Editor’s Note: This story is a piece of fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely from the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
There is something about Art that makes him very easy to talk to. But then, he says these really deep sentences that make me ponder very deeply. He finds my accent amusing and likes the Turkish songs that I play to him. He is impulsive, adventurous, melancholic and nostalgic, just like I am. This strangely allows us to get along very well.
We sit on the swinging chair in the garden of Hamm and talk about the genuineness of people. I ask him, would you rather cheat or be cheated on? To be loved or love? I have no idea how we ended up in the garden of Hamm after we left EVGR, but Art knew his way around campus. We first walked through a street behind ZAP with pretty-looking rich-people houses, picking out our favorite ones. We talked about living in a house like this, and that, or that one maybe. We talked about how much it hurts when friendships end. We decided that it can hurt even more than when a relationship ends.
On the swinging chair in the garden of Hamm, darkness surrounds us as we sit under the dim street lights and listen to the sound of cicadas. It’s such a summer sound… “In southern Turkey, this is what you hear, and in the background, the sounds of waves crashing into the sand and into the rocks blend into it… this is how summer sounds… how do you pronounce cicadas? Can you say it for me, Art?” I teach him how to say it in Turkish and listen to him make Turkish sounds with his American tongue. Ağustos böceği. The letter between a and u is called soft g, I tell him. “It softens the word. Turkish is a really soft language, you know, we like to connect the endings and the beginnings of the words together, and say it as one.”
We leave Hamm, and we are walking on the row. We talk about how much nicer it is during the summer when there is no one around, and it’s so quiet and warm, and everything belongs to us even a bit more than usual.
When we are walking up a dark street, he goes, “Do you see the clown statue there!” I scream with a sudden fright, and seconds later we are laughing loudly. Our laughter fills up the dark street and brings it light, almost. Now, the street is illuminated by our joyfulness.
We talk about our favorite buildings on campus. He says he likes the Kingscote Gardens. I tell him that building always reminds me of a psychiatric asylum. As I say this to him, I end up pronouncing asylum as asilium. “Oh, I said it really wrong, didn’t I? It’s azaaylum isn’t it?” He laughs, but doesn’t correct me. He is a kind soul like that.
We pass by the music building right at the start of the row, and Art tells me about the piano rooms upstairs. “Oh, we have to go inside now!” We go inside the music building and climb up the stairs. I have never been inside before. “It doesn’t feel as big when you look at it from the outside, right?” he asks me, and I agree with him. An architectural miracle this must be. It looks so small from the outside, yet it is so grandiose on the inside.
We are walking across the narrow hallway at the top floor. “Something about this place reminds me of high school,” I tell him, as I am looking at the high ceiling. “Yes, that’s the feeling,” he says. He knows the feeling I am trying to describe, despite the fact we have had high school experiences oceans apart, in different continents.
We sit outside Windhover, where there is a tree lit up by green lights and black stones on the floor. We talk about the last time we were in this area together, the time we sat on the road behind this meditation center, the one that goes up to Roble, and what a strange time that had been. That was eight months ago. We talk about if our lives feel any different now compared to then. “Honestly,” I say. “No. It feels the same. I have met some new people, learnt a lot about psychology, but yeah, nothing is particularly different.”
What about you?” I ask him. He agrees with me, saying life feels very much the same.
“Do you think life is circular? Like things happen in the same way, eventually repeating?” I ask him. He agrees. “Or maybe,” I say. “Life is like a spiral. It repeats, but it also moves forward, too, like the repetitions are similar, but there are nuances to them. Same events, but maybe with different people, or in different places. I don’t know. You are at the same point in the circle, but the circle has moved forward. Things are changing, but not really.”
We talk about race. Art is half Black and half white. He tells me how he is seen almost as white when he visits his mother’s homeland, Ghana, which contrasts with how people see him in the US — Black, despite any whiteness left to him from his father. We talk about our families, and he describes aspects of his mother’s culture to me.
Listening to him, I realize the commonalities between the culture he is describing and the culture I grew up around in Turkey, elements like collectivism and the importance of showing respect to your elders. He shows me a picture of his father, a white man with blue eyes; yet, my eyes fail at finding any sights of resemblance between the boy sitting next to me and the man in the picture. I tell him that I am also mixed, in a sense. I am half Muslim and half Christian. We are two mixes of two halves. I tell him that it’s not very common for people to marry from different religions in Turkey. I reflect that I’ve never met anyone else whose parents were from different religions back home.
It’s getting late, and I’m sleepy, and my accent is more distinct at these hours with the tiredness of the end of the day. He says I have a cool accent.
He tells me about how nostalgic he is feeling. In the current moment, he thinks back to past memories and misses them. “You need to stop this, Art!” I shout at him playfully. But I am the same. Something about the past and the disappearance of it makes you yearn for it even more. Later, in a few weeks, I would find myself feeling nostalgic about the summer nights I had with Art wandering around the campus. But how could I have known, then, that I would be looking back to those moments and missing them?