TE16 Turkish Delight

Our Best Love Story to remember that peerless sea scent once more despite the vague toot of a train whistle, as my struggle to love this city that drifts farther away fromme with each passing day, with its bridges built every day but in turn also torn down? Can a similar struggle not be found within a person who stays indifferent to my existence and my appeals? It’s like us, after all, to be melancholy, to turn autumnal, to revel in bus trips in the middle of the night, in a motel somewhere between two forsaken towns, in the wrenching pain and poetry of the tawdry meals in the tawdry restaurant of that motel; it all becomes those people who, like us, are forced to remain in the beginning, talking to their shadows, our best love story unable to belong anywhere in spite of all their wishes. The Arab’s Coffeehouse is very becoming on this cool summer morning, yes. I know very well now which stops the train that’s now in the stationwill make next, the games it will host, and with which actors. Idealtepe, Süreyya Beach, Pendik. The people who were once alien to this city, whose stories I shared in their myriad forms, have now departed to locations far away. Irreconcilably different departures in irreconcilably different countries and vernaculars await them now, as well as irreconcilably different reunions. Pendik, Süreyya Beach, Idealtepe. The scent of the sea and its evocations. Never mind, never mind, push past it, push past it, as an old friend would have said. New inquests will bring us nowhere, and another attempt at trying to get past the hopelessness is tantamount to rowing upstream, now. After all, most if not all those who experienced those spaces know very well what we lost even in the very recent past. Considering it all from this perspective, it may be for the best to leave everyone

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