the morning a fork fell to the ground
and you looked at it for a long time. or how

you knit spiderwebs with your fingers
to wrap around your spirit crown.

it is fair to say je suis, tu es, nous sommes, vous êtes refugees in blackboard stories, easily erased, taking bullets with the passion of a tortoise, or the leisure of a lover—quietly, slowly, in all fairness, as it is fair to say.

but note in increments, take heed;
you drop moon perfume on your neck
before carrying on chameleon duties.

and now i wonder in these lofty interludes just
who you had your last conversation with.

“would you love me more if i was a stranger?”

“but you are a stranger, and every day i learn more about you.”

(vienna came and went,
soft on the tongue.)

5 novembre 2012 —

ce carnet est proprice à l’attente. je le sors lorsque j’attends. pas toujours, mais souvent. cette fois-ci, je suis à vienne, au chelsey, alors qu’eric prépare ses trucs sur la scène. je bois sa bière, j’ai mangé ses chocolats. j’écris mais pourtant je ne dis rien. je suis la seule femme dans cette pièce. je suis heureuse de revoir mon ami. j’aime avoir accès aux endroits sacrés avant l’heure venue. j’aime boire cette bière et j’aime manger ces chocolats. demain je retourne à istanbul. de retour à mes chats errants, au bruit de la rue et de la nuit, aux mouvements. vienne, tu es bien mais je ne t’aime pas particulièrement. il fait bon dire ton nom, mais je préfère berlin.

i remember when my mother taught me the word “potelé”, french for “plump”. i was 7. she had observed that a girl in my class, marjorie, had plump hands. i asked her what it meant. she described the roundness of the fingers, the softness in the flesh, the milky skin. i could see what she meant; my hands were quite different from hers, and i didn’t know if i should envy marjorie or not. i often looked at her hands afterward, and the hands of others. i saw their beauty and their peculiar independence in the way that they moved and evoked—uniquely, and full of meaning.

hands are an extension of our breath. we create with our hands. we craft and devise and translate our thoughts into stories, poems, melodies and masterpieces the same way that we use our hands to clean, pick up, press, cook and mime: indistinctly. we offer help with our hands. we caress, we cajole, we mend broken hearts and broken bones with our palms and our fingers. hands often silently communicate that which words cannot.

this may be how i came about to collecting hands. the hands i collect all have a story, and they come from all over the world. some were given to me as treasured gifts from knowing friends, while others i found (or they found me). the hands i collect are different in colour and texture, such as bronze, porcelain, plaster and wood. if a hand cannot be kept, i try to capture its form and shadows through photography.

somewhere hiding in the argentinian depths of patagonia lies a cave (or series of caves) whose walls are covered with paintings of ancient hands. known as cueva de las manos, or “cave of the hands”, this world heritage site bears the immortalised hands of some of the earliest human societies, up to 13,000 years old. most of the hands painted in cueva de las manos are self-portraits: stencilled in and representing individual lives within communities. these hands are a timeless testament to our perennial desire to archive and to communicate. i want to visit these hands. i want to walk through the spaces within which primeval fingers pressed against the rocks so that i may see and show deference to the stories that they shared, thousands of years ago.

an abridged version of this text was published here—please click and star, if you are so inclined.

amasya is nestled in a narrow valley along the yeşilırmak river in the black sea region. it is a quiet little haven of traditional ottoman houses, ruins of royal tombs carved in mountains, apple orchards, and the ghosts of shirin and ferhat. i have never seen a city quite like it in turkey. & i waited not, there.

comme les pas résonnent sur le sol lorsque le sol ne les absorbe pas. je vois musti qui attend, sur le palier, au bout des escaliers. il observe de ses yeux qui ne regardent pas. dans l’attente, notre regard est d’ombre. musti franchit la porte, il part et c’est moi maintenant qui attends et qui ne vois plus rien. je ne sais pas combien de temps je dois attendre, alors je bois lentement. les petites gorgées s’attardent sur mon palais et témoignent, à défaut du temps qui passe, du temps à tuer.

(all my little words—and there you are, returning, as though you had never left.)

il y a toujours un retour à l’attente, ou l’espoir d’un retour. l’attente n’en serait pas une sinon.

always you forget to remember to wait. always you remember after you have already forgotten. remembrance of the wicked, memories of the sullen. always short-fused, quick-tempered, out of reach, controlling neither the comings nor the goings of your breath, just extending—pushing, pulling, pushing, pulling, testing the boundaries of elasticity, wondering when the latch will give out, whether this is even a test of patience.

your hands move on the clock towers of your arms. three marks upon your skin call for nails slightly sharper than usual. you scratch as if to rouse your mind, which has spent days, weeks, and months in a whirlwind or a haze. you look at the reflections in the window, shapeshifters and shadows from the tender nook of the illuminated, moving to the noise of the men, all men. never have you been so keenly aware of a woman’s spoon grazing the side of a pot.

the strangeness that becomes of you neither inhales nor exhales.

it is the not knowing where to get your coffee beforehand, so you drink tea instead.

note to self

dearest m*,

please return to robert walser’s the walk story, which you have not finished. you are currently at page 58, whereupon you will jump to the next available story. as you know, you need not read a book in a linear manner—you can read however you please (thank you, daniel pennac).

may you wander around and about until when or if you come back to where you have left.

the eyes cover a distance
of a thousand horizons.

unwittingly,
& always yours.

it seemed like all there was only preparation, from the moment the decision was made until the moment i picked up my black cat from baggage claim in istanbul atatürk airport. (there he was, sitting in his carrier unattended, dropped off like a lost parcel in the middle of the bustling space.) who knows how he made it across the atlantic; it seemed like the time would never come, for neither of us. yet he made it here the same way i did: with presence and patience as the only footing. now we sit on this couch, my black cat and i, in the other-other world, where another form of otherness awaits.

and so it was, and so it is.

and so it begins where it ends.

20 days remain. there is no solemn way to drink this tea. i send letters with no notes. i uncover memories, i box them in. (my childhood prayer veil; worn reluctantly at least twice a day, from the ages of 5 to 19—now a faded, if beautiful and sacred artifact.) this is my spring in autumn. i walk outside in circles with the pavement in my bones, knowing there is no proper way to say goodbye to streets, stones, and currents. who will take over these spaces? which corners will remain untouched? there is no torch burning, and nothing to commit to memory that hasn’t yet left its mark.

there was a short albeit essential respite in the capital city with esperanza. we stayed up for as long as our body would let us, biting on silver apples and bowing to starry skies. if i could fuse all of our nights, there would be a glorious diamond. all eyes upon eyes. all days long, all days short. time split in several different tracks. i captured in black in white, swiftly, for all the quiet turmoil, for all the brewing, for all the air growing colder—the air i cannot breathe.

j’ai la peau de l’automne,
l’épiderme cyclique des saisons,
l’humeur des nuages rôdeurs
et le regard qui ne fuit pas.

in 2003, i wrote the following:

“it has come to my knowledge — how i could have forgotten given my latest mindstates is beyond me, but i digress — it has come to my knowledge that i have dual citizenship, and if i am to flee, i could, no questions asked. the key term in the previous sentence is “flee”, which entails running from, in occurrence, something. determining the source is an easy task, cliched at best. it involves dissatisfaction on many fronts; mainly feelings of non-future in important life-areas coupled with a blooming desire to reconnect with blood-related roots. would this mean, then, that i would understand? that i would suddenly and finally be granted the light that so dimly shines within? this is matter-of-factually stated, as i am not particularly overthrown, just merely curious as to the effects of potentiality.”

it is now almost a decade later. i reflect back upon these thoughts, seemingly written by a younger sister or an old friend. it is no surprise to say that i have always had the want, the desire and the hypothetical drive to leave, but i have never had the opportunity, the means, the down-to-earth design to go along with it—until now. (the barriers we put up for ourselves are certainly multiple and stifling, in hindsight.) today, my reasons are less easily boxed in. life-areas are malleable. am i fleeing? am i running from? no. i am running toward, with tactile arms ready to entangle, mind aware and eyes open. i am wanting to reconnect with blood-related roots, absolutely, but i am also wanting to express, and live the second half in that second half, however it may go.

what can be said of the indivisible dual individual, then? un peu des deux, donc. ni l’une ni l’autre, mais l’une dans l’autre et l’autre dans l’une. méditerranéenne, fluvienne. la mer dans les os, la sirène sous la neige. ni francophone, ni anglophone, ni québécoise, ni turque. montréalaise, peut-être (certes); stambouliote, pas encore. l’entre-deux aux limites invisibles. look deep within to see further out: la terre est vaste. on commence par se perdre pour finir par se retrouver.

“accept that you are part of the world,
that you cannot understand the world,
that it won’t speak the way you speak.”

with a transatlantic move comes the inevitable purging of things. decades of trinkets, clothing and mementos, following you from house to home. these inanimate objects emote all your memories and associations. they become sacred vessels, personal mnemonic devices, soulful entities. yet unlike your thoughts, intangible and absolute and unfettered by material bounds, they cannot all cross the ocean with you. you have to let them go.

it is not so much having to rid myself of things; i have mourned the attachment of many things already, just by acknowledging that i must rid myself of them. it is not so much having people go through them, either—i have already relived the associated memories through the mere act of sorting. by sorting through my things and by acknowledging that they must go, i am separating myself from their physical reality and, by the same token, allowing them to simply be, in their inanimate state, without me.

(until another grants them a second life.)

take the backless red silk shirt. when edith extracted it from the pile and inspected it for herself, it reminded me of that time i went to a cocktail lounge on bleury and de maisonneuve, 12 years ago. i wore a long black skirt with two black feathers dangling at the heart. i also wore that shirt, shimmering red; it was an intricate delight held by strings, so light and so young. i remember walking from the back of the lounge to the front. as i passed by the bar, a woman muttered something under her breath. it was a single word, unkind, and judging by the emptiness of the room, meant to no one else but me. i remember thinking about the layers of offense, the way it can be woven with envy, unknowing and misconception. an exposed back is an easy target. i rarely wore that red silk shirt afterward, but i kept it until yesterday, if only as a reminder.