A few days ago I received this brief email:
Hi.
Hope you and your family are staying safe in this pandemic. Keep prayerful.
— Kalpten
It was from a Turkish woman I met 10 years ago in Göreme, Turkey, in the magnificent region of Cappadocia — all fairy-tale spires, ancient cave churches and local stone dwellings. I was scribbling in a Moleskine journal at the whimsically named Flintstones Cave Bar, a glass of Efes beer at hand. I was mostly alone until about 9 p.m., when bodies suddenly filled the white-stone grotto, music began to pulse and about a dozen people danced by their glass-filled tables.
A young woman, petite with dark pixieish hair, approached me, asked where I was from, and invited me to join her small party. I politely declined. About 10 minutes later, I decided what the hell and sat at their table and bought the group a round. The woman was Kalpten, whose name I still find distractedly unusual and pleasantly exotic. She danced with her friends, shyly, when I was there.
Kalpten explained how each weekend she and her friends made the hour drive from Kayseri, a city of nearly a million people in Central Turkey, where the airport which I flew into from Istanbul is located, to Flintstones Cave Bar for music, beer and boogie.
We hit it off, but eventually I ambled into the night, up the hill to my lovely cave hotel. As I was checking out the next morning, a message from Kalpten awaited. (In our flurry of small talk, she had asked the name of my hotel.) I called her back and she insisted on driving to Göreme, picking me up and taking me to the Kayseri airport. Yes, I said.
When we parted in the terminal she said she’d take a bus to see me in Istanbul at the end of the week. And she did. We spent a long, sunny day together, during which we broke up a vicious fist-fight between two young boys, sipped Efes beer, hung around the waterfront, strolled historic Sultanahmet and took a ferry to picturesque Princes Island.
And that was that. When I returned to the States, we exchanged several fond emails, then, inevitably, the flow trickled off, and a years-long silence followed.
Then the email at the top of this post came.
I promptly wrote her back, five or six enthusiastic lines. Three days later, she responded, part of which read:
So much time has flown since we mailed each other. And now we both two as all other people experience the same troubles, feelings and thoughts, we are all passing through historical and tough times.
Exactly. In these days of universal trauma and global grieving, our overdue reconnection takes on a slightly unreal complexion. It is strange, wonderful, serendipitous. Magic is not an idle player, I think. Yet tragedy is also part of the equation.
Connection is important to me, yet not as important as it is to most. A loner at heart, I prefer people in small doses. Yet this reaching out by Kalpten struck me differently, poignantly. Of course there’s the nostalgia factor — long time, no see and the triggering of a dozen warm memories — but it’s more than that. She’s a distant friend I have only wondered and dreamt about, a phantom face I can visit in a few photographs.
And now she’s real all over again. It’s not necessarily a romantic thing; it’s a human thing. That’s about all we have in these fraught times, and in any time.
Kalpten wrote: “It is really big pleasure to write you as always.”
Then she signed off.
How are you feeling?? Write me anything you want to write …
I’m going for now.
Take care
K.
GNASHING. 