Raphael Blows the Last Trump:
[ALL THE GOOD PEOPLE LEFT YOU SEE! ALL THE PEOPLE WHO CAN MAKE IT LEFT THIS PLACE! THEY DIED ON THE WAY YOU SEE! AND I MADE IT! WITH A LOT LESS PAIN, CLOSE TO NO PAIN AT ALL YOU SEE! I MADE IT!] and, no – I won’t fall apart. I won’t. Things would be perfect if I can just shut up. Someone years ago said my beauty came from my missingness – from my almost-there-ness. Almost perfectness. From my lack-of-perfection. They were wrong. Because I am simply ugly. There is no perfection or sublime in ugliness. Because ugliness is not romantic. It is ugly like walking in woods on a beautiful autumn day and finding a pig head on a stick. It is ugly as knowing that potatoes take more time to cook than mushrooms. It is as ugly as hands of the human body. Where sublime leaves you Lord of the Flies will always run to your help. I dance with my demons.
With my almost-there-ness I stand still and I let world spin under me. I am the only immobile person in the entire universe. Others think that I move but I am the one who is always staying actually. They just drift away. In one of these days I will let free all my barefoot belly dancers (just like Didem Madak letting go of her werewolves). Than you’ll see what a carnival this is. Than you know, belly dancers will suck all the tear gas, the murder, the injustice, the hunger, the desire, the custodies, the extraterritorial legal systems, the muteness of refugees, the dehumanization – and you know- they will give birth to a new nation of barbarians. Just like us. We will hunt civilized people in their daydreams and their nightmares and their elections. We will hunt them in their democracies. We will hunt them in their Prozac capsules. We will hunt them in their negotiations. We won’t negotiate. No. (Like Aglaya of Dostoyevski. She doesn’t negotiate either. She falls in love with an absolute idiot. That’s why Dostoyevski’s patriarchal universe curses her with madness and dishonor. I am sick of male writers.)
You know I fell in love with you on the day Mostar Bridge was exploded. I was left on one side, you on the other. Because it is essential to us you know. We fall in love over exploded bridges. Before the dust settled down we saw each other on each side of the cliff. I recognize you from the shine in your eyes, and the straightness of your gaze. It is as if twin stars have fallen from sky. You are all the unnamed colors of rainbow at once. You are one of those that could not be classified, that could not be written in 1913 Encyclopedia Britannica. You know, before falling in love with you I was burned down in Madimak Hotel in the same year. I fell in love with you through my flames. They were lynchers behind us both. We were two rebels against tradition. (And state. State follows tradition.) We watched each other on the opposing ends of the Mostar Bridge. Dead babies floated under us in the river. We took our time; I find it fascinating that we took our time when we were actually chased by the lynchers. I brought you the 40th day of the dark prison chamber of Ahmet Arif with the lines he wrote for Leyla Erbil: “through my longing for you I have worn out fetters”. [Ahmet Arif was later accused of not being a poet in the “full” sense of the word because he published only one book. He said he was a poet since you can be a prophet with only one book.] Leyla was a city girl you know. Not a mountain wolf like Ahmet. But love has its own ways. And we like epics.
And East meets East you know. We live in the universe where the more you go to east the more east you find. The more sun you seek the more sun you find. With the simplicity of impossibility. (We are twin prime numbers.)
I die five times a day.
