I am not going to make this long. There is a lot to write, to think about and to self-examine. Especially self-examine. Back when I wrote this 2 months ago I was wrong in something quite fundamental, and that was my underestimation of the resilience that societies have. I thought things were far more fragile than they have turned out to be. It seems that it isn’t that easy to break the backs of people. Although…
Back then I put another photo of Sokak Restaurant (one that I had taken last summer) at the top of that post; all the while despairing as to whether I would ever see what was in that image again. An early evening, the first customers trickling in, the tables slowly filling up. Lovely weather. Smiling faces. The delicious smells of rakı and fish. Happy cats. My dear friend Cafer, the maitre d’ with his big smile. Would I ever have all this back? I was so devastated…
And so, this is the first day back. And there is Cafer on the right, with his big smile. And now he is even sporting a very fancy big mustache! There are the first customers, tables already nicely filling up even at the rather early hour when I took this. The rakı smells as great as ever. No cats in this particular frame but they are bound to be around somewhere. And to judge by the dog kibbles, just behind the feet of the person on the left, the establishment pooch isn’t too far off either.
So, I was wrong.
But was I wrong in every aspect? What is yet to come? Will “they” give up so easily? I will enjoy this reprieve for now, but in the full awareness that it is probably only a reprieve. But I will enjoy it. I learned a lot over these past couple of months. I made new friends. Which is actually quite difficult at my age, but it happened. I had to let go of a lot of things. A huge amount of things actually. Made a lot of discoveries that were very painful. Not least about myself. About how my entire world view, my take on things, had been completely distorted, built on entirely false premises – and for a very long time. Most of my adult life, in fact. I had to learn a lot of things and I also had to re-learn a lot of things. And it is still happening. And it is changing things. Maybe not everything, but a lot.
More later.