September (gone)

SEPTEMBER (gone)

Pristine lakes. Punctual public transit. Nothing is out of place. Not even a candy wrapper scuffs the pavements. There are no scatterings. No disorder in this mountain fortress. A postcard existence every day.

Switzerland.

But once it seemed the luminous days would never end.

But that was Turkey,  the first decade of our new millennium. Like Atlantis those days seem submerged, uninhabitable. I retrieve them though, in fragments, slightly faded, like photos, tucked away with the rubble of other memories. 

Turkey gave September, the month of my birth, new meaning. In Canada, most birthdays, even long past graduation, rang with a kind of melancholy. Dwindled summer and the altered light. Disappeared friends. The dread of commencing a new school year. 

Not so in Turkey. September and October blazed. Days warm and gold suffused you. Outlined with haloes we were all like matinee idols.

Then evenings and the promise of night beneath uplit monuments.  The wind rose, lifted the sweat from your neck.  My first Istanbul birthday. We had descended one of Beyoglu’s many steeply falling streets, dodging taxis and scattering street cats only to climb an endless spiral stair, the marble worn and uneven. Up high everyone a sultan sprawled out on cushions quaffing Efes beers and G+Ts. A ceiling of cloud above the Anatolian shore intermittently cracked by lightning. To emerge on a rooftop with such a view, such a skyline. You could see why Fatih Sultan Mehmet had to crown an empire with Constantinople. How I wish I could fully revisit the awe of that view, that moment. It was everything. My own history fell away. 

Nothing about the city made sense. The sport shop with the massive model of a pistol pointed right at the Municipality’s sign which read: WELCOME TO ISTANBUL. The lira which made the poorest person an instant millionaire. At times the confusion, the chaos of the city could take on a slightly menacing air. The ground beneath your feet, the traffic, potholes, scammers and Taksi drivers all wanting to deprive you of your stable footing. It was never malicious. There was no big bad, just a first smattering of smoke rising almost indistinguishable from cloud. At least, at first.  

September. The Lycian coast. The trips. Children all tucked away for the season with textbooks and morning anthems. Pines bearding the mountains and the highway like a deranged grin. Stopped at mountainside trout farms to drink fresh pomegranate juice, sweet, bitter, delightful.

Then intense blue days, our sea-slicked bodies on pale rocks. The books. Reading about the Great Game, Central Asian history, interspersed with the novels of James Salter. 

That shade of Mediterranean blue and everything else so vivid. The seaside villages, post pink-cheeked tourist, breathing a collective sigh of relief. A lone foreigner and a Kurdish woman. Swimming off the cliffs. More Efes beer. Under a naked fluorescent bulb, salt scrubbed bodies, the colour of sunsets. 

September. Your days had no urgency. No schedule. Minibuses would come and go, drivers simultaneously smoking, chatting and squinting at mobiles, rounding cliffs hundreds of meters above coastal rocks like grinding teeth. You chose to stop when it suited you, could decide if the blunt scrutiny you received was friendly or hostile in a nanosecond. 

Looking back, it was so aimless. Days of drift. No mission, no calling. Perfect purposelessness. The feel of a place was enough. The calm realisation you know nothing, are nothing. But we were present. So present. It didn’t matter to that you we were another traveller deceived by wonder and destined for the erosion of time. You were there. And so was September.

September. I miss you.