Енгин Акюрек в „Kara Para Aşk”, нови и стари проекти – Тема 311

People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle.” – Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel) from a movie ”Smoke” directed by Wayne Wang and written by Paul Auster.

The conversations around the table, the swapping between the saliva and the stomach acid, and the damage on the idle percentage of my brain caused by the creaky sound of the wooden chair under my butt, as if it was creating a soft tissue trauma, were the proxy show of an atmosphere created by the weather. The rainy weather’s attempt to wet entire humankind, as if it was rolling itself from the ridge, was like squirming of a little child who needed to pee. That’s why streets were full of people and it was as if curbstones were walking on the people. Luckily, I had found a table and sat. And I had sat in such a way that my attitude was like a great commander who wanted to declare his own independence and my body was expansionist enough not to want any feudal systems inside and my hands and arms were threatening enough to colonize other continents. A chair that a waiter would suddenly put in front of the places that I would go with my eyes open could make me a distant relative of a sweaty elbow which was tired of waiting. Meanwhile, I can’t still catch the waiters’ eye.

I am in a place full of people and when there is a lot of people, one wants to be something else. What do I want? Looking everything from above, rising like a seagull in the steep of a tea, I want to go to my dream place. Actually, I want to be a seagull; like the eyes of a seagull searching for something, I want to play the fairy tales that I love the most, landing on different distant lands with a fairy tale hero attitude and inhaling the smell of the places where I land. Do I want a lot? It seems that, sitting at the table, one’s desire to drink a cup of tea is one’s most innocent state. When I look up, I don’t like this black backdrop casting shadows upon my eyelids. While looking at the people, the weather, and especially, the seagulls that I am jealous of, I want to discover new continents which nobody knows and I want their name to be mentioned with seagulls, and, arrogantly, with mine. Seeing is like the most primitive device compare to my dreams and feelings. The symphony composed by the tables, people who don’t listen to each other, hands mating with their phones, bodies that make their eyes make love with their smartphones as if they are receiving world’s most important news, and heads which wipe off the most primitive human behaviors with a theory that I cannot explain.

Human nature; when one sits at the table, and furthermore, isn’t able to catch a waiter’s eye, one wants to say something for everything; especially for the things spoken at the next table. Yet, I would just drink my tea at the table which I fortified with my mind’s walls. Even though the things spoken at the next table didn’t have any correspondence in my sensor’s system for a while, my existence defeated by the frailty of being a human, was trying to be a part of the reality, as if it was detached from the hairs of a white seagull, and the sentences spoken between the tables. When one draws one’s own borders, one audaciously wants to look around; and I am not still able to catch the waiter’s eye. It seemed like he, constantly turning his back as if I caught his eyes I would have him written the obscenest words on the ”adisyon” [Translator’s note: adisyon means `check` and it comes from the French word ”addition”], which I thought it was written as it was read, wanted to greet me with his back. The people who got together around the table had so many things to talk that I wondered how much sentence I would get in the judgments and the eyes of these people if I would do something crazy and, sputtering on the air with my breath, wanted everybody to open their eyes and go to places whose names they didn’t know. Like seagulls looking for their sea, everybody could look at the sky and the seagull that belonged to them.

While thinking all these, I didn’t know the angle between the hour and minute hand and I had already given hope up on the waiter. Our not being able to catch each others' eye had turned into a tragedy that needed to be told. Could I create a strong tea in the looks of the waiter who ran away from me with his eyes if I waved my arms and hands?

... and, it seems that my waving arms and hands apparently got his attention, he looks at me, as if he has been looking at me for years...

By waving the little paper in his hand, plain and clear, he says: ”Yes”. I look at him as if I reproach his being so clear and plain with my eyes and also by licking the spit piled up on the corner of my lips. I say ”Tea” without breaking up the serious atmosphere created by the waiter.

Before I was able to tell him about the relationship that we had during the time frame when we couldn’t catch each others' eyes, he, averting his gaze and folding the paper in his hand as if he is mimicking the gestures of important people, says ”We ran out of tea” and leaves.

Thinking whether I should postpone my dream of living a literary moment within me keeping my eyes open, I wrote on a white paper with characters stuck between my tongue and lips: ”I guess it was very easy to drink tea and be jealous of the seagulls... The hardest part was to be a human...”
[Translated by Engin Akyurek Universal Fans Club]