Early Morning Ramblings

I flip open the lid and, like muscle memory, my fingers feel for the on button, then type in the pin in the dim glow of my laptop's screen, waiting for a moment as 37% battery flashes, before Chrome appears. I open a tab and begin to type. The clock display blinks brightly in the lower right-corner of my screen. 4:58 am

I never used to struggle with sleep. I would sleep late enough, often after 10 pm, but I would get my 8, 9, sometimes 11 hours without any trouble. If the sun came up, if I had to use the bathroom, if I got cold, if I woke up from a nightmare, I would simply pull the blinds, hurry back to bed, and pull the quilt around my neck a little tighter before drifting back into dreamland.

Now I cannot sleep before midnight and have to fall asleep listening to a podcast. I wake up with the morning sun at 6 am and my brain starts whirling. So I slip to the living room where I work, pray, or try in vain to fall back asleep. 

I try to laugh it off; my sister said jet lag had to wait its turn as I had no time three weeks ago. I'd just finished a 30-hour trek from California back to Istanbul via Amsterdam and as soon as I put down my suitcase, I had to go see the first of 15+ apartments we would look at over the next couple of days as we decided where to move to next. Our current apartment was about to be demolished, the utilities cut off, and we had to move right away. 

But it's more than that. At least the night before I was able to fall asleep a little before 10 pm so my 4:50 am wake time feels like a luxurious lie-in. 

Perhaps my brain is still trying to settle in to this new apartment we now call home. I shuffle around the house in a pair of my husband's too-big slippers, wishing I could find my own. I finally started washing my new clothes last night; the rains come next week and soon it will be too cold to wear all the new pants I bought in Ross, perfect for Istanbul's humid summer weather. The bedroom still feels like chaos, clothes haphazardly everywhere, and I can't muster enough energy to wash the six glasses that I managed to collect throughout the day on the little brown side table in the lounge. The lounge feels cluttered with two white side tables taking up prime space on the way to the balcony. The kitchen bin's foot finally broke. There's still a distinct mold smell in the one kitchen cabinet that hasn't grown more mold but persists if I keep the cupboard door closed. I need to renew my residence permit, hang the curtains in the bedroom, and cook the fresh pink cranberry beans I shelled last night. I reach for another tissue to blow my nose and realize I already have two more half-used tissues by my side. My ears and throat are itchy again; likely the side effect of having a lovely open window overlooking a very prolific garden filled with flowering trees. I think I'm allergic to ragweed. Except in California, where surprisingly, even with windows wide open for a blissful seven weeks nothing itched and I didn't have to take allergy medication to try to keep from going crazy. 

My A1c went up 0.3 points. 

I try to tell myself not to worry, my body is resilient, I just need to lose a little weight. But I'm an emotional eater and I don't prioritize nutrition when I'm stressed, so a busy day out means I'm surviving on chocolate bars and cookies. If I don't get serious about this, I will end up with diabetes. Which I do not want to have. I know all the right things to do but every time I try to do them, I end up feeling like a snail trying to maneuver its way through a swimming pool of molasses. My husband plies me with Pepsi, ice cream, a viral Dubai-filled wafer cookie. I reach for the Twix bar, the sour cherry juice, the convenient almond-covered speculaas. 

I'm not going to the gym again, I told my husband on Thursday. I desperately wanted to, but had decided that I didn't deserve the things I wanted. Just like the candle I'd paid $60 for that I'd put in the give-way box. A colleague of my husband's had volunteered to bring over some of our things we'd left in a friend's storage, after we moved to Istanbul. The intricately carved candle I'd bought in Michigan at Holland House Candles ten years prior, planning to create my own family heirloom to pass down to the children I would never have, was one of the items he packed up. I'd carefully wrapped it in bubble wrap but somewhere along the line, likely in an airport where careless authorities unwrapped the candle and then tossed it to the side, the candle lost its protective wrapping. Pieces of it flaked off and it was no longer perfect.

Even if the colleague repaid me, I would never be able to replace that candle. After 51 years of hand-carving candles, the owners had retired and stopped making their signature candles. It felt like the story of my life. Something beautiful always turned into ashes. Nice things got damaged, like the burgundy suitcase Anadolujet mauled on a flight from Istanbul to Amsterdam. Or the new-to-me phone screen that got two deep scratches before I could buy a screen protector. Or me. 

Yesterday I read something along the lines of, God created you to be uniquely you and wants you to do what will bring you joy. I shook my head firmly. I knew what brought me joy, but there was no space for that. No time to sip a cup of tea in the morning, to walk on the elliptical, to sit by the sea. No money to study for a doctorate, to buy coconut milk and tofu, to save for a home of our own. 

It's 5:58 am and the sky is starting to lighten. Maybe if I pull my eye mask on and turn on another podcast, I'll be able to escape for a couple of hours more. 

Oddly Enough

 You've probably heard the allegory before. An old man was working in his fields when a stranger walked up to him, said he was planning to move to the nearby town, and asked what kind of people lived there. The old man thought for a minute, and then asked, "What were the people like where you came from?" 

"Oh, they were the nicest people you'd ever meet. Friendly, helpful, real neighbourly," the stranger replied.

"Then don't worry, you'll find the same kind of people in this town," the old man grinned.

Sometime later, a second traveler trudged up to the old farmer and said, "Excuse me, I'm coming to settle in this town and wanted to know what kind of people live here." 

The farmer looked at him, stroked his long gray beard, and asked, "What were the people like where you came from?" 

The traveler replied, "Oh, they were the meanest people you could imagine. Petty, jealous, backstabbing people who never helped a soul. I'm glad I don't live there anymore." 

The farmer paused for a moment, then returned to picking his corn as he said, "I'm not sure you'll like living in this town then, because you'll find the same kind of people here too." 

The meaning is fairly simple to deduce: be a friend and others will befriend you. Or be difficult and you will find that others are difficult too. 

Except there's one country that perversely refuses to follow the norm.

I first moved here almost three years ago with my husband, 4 suitcases just tipping past 23 kilos each, 2 bulging backpacks, a pillow each, and as many travel pillows, jackets, and plastic bags of food we could squeeze past the Pegasus Airlines security. We were excited. This was going to be an adventure for us, after 4 years of grueling survival in a country where hyperinflation was the worst the World Bank had seen in over 150 years. It was time for a breather and we were ready for it. 

The adventure started in a tiny apartment in the western part of Istanbul. We took the M4 metro to Kadikoy 3 times a week to Turkish classes, and when we weren't in class we were hunting for an apartment, buying used furniture, visiting every Koctas and MediaMarkt for an hour's radius to look at appliances, applying for residence permits, and generally enjoying the newness of it all. Every night, we tumbled into bed, barely able to keep our eyes open long enough to set an alarm for the next day's adventure. 

I was loving it all. The yellow and white ferries, the obnoxiously loud seagulls, the midnight planes overhead, the packed metro and cheap lokanta where you could buy soup for $1 on a cold winter's day. There was free lokma from a roadside truck, a Friday market packed with little old grandmas jostling for the freshest cucumbers, and malls that went up 8 floors. Every time I turned around, there was something new to see. 

As I opened my heart wide to soak up the flavour of Istanbul and started to haltingly communicate in my few words of Turkish in the little shop around the corner, I naively expected that Istanbul would throw its arms wide open in a welcome return. 

Except it didn't. 

I smiled at everyone, made eye contact, said Teshekurler (thank you), and did my best to conjugate a few words to communicate what I needed. I tipped waiters (not a usual custom), helped a little old lady push her cart to the recycling place, and tried to answer when someone asked me how many more stops until we reached the end of the bus line. 

But after nearly 3 years of struggling to communicate with people who looked at me dourly, if at all, refusing to let me try to get out a few words and, instead, shutting me down by shoving reams of papers at me, or people who spat on my international marriage certificate to see if it was authentic and then declared it was not (it very much was authentic), or people who spoke so fast I couldn't understand what they were saying and had to leave because I couldn't get what I needed, or people who scoffed "yabanji" at me with a dirty look, or people who took my small bag of carefully chosen veggies and threw 3 or 4 more rotten ones in and then tried to charge me for the extra produce while disregarding my protests, I was done. 

I stopped communicating. I refused to go to the Friday market by myself; my husband had to come with me or I wouldn't go. I went silent in the small shops, communicated only the bare essentials, and stopped smiling at people. Most times I went out in public I came home on the verge of tears, oh so very tired of struggling to survive, yet again, in a foreign country. Would it always be like this? Would I never feel like I was home? 

And then we moved. 

I'd traveled for the summer, came back to an apartment whose utilities were cut off a couple of days later, and suddenly we were packing up our first 3 years in Istanbul into a truck and unpacking it into a very different sort of neighborhood. It was as if we'd stepped into our very own Narnia and everything turned magical. 

The stout man at the dogalgaz sat behind his desk, answering "yok" to everything my husband asked, including putting me on the new utilities subscription, but then a moment later he was presenting me with a tablet and gesturing for me to sign my electronic signature. The new landlord painstakingly went over every paragraph of the rental contract to make sure my husband understood everything it said and bought us a hot drink. The translator in the notary office (the nice one) invited me over for tea and conversation. Our new neighbours smiled and said hello as they passed us in the hallway and one said she would show me where the Monday market was. Even the man who registered our change of address in the immigration office grinned as he handed us a slip confirming it had been updated and said, "Hayirli olsun" as he wished us blessings in our new apartment. 

Everywhere we turned, people were reaching out in kindness and my lonely heart started to melt. 

I thought if I was kind, people would be kind in return. It didn't work that way here at first; people were too tired and had no time to help a muddling foreigner find her way. Then I started to become like the people I met, impatient, distant, easily irritated. And strangely enough, as I pulled way back and stopped trying to engage, I began to meet people who cared. People who were the opposite of what I now expected. 

I used to wonder how much longer I could manage; now I look out my window and think, "I could stay here forever." And for that, I am grateful.