Memory

by Alexander Stessin

On a poorly lit morning in O’Hare airport
my memory serves me a dejavu:
there was a waiting area just like this one
last winter in Istanbul where we spent four rainy days
warming ourselves with sahlep from a vendor in Sultanahmet,
tourist spot devoid of people in the off-season,
and the first two days were enough for us,
on day three we no longer felt
like stepping out of the hotel room,
felt like staying in, just like I did here,
in Chicago, where I spent two rainy years
in the midst of my teenage off-season,
and where I am returning now,
twenty something years later.

This is how consciousness —
hardly a stream, more like a trickle —
escapes back to childhood, and from its shallow depth
emerges a phrase or a gesture, dragging along a someone,
that go-with-the-flow Yuri, who in fifth grade
served as a punching bag for the class alpha-males
and by eleventh grade would become their reliable ride,
whenever they needed a designated driver —
he was the only other Russian kid in that school,
my first friend in Chicago, though in truth
my friendship with Yuri was just an excuse:
at night I would dream of his sister, but she
was older than me, had a trendy hairstyle,
knew about Kuryokhin and the artists of Soviet underground,
educated us too, took us to the movies once or twice,
gave me fashiontips, told me to grow out my hair,
too bad it all frizzed up, and when I jerked my head
in an effort to toss my bangs like an eighties rock star,
people mistook this head jerk for a strange motor tic . . .

I reach for my phone, pull up Facebook, type in her first
and last name, and on the picture of a woman with graying hair,
squinting at the camera from under the palm of her hand,
I see the same backdrop: the abandoned Sultanahmet district,
Blue Mosque, Topkapy Palace . . .
What’s more, the date
when the picture was taken appears
to coincide with the time when I was there,
everything coincides, all the background details,
so much so that if I wanted to, I could easily
convince myself that I too am in that picture —
one of the blurry passengers in the back,
on the river cruise ship “Bosphorus Tours,”
that I am one of them, unrecognizable after all these years,
just like the gray-haired woman at the forefront of memory,
just like all these people, looking out into the emptiness
beyond the still frame, instructed by the cruise-ship captain
to keep an eye out for the watchtower of some old Ottoman fort,
which can be clearly seen from here on a sunny day,
but today there is only fog, and nothing comes into view.