A Friday That Felt Like Tuesday

Someone once asked what I liked most about Ankara.

“It lets you experience loneliness completely,” I wrote.

The answer was partly a joke, but winter evenings in the city knew how to support it. The sky darkened early, buses kept moving, apartment windows came on one by one, and everyone outside seemed to have somewhere definite to go. If you did not, Ankara had a way of making that fact visible.

Some evenings I went home, made tea, turned on the computer, and put on music. The city continued outside the window without asking anything from me. Friday night could feel exactly like Tuesday afternoon. No event announced itself. Nothing happened badly enough to complain about, and nothing happened well enough to change the evening.

That was one version of Ankara. There were others: the city seen through bus windows, the student city, the city after work, the late-night city, and the streets I had once walked with people who later moved elsewhere. The roads could stay exactly where they were while the city changed around them.

A café closed. A bus route changed. More often, a person simply stopped being part of a place where I was used to seeing them. Then an ordinary street acquired an empty space that existed only for me.

I used to complain that Ankara made loneliness too easy to notice. I still think that was true.

But when I remember the city now, I do not first see monuments or large avenues. I see a dark window, tea beside a computer, a bus moving through winter, and lights appearing in other apartments.

The city could make an evening feel empty.

It never felt unfamiliar.