Lazy Letter: To September
I uncomfortably sat in the corner of the couch which was chewed up by an animal from the sides. I already knew that he keeps pets and he fights for animal rights, but what kind of animal would he bring home to destroy a couch like that?! I scanned the room quickly to know what goes on around, and what I got myself into. Perhaps a bit too late, I really don’t know that kid. I met him at the beach during my trip to the south, hung out with him a few more times while I was there. There was no reason for me to trust him, I wonder why I went to his two-bedroom apartment anyway. To be perfectly honest with you, I didn’t make any plans for that night; it was one of those nights. Just like the old times when I was younger, not to say that I’m old now, I just felt I was back at the school again when I had the energy to be adventurous. I’m still as carefree, and ironically enough, just as alone too. Maybe it’s for the weather, and that autumn is just around the corner–it smells like school anyway.
I’m usually a lucky person, and I mostly rely on my good fortune. I make spontaneous decisions assuming bad things and painful troubles won’t come across my path, and that nothing serious would happen to make my night miserable. If I was thinking right, I wouldn’t accept an invitation to an unknown party from an almost stranger, but I guess I wasn’t thinking right.
Two of his friends were smoking something at the kitchen counter when we stepped into the house. He didn’t mention over the phone that he had company, so I was pretty surprised to see them. They seemed too high to say hello and greet, or maybe they were one of those people who didn’t know how to greet properly and believed greeting is for losers. I took the tobacco out of my daypack and started to roll myself a cigarette once I found my place. I didn’t feel like smoking, I just felt like rolling.
The house looked decent, the furniture was nice and well decorated. All kinds of law books were piled up all around the house. He is a law student after all, I thought to myself and looked at the books more closely to read the titles of the books. Well, my mother is a lawyer, and so I know a little bit about the painful procedure of becoming a lawyer. The coffee table was a mess too, and I was glad I wasn’t staying long. For some strange reason, the ashtrays were freakishly small and the bag of weed ridiculously big. I really didn’t feel like smoking, I just felt like rolling.
Felt very foreign to all the talks going on in the house; it wasn’t my time or my place, so I decided to keep quiet and do what I do best: observe. The things that his friend was saying was neither interesting nor funny, and I didn’t even pretend to be entertained. The only thought passing my mind at that moment was to smell the weed. I wished I asked for it. If I’d picked the bag, or mentioned it in a way, it would probably be removed from the coffee table, and those two cop-looking fellows wouldn’t know about it. Yea, right, a few minutes later two men knocked on the door and entered the house with no permission. They said they were cops, friends of the kid’s father, who I’m thinking stopped by to check on the boy, just to make sure he was behaving well and was staying out of the trouble. “I’ve been studying the whole time” the kid kept saying as he pointed out to the books all over the room. That’ll explain, no wonder why he had all his books out of the bookshelf. Well, the funny thing is that he actually was behaving well; he was sober enough. It was his so-called friends that caused him trouble. Those two men were kind of funny too. The friend and his girlfriend kept revealing themselves to those strange men. “Stop speaking you idiot,” the kid said to his friend “these guys are cops!” I wanted to laugh at their good-cop-bad-cop game, and how one of them kept asking questions in the friendliest manner and the other one was mad and mean for no apparent reason, but it wasn’t my place to joke around. I smiled warmly to the good-cop and answered him honestly. It was kind of funny to start a conversation about my old neighborhood with him.
Everything about this incident was wrong. Everything! What on Earth was I even doing there?! I actually got a bit paranoid as I was walking to Ertuu’s apartment; I was supposed to stay with him that night. I kept thinking what if the kid himself was an undercover, and was cooperating with the police, or his father, or whoever those cop-looking dudes were, to investigate a case or something. The kid told me these guys weren’t really his friends right before we entered his apartment. He wasn’t an undercover, but it would’ve been funny if he was. More like a bad joke with a big laugh which ends with sad tears.
28.Sep.17 – Istanbul, Turkey