Eskişehir

It’s sometime in the deep winter. Eskişehir in Turkey. I am 29, maybe 28. No one at home knows exactly where I am. Paul Bowles wrote a travel book about Morocco called Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue but my travel book about this part of Turkey is called Their Heads are Grey and Their Skies Are Grey.

It snows constantly under the greyness but the canal looks lovely in the dark, the wrought-iron lampposts shedding haloes of light at midnight, like a painting by a Frenchman from years ago. This is the most European-looking city in Turkey, full of students and Liberals.

I gravitate from a grim hotel to a better Airbnb. I work on-line. I do press-ups to give me a sense of having achieved something. I sit in cafes and think, but mainly sit. I walk and wake, but mainly wake. I write nothing. I wonder what my friends and family are doing. I wonder what I’m doing with my last youthful years in a middle-of-nowhere town trying not to listen to loud Turkish rock with desperate, cold hands clutching at cigarettes and straws. There is a tram though, which is nice.

Outside the locals move on purposefully with their lives, striding everywhere, so I copy their movements, although I have nowhere to walk to. I consider leaving but don’t, being strangely wedded to this place. I look at the bare hills. I have never known a countryside to wear its winter like this, with such unambiguous bleakness. In the pine-lined cemetery I walk the lines between the graves in ever-increasing fascination at the places I have chosen to live my life in.

It snows even more. I linger on. I meet a girl. She is impossible to nail down as something definite, she is translucent. Her eyes are green, and she only wears black. Walking up a hill in the snow; she goes on ahead and looks back at me. At the top she looks at the town but I look at the far hills beyond them. There are still no trees, no routes criss-crossed by others.

She disappears for days. I work on-line. I wait. I do fewer press-ups than before. We meet again, at last. After a time I leave her and the town, in a cloud of acrimony and recrimination. A train takes me to Istanbul, away from my bitter, winter town that I only think of when it’s cold.