59. Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink ....

QUOTE OF THE DAY .. Sometimes you only need a moment to forget a life, and sometimes a whole lifetime is not enough for forget a moment. 

My Istanbul adventure is coming to an end. It’s hard to believe it’s a month since I first arrived here with Luda, excited after Morocco to be in another exotic city, with only the faintest memory of my last visit ten years ago. Only four weeks ago we wandered lost, dazed and excited down side streets, shrieking with laughter as we walked in dark circles, layered to the eyeballs with thick coats and scarves.  Now I know my way around the back streets, and I’m known in the markets where many vendors wave hello, and ask me to stay for lunch.  My pomegranate juice seller charges me the local price and pulls up a little wooden stool when I walk past.  The Star Holiday Hotel, has, like my hotel in Kathmandu, become like home.  I’ve got over the blues, and I’m in a really, really, happy place.  I have a bounce to my step, my hair shines like copper, I’m sleeping like a baby, I don’t have nightmares.  I think I can see the path ahead.

Moi on Bosphorus cruiser, enjoying sun

The day after the Bosphorus cruise, the sun shone like it had something to prove.  Istanbul burst into light, people played music in the street, they pulled up little tables to play chequers or chess, singers were busking in the square,  and everyone was eating ice cream.  I needed to ditch my backpack for a new, more portable case for my next journey which I knew from previous experience would involve a lot of steps and a lot of fashion criticism.

  

I returned to the Grand Bazaar.  Its labyrinths don’t frighten me any more. I found the yellow wheelie case I’d seen previously and quickly negotiated my price.  I collected the Afghani lapis which I’d set aside before England, and the two Afghani coats from Salim, the Afghani trader, that I’d promised to get for Lovely Miss Marvel. I sat with Salim’s dad on a stack of Anatolian carpets spread out in the sunny square, drinking tea in tiny glasses while he patched up the sleeves and stitched on some cord and Salim put my phone number in his Blackberry and offered to meet me at my next destination.

My next home - in shallah!

I was on my way back to the hotel, because David had arranged to call me.  Yes, we’ve been talking and skyping and for a myriad reasons, I’ve been very happy that we have.  He’s always been some sort of lifeline to me, a fundamental fix that during this journey was hard to let go of. When the nights were long and the days sucky, he kept me going. I wanted to get back to the hotel quickly, so I wouldn’t miss him.  We had a few hours of talking opportunity before my next destination.  But I needed a loo stop. I was working my way into the door, legs practically crossed, dragging my new yellow wheelie case in one hand and my loo payment in the other, when a young man grabbed my arm. 

“Merhaba, hello! Remember me?” he asked.  “I saw you at Dervish dance at Arasta!  I want to take you to Taksim, where you go?”  “Right now,” I said, “I go in here, where you can’t follow me!”. “So, I will wait,” he said, leaning indolently against the ancient stone pillar, one leg crossed against the other, ready for as long as I’d take. “I’ll look after your case also!”  Instead, I left my case at the door, paid my half Turkish lire to the Turkish woman in a Turkish polyester head scarf, who was watching Turkish soap opera on her iphone plugged into the white tiles, while five other women waited their turn.  

I did what I had to, in a tiny glass fronted booth, two metres from the kebab vendor who was doing a roaring lunchtime trade. Tea porters rushed by with their little brass trays of tiny tea filled gold cups, delivering them to the many vendors who relied on this service to keep their customers inside.  It’s the sort of toilet stop that your nightmares are made of. You have to calculate how much toilet paper you’ll need before you go in, and most of the visitors to this well of sanitation bring their used paper out with them and dispose of them in a communal, rather odious, bin, just a metre from the Sheesh sellers and the scarf twirlers.   

The brilliant Turks practically invented the flushing toilet. In the old days the marble seats of the great palaces were heated with hot running water from the thermal springs, and they were, with the hamams, the places where great conferences, of the financial and engineering type, took place. But they’ve never taken to paper, and that’s something I can’t take to.  What a hideous place for a pickup.  

But wait my young friend did, and then led me into his handbag stall where he tried for the next hour to persuade me to come out with him to Taksim for dinner and whatever.  His English was excellent, he was a sociology student, he was as cute as a button, he wanted to visit Uzbekistan, but hey, his post-adolescent pimples distracted me from his intentions.  It cost me a $60 orange leather fake Valentino handbag to shake him off. It’ll be my memento that I do have the potential of making the earth move for a twenties something trader.

Manoeuvering my way out of the labyrinth with relative ease,  a delicious - slightly older than my handbag friend - Turkish man ran after me, through the throngs of shoppers and glittering emporiums and cluttered stalls, begging me to have tea with him under the faded, painted arches of the Grand Bazaar.  “No!” I laughed, “You’re trying to sell me a carpet!”  “I’m not!” he said, “to other people, yes, but not you, I want to talk with you. I have seen you on many days and today you look more beautiful!”   He held his hand out to mine. It was warm, so warm. Fifty thousand volts of attraction shot through both of us. “Please,” he said, “this is very important”.  “No, I’m so sorry, I can’t,” I said,  and for the first time in years and years and years and years and whatever, I was truly sorry. “I am in a hurry!”  He held my hand, then my palm, then my finger, then fresh air, for long moments as the other fifty thousand volts left in Istanbul flashed through us both.  

Flushed to my core, and looking to see if he had continued to follow me, I moped back to the hotel, through the lanes of wholesale silver sellers and past the wrought iron grilles of the mosque, truly sorry that I hadn’t stopped to talk to my ardent pursuer.  He was handsome and sexy and articulate and there was a connection, and maybe he did have a villa on the Bosphorus. And a big swanky yacht. And the desire to go to Corsica on holiday. He said he had a cousin in Sydney I should meet. Perhaps.  Most probably he would have a wife. It didn’t matter - I wouldn’t have taken up any short term offers.  But he rattled me in the nicest of ways and it was wonderful for my ego.

I realised something was fundamentally shifting in my attachment to D.  I don’t know if I was pleased or sad:  emotionally this journey has been a slog.  It’s easier to hold onto a known intimacy than begin a new one, even if that intimacy - and its intracacies -  led to the journey. Across the world, D would always know where I was going, and whether I had arrived.  It comforted me, in a time of instability. In a time of strangers. In a time of no possessions, or home, or common language. 

“Travelling is a brutality”, wrote Cesare Pavese. “It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.  You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky -all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

A castle on the Black Sea

I’ve learned on this journey to rely totally on myself, on my intuition, and on my desires. The most freeing element of all has been the ability to be spontaneous.  I haven’t had to consult anyone about where or what I ate. I’ve gathered and discarded as I’ve needed. I’ve befriended and ended, as I’ve needed. I’ve been silent where I wanted and reached out when I needed. When D left me last August, left me to an enormous task that I thought would kill me in its completion, it was weeks before I could enter a supermarket and buy food for myself - weeks before I ventured to fathom the dvd player - months before I stopped waking in tears, in panic at his absence. I just existed.  I hated my home and I hated my bed and I hated my clothes. So I discarded them all and I slammed shut so many doors and I bought a plane ticket to the most far and challenging places I could imagine. Alone in strange countries, I was invisible, and I wanted to be so. I could be as miserable as I wanted, and I didn’t have to feel guilty.  

I look at the photographs taken early in this journey, and I look shrunken, spiritless. The experiences and people I attracted then depleted me further and took more from me than I could give - the relentless cold, the school, the glue sniffing children, the dirt, the constant sickness of body and soul.  All this was evidenced by my paralysis to do what I wanted so much - attend Holi and celebrate colours with a riot of happy people. When I contacted D on that day after my long disappearance, I slunk back to what was familiar, and then to my dismay I had to start the recovery process all over again.  In places my spirit should have been soaring. 

Sometime over the past five weeks, my spirit has shifted.  I don’t recognise that miserable person any more.  I feel five inches taller.  I feel light.  Physically, my hair is five inches longer, I am four kilos lighter and one size smaller. I’ve stopped wearing colours that make me invisible or unflattering clothes that hide my body because I feel inadequate.  I feel alive and I feel loved and I feel as if I’m a worthwhile woman again.  And I don’t need anyone’s permission to buy a fake leather orange Valentino handbag!

I packed the case for another load of goodies to ship to Sydney, and trundled to the courier on cobbles, between couples lunching and drinking and couples holding hands and couples snogging and couples making plans. The courier asked if he could carry one of my cases on one of my journeys, and in the street, another man stopped me to ask if would have tea with him. “Why?” I asked, “Just because you are so beautiful,” he replied.  I smiled, refused, and walked jauntily back to the hotel, under frothy branches of jasmine, past the Cisterna, over the ancient stones, past the postcard sellers and Turkish delight boutiques and the people selling spirographs on card tables set up on the footpaths.  The hotel crew shouted “Hello! Suvanna! You have good time?” when I walked in.  Back in my room, I opened the windows wide and watched the square while I waited for D’s call. 

We talked for an hour. Sometime during this conversation, I lost interest in what he was saying. I lost interest in all of my past and everything that held me to him. What happened, happened, and I’ll never know the full story, or why, and searching for any more truths here seem futile.  Our lives are too far apart now. I wanted to be outside, in the sun, enjoying my last rays of Istanbul.  I’m not alone any more because the fractured part of me has healed. I have learned too much and grown too much and let go of so much. I have become the me again that I like, and that other people want to love. 

HIs phone card ran out and we were cut off, in the middle of my saying “shattered”.  I sat there with the receiver in my hand, and I knew. I am not shattered any more. I am over all this holding on and waiting.  My life is too good now, and too wonderful now, and going forward so fast now, that I don’t want what I had. I am done. I am worth far more than crumbs. There are so many other people around me who want to, and do,  love me.  I’ve been wanting, for so long, what no longer invigorates me. 

Blue Mosque, from my window, with Marmara sea in background

The muezzin started his five o’clock big song of the day, shared with his other mosque mates. It was one of the calls that made all my hairs stand up. I got up off the bed and leaned way out the windows. Pink blossoms from the cherry trees in Sultanahmet square took on the wind, blew through my open window  and landed on my hair. The muezzin went on and on. The Blue Mosque gleamed like it had no tomorrow. The sun was brazen.  And I was done.  I was, finally, free.  I shed a little tear, then I opened my arms wide, and, alone in Istanbul in a lovely room overlooking everything I love,  I embraced my new life.  

I know I’ve made jokes about the mosque being so close that I could spit on it if I didn’t fear a fatwah, but there is a Jewish ceremony of separation that requires you having to spit three times into the wind.  I was ready to separate, finally;  a little ceremony for myself, a truthful one, not the many separations I’ve told my friends about when my heart was still breaking and I was still half of him and half of what I used to be and none of whom I wanted to be.

Yet all of this brought me here, and I could not be in a better place, geographically, physically, or emotionally.

I squared my shoulders, and faced the mosque, and the evening sun, and the blossoms, and all those below who love me in their unique ways, and I said Thank You. Then I spat three times into the wind. Phitooey. Phitooey. Phitooey. I. Am. Done.

And I decided not to return to Australia after Istanbul.

I'M GOING TO VENICE!