Chapter 1 takes place in Adana, where my journey began.
I sat in a dark room, and with each sound of a car driving by my ears perked up. With each car stopping, doors slamming then followed by voices I slowed my breathing and waited to see if they would come to my door. I was leaving my company and they knew I was leaving but they didn’t know how soon. I had lied and told them I was in Istanbul and that I would be back on Monday. They were trying to force me to pay several thousand Ottoman Lira for payments they had made while I was at their school. Therefore, from the evening time until late night I left my light off in case they came by to check and see if I was there.
A picture of a kro I found on google. Not my landlord though.
There was also the landlord. He was an ignorant man, yet very strong with a short temper. A typical “kro” from Adana, who would walk around town with prayer beads in his hand, attend Friday prayer but that was as far as his religious life went. He had been one of the reasons I was leaving, taking months to fix basic needs and as his apathy ascended, so did the company’s apathy. If he came early, then I would have to come up with a story to tell him about why the company hadn’t paid the rent or the monthly bills, and how I didn’t owe them.
I eat a lot of vegetables.
It was around seven pm in the evening, when I decided to cook something for dinner. I only lit the room with the cooking stove’s light and cooked a chicken salad. As I sat down at the small table in the center of my living room there were footsteps at the door. My neck craned to the left and I peered towards the sound. But the steps continued to the neighbor’s door. I was on the first floor of the apartment and had one neighbor on the right side. With the chance of someone else coming, I switched the stove light off again. The only light now was the glare from my Alien ware laptop’s screen. It had been my only source of entertainment for the past week or so. I was mostly writing, editing or playing games from time to time, if the Internet allowed it. That was another reason I had started looking for a new job. In my only free time, I came home to write and then any leisure time was spent looking at a loading screen or pressing reconnect.
Ah a calendar, one of the worst inventions of all time.
Soon I would be free. I only had to make it forty-eight hours and I would walk out the door with my bags, take a taxi to a hotel, and then stay there seven days before I headed to Antalya. That was another problem. When I left the apartment, the landlord would see me with two large traveling bags and might come asking about the rent or where I was going. I looked up hotels nearby and planned to go there a day early if I could find one.
He’s saying “yok”.
Thus, I walked out around noon to search for the ones I had found on my phone’s map app. There was a nice hotel about half a kilometre away but when I arrived at the reception desk nobody spoke English and when I asked them about a room, they waved their hands left and right wildly and said “yok”. That of course means “no” or “none” in Ottoman. I would have to stay in my apartment for one more day and leave in broad daylight and hope that my landlord didn’t try to chase me down.
Ok, so I wasn’t wearing flip flops…
By noon on the day I would leave, there had not been any knocks on the door and all my things were packed. I prepared my two bags in a way that I could grab them quickly and leave down the steps as fast as possible. As I swung the bags out the door, I put the key in the keyhole and left it there. Then I clambered down the steps and walked at a hastened pace down the road. There was a commotion on the balcony and yelling. I walked casually as if everything was fine and kept going. Some moments later I was rounding the corner, crossing the street and going down another. I finally felt free and only had to make it to the corner where the taxis waited every day.
A typical Turkish cab driver. Friendly and chatty.
If they had seen me, they had been too slow, as it wasn’t long before I was sitting in the front seat of a rolling taxicab and being asked questions in broken English. They were the most popular questions I heard while living in The Ottoman Empire. “What’s name?” “What are you from?” “You like Ottoman Empires?” “Why Ottoman?” For the next twenty minutes of the taxi drive I spoke in broken Ottoman to him and changed my English to a broken version and we conversed all the way to the hotel.
AH look at the beauty, I can almost smell it.
The cab drove down road after road with rubbish on the side of the road and buildings with such a lack of maintenance that it looked like it had recently been through a fire. You could smell the smog in the air, and we stopped just short of a warehouse. There was a sign pointing around a corner that read, “hotel parking” to the right of the warehouse. Right before you turned into a car garage there was a sign that said: “Empire’s Lux”. I thanked the cab driver and once we confirmed that it was the right place, I took my bags inside. As he sped away, I opened my nostrils and breathed in the smog, yet in this moment it didn’t smell like smog to me. It smelled like freedom. It smelled like a new adventure.