niçin istanbul?

today i was mulling over how i got here. really, how did i end up in Turkey, twice? because when i think about it, it all feels very random.

it just so happens that i fell in love with a man who studied music and whose former professor just happened to be starting a promising international music program in Istanbul. and it just so happens that i decided to move in with that man into his cozy apartment and encouraged him that it would be a good idea if he take up his professor's offer and attend that really promising program. because he was looking for something more in his life. and on one hot july night, a group of kids broke into our basement and lit our building on fire. and it just so happens that at that moment when that match hit the pile of unsold books my neighbor had left from a yard sale she had held that afternoon that turned the building into a smoldering inferno, i too had been feeling an itch. an itch of restlessness, dissatisfaction with my life, of where my life was heading. and it just so happens that all of my good friends had moved away at that time and i was seeing changes in my neighborhood i didn't like and slowly unfastening my ties to my chicago community, so that as my love and i cleaned up the charred debris of our apartment and felt the residual heat of the fire still radiating from the walls, i thought, maybe i should go with him to Istanbul.

so Istanbul i went and it turned out Istanbul I loved. and as i sit under the shadow of the Galata Tower drinking my tea and listening to the haunting chorus of the call to prayer echo around the city and the relentless hungry yowls of the street cats and the shop keepers and cafe owners calling out, i still marvel at how i ended up here, almost halfway across the world from chicago to a place so completely different.

and as i walk around my charming neighborhood, asking for bread in Turkish, fielding questions from shopkeepers and cab drivers and fruit sellers who speak enough english for their first question for me to be, "what are you doing in İstanbul. why are you here?" i answer in my very basic Turkish about how my husband studies here and I am here to be with him. but really the answer is a lot more complicated.

i'm here because i love my husband but also because i was looking for something different. and different found me. just not in the way i thought. so as difficult as living in a foreign country can be, i feel really lucky to be here. i now look at my life, who i am, and who i want to be in a way that i never would have had i not come here. and in that way, this experience has been a gift.

i'm not a big believer in Fate, in the cosmic plan kind of way. i believe that life throws things your way and that how you decide to act on these things creates your fate. our fates lie in the shaping and focus of these random things that happen to us so that sometimes a seemingly random chain of events brings you to a place that you never thought you'd be and you realize it's not so random at all.