TE16 Turkish Delight

Our Best Love Story

18 Melancholy, theQanun,Afternoon, andOtherSuchThings Strictly speaking, we had always existed. We had lived within one another’sstormwhetherwewished toornot,wehadbeentangling together with all our avoidances, shortfalls, habitual defeats, our predisposition to introversion, our departures and silences, for a long, long time. It was only our sentences that differed, at most, our words, cataclysms and melancholies, perhaps. When that was the case we blamed only our own selves for our solitude, and I found myself almost happening upon your trail when I least expected it. Was this a delusion, an ancient deception, I wonder? Yet whatever our experiences and reasons for parting, we couldn’t findeasy respite fromoneanotherdespiteourparenthesesand the punctuation marks that could at times provide rest or sanctuary, our longings in the name of possibility and unending passion becoming insteadanobstacle, unreachability. Fordifferent stories and sentences often got involved and, asmentioned at some point or another, different melancholies merged with different stories. Different stories and melancholies, yes. At such times, everything seemed like an afternoon or some such thing, rang of solitude and muteness. I never tired of recounting such afternoons, thus never tired of experiencing them. Only, in those hours, I thought of old turns of phrase, thought I glimpsed your shadow or your fragrance in the depiction of a street. I then imagined you as a red-haired, pale-skinned, blue-eyed lover. There were times I claimed to be setting out in search of a manuscript. It was meaningful, of course, this departure, formidable. Then it was 47