When Does a City Become a Stranger?
It is not a wish to be somewhere else. Nor has it anything to do with leaving. It is an odder feeling, harder to describe: as if, in a room you have known for years, someone had moved the furniture a few centimetres during the night. Everything is still there — the table, the chair, the window, the light. But when you reach out, nothing is where it used to be.
On mornings like these, I leave the house early, not knowing what I will find, yet as if wanting to find something. It is one of my favourite hours in Istanbul. The city has not yet fully shown itself. The shutters are half-drawn, the pavements still belong to the night, and over the streets hangs a faint silence that will be lost in the course of the day. I take the metro.
Perhaps that is where the real city begins.
The carriage fills up. Faces across from me. Faces beside me. Faces by the door, in the reflection on the glass, in the cold light of phone screens… I look at the people of my own city. People with whom I speak the same language, walk the same streets, pass through the same seasons. And yet, some mornings, it feels as though an invisible border runs between us.
I don't know them.
Or rather, I can no longer find what I thought I knew.
I put in my earphones. I play old Turkish songs. A few words drift out of one of them: "Hani büklüm büklüm boynunda…"
In the first few seconds of the song, something strange happens. The metro is the same metro, the people across from me are the same people; but time changes. Because some songs do not remind you of the past — they open its door. A voice gently eases open a drawer you have not touched in years. Out of it come a summer evening, the yellow light of a living room, a word my mother used, the laugh of someone no longer alive, a shop we used to walk past.
And suddenly I understand: on the metro, I am not looking at people. I am looking at time.
What I am searching for in their faces is neither beauty nor familiarity. It is the trace of a time.
Perhaps I am looking for that indescribable quality I believe Istanbul once had. The small gesture of people making way for one another; someone on the ferry asking the person beside them before opening the window; the old pronunciation of a word; a grace in the street that no one noticed… These are not big things. Most of what makes a city a city is never big. A glance, a tone of voice, a shop sign, the glass a waiter sets down on the table, the way a woman holds her handbag, the way a man folds his newspaper.
A city's memory is kept not only in its monuments, but in its gestures.
And when gestures disappear, no one notices.
When a building is torn down, the void it leaves is visible. When a cinema closes, a padlock goes on its door. When a tree is cut down, you know the next morning that it is no longer there. But when a city's manners change, no visible ruin is left behind. Everything happens in silence. From one generation to the next, certain words fall out of use, certain glances are forgotten, certain habits come to seem unnecessary.
Then one morning you get on the metro and realise that, though you are no tourist in the city where you were born, you have begun to look around you like one.
Perhaps this is exactly what estrangement is.
Not getting lost in a place you don't know, but no longer finding your own traces in a place you know all too well.
But I don't want to be unfair to Istanbul. Because while the city was changing, I did not stand still. My face changed too. My voice, my expectations, the things I look at, the people I miss… Perhaps I now see details I never noticed when I was young — precisely because they are disappearing.
Sometimes we find the past beautiful simply because it is past.
Memory is a poor archivist. It keeps some things, throws others away, and places others still, over the years, beneath a light more beautiful than they ever were.
So did the Istanbul I miss ever really exist?
I don't know.
Perhaps the city I miss never fully existed. It is an imaginary Istanbul I have made out of my childhood, my youth, films, songs, family stories and the things I wanted to remember.
But isn't that, after all, what our relationship with a city always is?
We never love a city only as it is. We add our own lives to it. We remember a street because we loved someone there. A song, because it played on a particular summer evening. A neighbourhood, because of someone who no longer lives there. A table, because we cannot forget who sat across from us.
Then people leave. Shops close. Houses change hands. Voices fall silent.
The city remains, but our city slowly withdraws from within it.
The metro moves on through the dark tunnel.
My face appears in the glass. For a moment I am looking not at the people across from me, but at my own reflection.
Perhaps the stranger I have been searching for all morning is there.
The song plays on in my earphones. The carriage stops at the next station. The doors open. Some get off, some get on. Up above, Istanbul begins its day with all its noise.
And I move on beneath the city, listening to a melody I have known for years.
I still don't quite know what I am looking for.
Perhaps an old Istanbul.
Perhaps the people who are no longer here.
Perhaps an old self of mine, left behind among them.
And for the first time, I consider this possibility:
Perhaps we do not grow estranged from the city we live in.
Perhaps, one day, when we can no longer come across the old self we left there, we call it estrangement.