Fluid Wings

Taken from my instagram post on October 6, 2018. This small piece of mémoire emerged at a time where I spent so much time looking at my past, yearning for a reconnection with my younger selves; both as a remembrance but also as a way to recreate myself after for years, producing so much, doing so much, and feeling like an important road in my life map was completed.

Time can be such a fluid thing. When was it that I was first on top of this tower? It was for sure before primary school. I must have been six years old. Didn’t know how to read or write, only knew how to listen and imagine. Time wasn’t linear then. It was absolute, as if it didn’t flow forward, but always remained the same, as if everything would always remain the same.

According to the chronicles of a certain Ottoman voyager, a man of intellect built his own wings and flew across to the other side from the tower, landed right in Üsküdar. I remember my mother telling me another story as we gazed into the silver blue horizon of the Bophorus; the story of Ikarus. Ikarus was a slave she said, and he built his own wings out of wax. He had a route to escape but in the middle of the journey, he didn’t care anymore to arrive there, he just wanted to fly. For him, time also wasn’t linear. It was absolute. It was only the thrill of the wind on his skin which was real. It was only the sun rays warming his hair which mattered. What could a little more of it hurt? Just more air to breath in, more of the sun’s warmth on his skin… So just reach for higher, higher, a little more close to the sun… Until… Too hot, not just sun on your skin but also the wax, your wings, melting, mankind’s own creation, betraying itself. Ikarus suddenly wakes up from the hazy dream of blurred time; now time flows forward again, you have to take action, but too late, half of the wax has already melt off, you are falling, falling from the sky, away from the sun. The final crash will happen when he merges into the sea.

From that day, I clearly remember the sensation of the intense heat, from being too close to the sun, how the melting of the wax feels as each moment passes, produced by my mother’s careful words and my own imagination, more than my actual surroundings. The shiny blue Bosphorus view was pale in comparison. Istanbul was a magical city, a new sensation waiting around every corner. The magical words transmitted from generation to generation, the fascination of millions of lips as they passed on the story to one another, the pleasure of entering the garden of endless symbols.