there is a man on every street. he is the token drifter, with a head full of hair swaying, his mind elsewhere but squarely there, a bottle in a bag at his feet. he sits on the ledge of a front yard, always the same ledge, among the cats, sometimes looking at the myriads of passersby walking by and passing through, sometimes unaffectedly ignoring them. he is a strange man, but only because we do not know him, and we haven’t stopped to ask.
a friend and i walked by one evening, talking about this but not that. the man was there, sitting on the same ledge, among the same cats. as we passed by him, i heard him say “çirkin kız” and, again, “çirkin”. i couldn’t turn around and catch his eye as my friend and i were talking about this and not that, and i didn’t want her to be offended that his voice had distracted me while hers spoke of important things, things i would later forget. my friend hadn’t noticed the man’s words since her ears were not attuned to them—he spoke in another language; his words could’ve meant anything to anyone, on any street, in any world—but i knew they were meant for us. i paid him no mind, though i handed him all of my spare attention, in the angle of my left ear which i also wished was an eye.
eventually we reached a corner; i made a left and my friend made a right. all this time i had the man’s bait in my pocket; it had stayed with me, and i could finally take it out, to hear, to see. i didn’t know what to make of it. it lay there stripped of its context, with little meaning. how was i to know that çirkin kız wasn’t an insult, but a nazar-proof compliment, a counter-intuitive flattery meant to protect from the evil eye? by calling us the opposite of what we were, he effectively restored a balance that was tipped by the thought of an envy-laden, negatively-charged beautiful. i wondered how easy some have it by not knowing a language, how immune they are to the sight and sounds of others, but also how unfortunate it is that remarks like these—fishing lines of connections—can so easily slip by, catch nothing, and never be thrown again.