Nomadic Tribe Soup

"What's up ice eagle?" beams up my old Nokia phone. A text message from Boris, an indication he is back in town. I walk twenty minutes through a snowstorm to join him. Snow, even in spring, makes me happy by default. "My heart started beating fast as I approached Heidegger's house," he recounts his Freiburg escapade as we munch poached eggs at the Starving Artist. "The feeling dissipated when I reached this residential area, rich people's houses." I am glad he is back. I wish to keep him with me, prolong the time before we disperse to our respective libraries, deeds, tasks, plans, procrastinations. We head to the counter to settle the bill. "The interac's not working," says the server, "pay next time". I write my name on a piece of paper. "How do you pronounce your name?" is the next inevitable question. Tobias (yes, our server picked that 'English' name before Arrested Development) challenges me to his...

in a small room filled with cables and electronic gadgets and clothes out of my emptied baggages in some "turn right after migros, and then, take the first left" street in a middle-class tall building filled old neighbourhood of Istanbul, I scream to those people who have their home and roots and jobs and belongings and future-heres and feeling-homes.... "I AM HOMELESS!" I though I was coming home, for I was out of home for so many years, yet, walking in these streets, where I had walked a zillion times with so many feelings and hopes and worries, I felt no nostalgia nor coming home. Instead there was a washed out feeling of "oh, I have been here before". SO, Istanbul, you shall no longer be my home-city-that-I-was-once-in-love-and-that-I-left-in-tears Instead, you are the rotten-city-destroying-and-shamelessly-forgetting-everything-that-made-it-Istanbul. you are not my home.