so i help Sena babysit little Lucas and remember my teenage years when i babysat my two cousins every summer. Lucas with the big blue eyes [patterned like a pineapple]. Lucas the serene, Lucas the good boy. the way he said 'mommy' made me want to hear it said to me. all the toylike contents of my place along with my children's books are lying on the floor of my living room now.
the heat is sucking all my energy. i want to head down south, live by the kind of sea that you can actually swim in.

there's this girl and she says,
"I want a lover I don't have to love
I want a boy who's so drunk he doesn't talk
Where's the kid with the chemicals
I got a hunger and I can't seem to get full
I need some meaning I can memorize
The kind I have always seems to slip my mind
But you, but you
You write such pretty words
But life's no storybook
Love's an excuse to get hurt and to hurt "
i don't want a lover i don't have to love. i want a lover i love, without 'have to's.

my favorite things

the addiction a recently discovered song brings
being out in the world while everyone's at work
rooms full of light
these days, opening the window to early morning air
on a walk, the reflection of the sunshine on the sea that makes me feel like it's moving with me
full-grain bread from Paul
sitting at BP, sipping lemonade, reading
ecstatic feeling that comes with dancing
the moment they bring the mezes at sofyali
locating myself in front of the computer with a big bowl of salad
walking through nisantasi with freshly blow-dried hair & feeling like everyone's looking
running into someone unexpectedly
revealing conversations
kennedy lodge
really getting into a translation work, blood rushing to my cheeks
reading comments on my blog posts
"we are a team now" feeling -also ecstatic-
coffee
yoga at the end of a long day
coming up with a good outfit
putting into words exactly how i feel & seeing it written down
clear reciprocities
leaning back and taking in a sunday breakfast
my "the way we live" book
robinson crusoe bookstore and its contents

night

i'm sitting on a bench looking at fireworks bursting on the other side of the bosphorus. other than the sparks flying up like hundreds of comets, and some kids screaming in amazement with each chrysanthemum, the world is still. lovers occupying benches to my both sides laugh and cuddle and kiss. more of them fireworks are being rocketed in the distance but we cannot see those, only hear- along with cicadas, also anonymous. what is this kitten looking for so intently? the lamps illuminating the shore across do not blink, just stare at me like that. this little community here, joined together by the seating, the summer night and the beauty of the scenery; myself, lovers and cats, we don't even care about who lives across the shore and what they are doing as of this moment.

Lois Lane: You know my um... Richard. He's a pilot. He takes me up all the time.
Superman: Not like this.

bronze, marble, stone

“The diary of my sculpted life,” says Auguste Rodin (for The Gates of Hell) and how soothing is the sound of it, to be able to say that as an artist and a man. I read the line and I fall into curiosity and maybe melancholy. Will there be something to identify as the diary of my (written, sung, recorded, happily lived) life? How do you fill in a diary of years? So I’m at the Sabanci Museum in the middle of the day, enjoying my little escape from the daily routine into the light-filled halls of the museum, the lavenders and the hydrangeas in the garden overlooking the blue, and the sculpted life of Rodin. I walk through a bronze nakedness and antiquity themes, feeling serene. I circle around each and every sculpture, look but don’t touch. Except for The Hand of the Devil, just because it is so white, so inviting in its marble coolness. Brings me suddenly back to the city of Hierapolis. Pamukkale, the massive chunk of white in my past. So concrete with its antique city, Phrygian statues, stone tombs, but so distant to the imagination, you grow up thinking, who were all those people that carved cryptic letters into stones? Those oversized human figures set in stone? No idea, but that kind of mystery is what I grew up around. Sure enough, I reach out and feel the smooth surface of the hand. As if I’m still in a Phrygian city emerged from deep underground. Still 14, on a Sunday picnic with my family. The feeling surely is somewhere under my skin.

Photo: Pamukkale, where once upon a time water was abundant.

I was later than I expected, so I rushed downstairs to find him at Starbucks with a cup of coffee. His marketing journals and cigarettes on the table, only the latter appealing to me at that moment. So I lit one, gave some quick answers, said I was really hungry. In the middle of the city, away from the Bosphorus, the sound of water coming from the fountains of the spaceship-mall made me feel different, detached, in spite of his presence pulling me towards familiar waters.
Within two minutes of being seated at Wagamama, we looked at each other and pronounced the very same word, as if it was hanging in the air in a bubble. Experience, was the word. I thought of experiment too, right after I started reading the menu, but I didn't say it out loud. This was before the food's arrival and I was the pilot landing us where we were supposed to eat. And the menu did not give guarantees.
Gokce ended up loving everything. I realized I had forgotten about his fondness of food, thought hard so I can recall something, say if he liked desserts especially, or any cuisines. "I have no memory of it," went the Gandalf in my head. And it's not like my body was there with him and the noodles while my mind wandered through the castles of our past. Of course I was there body and soul most of the time, with the informative waiter and the yummy side dish, the baby with the devilish grin and what we talked about, the rhythms he played with chopsticks and Gokce himself.