry. Laughing, effortless together - kids, really. After the beer was gone, you went sledding by moonlight. Then you stayed up until dawn, cooking eggs and bacon on a cast iron stove.
“Do you remember that?” your best friend asks you, these years later, the girlfriend long gone.
“I do,” you say, smiling as he hands you a cigarette.
“Those were good days. Some of the best days.”
The second story is about L. It was your second night with her. You were strangers, then, as now, but strangers in a different way - strangers of possibility instead of exhaustion. Strangers waiting to be filled, instead of drained. You went for a long drive, like this one. Went down to the airport, kissed and watched planes land. Then you drove out into the farmland beyond the city, where the Quakers still have meeting houses, and you lay in a graveyard and looked at the stars and talked until nearly dawn. These things matter, in some way, but mostly they matter because they provide those layers of history, both inside of us and in a place, and they bind us to that place, even as those we love drift away.
You drive by her house on this, your last night here. Make the four familiar turns, some memory of all those forgotten drives worked so deep into who you are that, even if nothing specific remains, those drives are there, some general impression, some moment in your life when you felt a little bit less lonely and thought that, maybe, with a little luck, it would be possible to be present.
Both of you are leaving in the morning, for your new lives, far away from this place, this place that is so marked by each of you, will forever be mapped by the other, no matter how far away you run. Her light is on. She’s up there, packing, wearing a black tank top - the familiar shoulders, which you once knew so well - her hair pulled up.
You keep driving. There’s nothing to stop for.
~
What has it been worth? What have you learned?
I guess I couldn’t say with any certainty. I guess I’ve learned that some people will walk 3000 miles for a new life and that others can endure 6 months in an Iranian jail and that, sometimes, when there’s a war going on over your head, you just want to break into song. That I’m not sure whether I would have the courage to do any of those things, but that I was selfish enough to move 5000 miles away from my family to write a book and mend a wounded heart. That there are limits to love, and kindness, and that though lovers become strangers, the memory of who they once were is a tougher thing to shake, perhaps even impossible. That one year weighs less and less as you get older, and that sometimes you’ll be grateful for this, but other times you’ll wish it was heavier, the way it was in childhood. That Czech women are outlandishly pretty. That kindness will often surprise you with its depth. That strangers will sometimes nurse you back to health. That people, everywhere, like to dance. That sex can be so good it leaves you unable to speak. That even sex that good still leaves you yearning for a beautiful conversation. That love, oftentimes, isn’t enough. That they party the same way in Greek villages as they do in Wisconsin villages. That some men will do almost anything for money - sell twelve year old girls on the street, kill one another, throw tear gas at children - and that some will do almost anything to avoid it. That tear gas tastes like shit. That we are so afraid of death and nothingness that we will marry people we do not love. That few things in life are more enjoyable than laughing until you cry with an old friend, over endless wine, in a Roman trattoria. That the sky in Istanbul, in May, is the same as the sky in Philadelphia, in October, is the same as the sky in Wisconsin, in August, is the same as the sky in Greece, in March. That most people, including me, are mainly looking our for themselves. That you can love a person enough to know that you would only fail them and hurt them. That I will never fully grasp the scope of the privilege I was born into, and the leeway it has afforded me. That most men don’t care to know beautiful women beyond their beauty. That editing a book is harder than writing it. That I was right: I could be alone with nothing but my writing and still be happy. That even this joy has limits; that I’ll always be called back to life again, to the messy intertwining of love and friendship and sex. That some part of me craves the validation of female attention more than almost anything else, and that this resemblance to my father, more than any other, terrifies me. That if left unresolved, anger will fester inside of you, and it will infect everything. That good memories can be ruined by things outside your control, but that with time, some of them will be returned to you, like petals falling from a cherry tree in spring - gifts of grace.
I’ve learned that little children have good memories; that in our absence, they make up myths and stories, just as adults do.
I’ve learned that there is no joy quite like the ease of being with your family at the dinner table, even if that joy diminishes with repetition. That it’s this familiarity - the years and years of thoughtless, forgotten meals - that now gives these aberrations their power. That maybe the whole point of childhood is to be forced into familiarity so that later, you can appreciate the necessity of absence.
~
Back in Istanbul, you meet a new woman, lovely, brilliant, and you lead her through an ancient passageway, where an old man unlocks an ancient door, and then you emerge onto a roof, into searing sunlight, and you watch the boats silently plying about the water, and your heart feels, temporarily, set alight.
You see an old lover and you wonder if she’s dying - she’s so thin, so pale - and you lie in bed with her while she cries for reasons she can’t articulate in English and it scares you, to have someone holding onto you so tightly, someone that you know so little about, to feel the weight of our loneliness, the weight of the void, which you do such a good job ignoring, even when it knocks on your door - that dull pain in your chest after a run; that ache in your liver after a long night of drinking.
Another friend cries beside you on the bus. She wonders how she would ever leave this place, which she’s mapped so thoroughly, with love and loss. How she could bear shedding the weight of all those layers. Clumsily, you fumble for her hand. But it doesn’t help. You’re reminded of how insignificant love is, how frail it is, how weak when compared with our solitude. There are limits, you see. To what we can say with language, to what we can express. To how much we can see through another person‘s eyes. There are limits beyond which love doesn’t matter, beyond which every single one of us is alone with the maps of our lives, the geography of our hearts and memories. Everything can be taken from us. Everything will be.
She leaves without a word and, lost, you work your way down to the sea, onto a boat. The clink of spoons stirring tea, the soft murmur of late night conversations, sleepy couples talking in their own specific tongues. You move to the back of the ship, down the stairwell, down to where the engines hum and throb, where you are alone with their noise, with the dark surface of the sea, with the lights of the ancient city all around you. Ortakoy, Besiktas, and, distantly, Sultanahmet. Uskudar, Galata, Kuzguncuk. G’s stairs, A’s roof, and N’s balcony. P’s mosque, L’s park. The lights, the melodies of other lives, sing on the water, and suddenly, there is the call to prayer, resounding like a bell.
You‘ve learned that you can come home again, even if it’s a little scary, even if it makes you wonder whether there’s any reality to your new life. Even if it makes you wonder whether all of this is something you made up - some myth you’ve created on one long, heartbroken drive through the suburbs.
Post a Comment