Letters to Oktay: Letter One

Dear Oktay,

TL 77.20. Sound familiar? It's the amount you paid for electricity for the month of February, back in 2011. It's hard to imagine what a person is like based on their monthly energy usage six years ago. TL 77.20 is pretty standard really. Not too frugal, nor excessive. I wonder if you know about vampire energy. It's the power consumed by household electronic devices when they're switched off but still plugged in. If you didn't know, now you do. And the question is, will you start unplugging your TV and whatnot before bed every night, to knock a couple of digits off your next bill? If a couple of digits don't matter to you, would you do it for the environment? Maybe you'd start with good intents, but maybe after a few nights of the ritual, you'd get lazy and fail to see out the month... Now that would tell me something about the type of person you are. Which is interesting isn't it? Knowledge. Are we defined by what we do with the knowledge we acquire? 

Here's another thought. Perhaps if you knew about vampire energy back in 2011, you would have acted on it, but now you couldn't give a shit. I can relate to that I think. I too have grown more disenchanted in recent years. I wish I could offer some measure of consolation in these bleak times. But consolation is a thing I'm no good at. Escapism -now there's a solution. It's also how I happened upon your electricity bill, and some further mementos of you besides, pressed between the pages of my recent purchase from Melenkoli Sahaf -that secondhand bookshop off Cinnah Caddesi. 

I wonder if you frequent the place often, or if the occasion you stopped by to drop off this unwanted book, was your one and only visit. I wonder if you've met the owner's cat, Dolma. She's got Multiple Sclerosis, so she can't stand up right or walk to save any one of her lives. Instead, she rolls about like those tire-twister toy cars that can get out of every corner. The day I bought your book, Dolma was in heat, and kept yowling something awful above Ismet's (the owner) carefully curated playlist of classical music. Yowling and rolling and toppling all over the place. She gives me anxiety, that cat. I worry about her toppling into one of the electric heaters Ismet's got on the floor. I told this to him. He just lit a second cigarette and looked at me, apparently untroubled by the possibility. 

I went back to my molehill of foreign language books, piled up against the bit of bare-brick wall between two shelves. Ismet doesn't believe in order when it comes to his books, so I was excavating: removing the top layer of commercial fiction, teen romance and 70s erotica, to get to the good stuff in the center. Pachelbel’s canon in D turned into Bach’s Suiten fur Violoncello and eventually Ismet lit his third cigarette. Outside it was snowing, and if the world was going on, it was going on somewhere far away from where I was sat, on the floor at the foot of the molehill, surrounded by book towers of my own making.  Every so often, Dolma on her ceaseless rounds of the tiny shop, stumbled into me, then picked herself up again and rolled on. The towers grew. The snow fell. Bach became Ravel's Bolero, slowly building up to its epic crescendo. Then suddenly, about twelve minutes into the track, there it was.

In hindsight, your unwanted book was not the most exciting second hand book purchase I've ever made. But when you've set aside enough copies of Twilight and Fifty Shades, you appreciate the little things.