Prompt #4: Istanbul.

Recently at Chatham, a large number of MFA students went to Turkey for their field seminar. I initially was set to go as well, but after a long discussion with our director, I realized that perhaps it wasn’t for me. Going to Turkey wouldn’t have been an adventure so much as it would’ve been me revisiting familiar ground.

I don’t talk much about the time I spent in Istanbul anymore. Enough time has passed and no longer do I have strong feelings about a place that was so important to me. The important part is that, at least, I remember the way I used to feel towards it.

A month after my father passed away in 2008, I did something that I don’t think anyone expected: I took a job in another country. With a large part of my family grieving and reassembling their lives, I fled for Istanbul, Turkey. There is a sense of guilt I feel to this day about it, about leaving, but I remember being on that plane from Seattle to Chicago, Chicago to Istanbul thinking that as selfish as it was, it was something I had do for myself. I had to come to terms with a life, without a father, alone.

Istanbul had me from the start. After Orhan, the school’s assistant picked me up we took the drive from Ataturk International to Kozyatagi on the Anatolian side of the city. The word metropolis doesn’t suit Istanbul. The city alone contains more than twice the people from my state, possibly even three times more with the undocumented lost in the Eurasian sprawl. Combined with oppressive pollution and an early spring heat, I was overwhelmed. But not the overwhelmed that is typically accompanied by anxiety. The kind of overwhelmed that makes you feel powerless, fatalistic, where all you can do is just watch. Jet-lagged, jittery, surrounded by people speaking a different language, I remember drifting in and out as Orhan spoke in broken English. Istanbul, if you were to consider it a European city (which I do not), would be unusual. Paris, Rome, Berlin, Barcelona all reeked of sulfur and dogshit, tagged in graffiti, preventing you from being adrift and lost in their supposed magic. But Istanbul smelled of vetiver grass, chamomile, and deep citrus, the avenue of my apartment lined with palms and neon-violet flowers. I would wake up later that night and take a stroll for baklava and a phonecard before returning to my pastel-colored apartment and grieve alone and far away from everyone I’d ever known—grieving properly. My room had an outside balcony and from it, I could make unfamiliar constellations in the sky, realizing that Istanbul was and remains the only city that could ever happen in.

There are many things I give Istanbul credit for, but this remains the first and most important. Time would pass in Istanbul and I would become one of them, fall in love with one of theirs. But as with all unfamiliar places, all alien and exotic, a routine begins to develop. That crowded midibus and ferryboat that was so fascinating, such an experience, would become an inconvenience. Crossing from Asia into Europe, over time, becomes a commute. When the time came to choose between my adopted home and my real one, I would choose the latter.

I don’t want to say I never look back—I do. Not as much as I used to, mind you, but I do. I try hard to stay in the now, not let nostalgia get the best of me. I know Istanbul is a different place now and all the components and people of my life from that time have moved on. But whenever Washington started to drizzle, or Pittsburgh gets too cold, I think back to sunlight flashing in Gizem’s eyes, all those walks with her by the cay at Kadikoy and pedestrian, cobblestoned Istiklal Caddesi. I think of the Galata Bridge and the fishermen with their cigarettes dangling out of their mouth, the toothless simit salesmen wishing God would bestow his peace upon me. But mostly, I think of that spring, that morning after that first night, and how everything would be okay.