Burhan the Cabbie

…tell you a love story to complete the game. My name is Cabbie, and I happen to be a weary Burhan in my spare time, thank you kindly. I tend to keep a stage and a curtain at home to ensure the identity exchange, which helps me switch from a journeyman to a hapless romantic. The confusing play forces my wife to subscribe to a funny feeling. On a winter’s night. If a traveler.

The wife character has no name. She tried to own one; we couldn’t afford being postmodern. She walks like a summer breeze in our apartment, carrying onion and detergent scents with her. Enter a short woman with an onion picture in her hand. Her presence in bed reassures me that we sleep together like a mountain and a valley. It takes her eons to wake up from her slumber. Then, she counts all the Bat Mans (Bat Men?) so that I can go back to my vigilante sleep. When God throws our dice, our world turns null and void, amounting to a simply hunch. Really? Really. We have the potential to lead up to an interesting idea. Of living. At times, my wife appears in the rear-view mirror of my cab, still searching for her name under riverbeds and tectonic plates. I help her look for more meaning than we can hope to carry. That props her a bit. We sit up to watch a revenge movie we know the ending of.

Ladies and gentlemen, such was my life until I’ve fallen in love with the most unlikely other-woman imaginable. For one, she has a name. That, I can’t reveal for she has since become the center of life. Say, the Sun of all revolving things. Enter a solid red circle, hanging down from the ceiling. You cannot stare at her directly, or it’s a new day. Her hair is neither long nor yellow or historic. Its power lies in its permission, lying in broad daylight, with a poem to spare. I love each and every cell of hers, adoring them one at a time. I think it’s not normal to adore one’s existence. Then again, I’m not a normal Burhan. I drive a cab ‘round and ‘round the city to carry dangerous people. Enter clients in clown make-ups waving credit cards.

Stillness bothers this new other-woman. Where she sits, she does not get older, but farther. Time passes through her. What I know is that if I could stack all that time on top of each other, I would grow to be a much taller Burhan with a heavier heart. Everything about her reminds me of all the circular things I have had to endure, roundabouts, and eternal errors. In turn, I end up loving the mysterious other-woman even better. Stronger. Delirious. The mountains break open showing off their power to shake valleys and plates. The other-woman warns me that I could hurt myself, falling from such heights. My wife could even believe in a God.

I swallow all my necessary questions while she stares at random places as if she knows everything there is to know. I can sense the semi-answers, which triggers me to find the other-halves. She smiles when that happens, breaks her stare, and says, “Turn left, please.” This is how autumn falls in İstanbul, slowly but surely, the shortest distance to something prudent. I turn left because I always try and do all the right things for the other-woman. Evading the traffic of this world for a belated Sun, for instance. It’s a start. Planets and moons with wheels move from left to right. I told you. Or not.

If you ask me, it’s odd to love a person just because she is the other. I’m an ignorant tool, so I may not know the answer, but you nice and neat ladies and gentlemen, you sure must know. People should fall in love with people because they are good at things, like cleaning, writing, making seasons or floods happen. What’s the name of this game I’m playing? In the second act, I would very much like to tell you all about it. She owns a name because she can afford having one in this library of curious encounters. Even the wife character understands that I have no choice, but to lose the game because I’m a good for nothing Burhan, driving a cab around the city only to end up meeting dangerous women to fall for. Enter a precipice.

The city gets smaller and smaller, I go faster and faster, the world unravels according to laws and lusts. My love grows stronger still. I wind up saying, I love you, to everyone I don’t know. Clients get uncomfortable, cops ask for my license, and I get to run afoul of even more dangerous people. It never matters, though. I’m unable to move the worlds. So, one day I tell her, I love you, and she goes on and on about all the women she’s had to have been for other men. What men, I ask; I think I thought out loud, she says. We start laughing at my being an imbecile. Don’t fall for me, I don’t have a name, she says, smiling. You don’t know, but you have one, I say. Enter Burhan with a cardboard of a mountain. You are very funny, she says. I am in fact a comedy plus some time, I say, you caught me in my warm-up. I was just about to begin. To what, she asks, flabbergasted. Some time passes. A few years, or a moment. We all die to get better. I get why she asks the questions she already knows the answers of. To my tragedy, I say.

For tonight, I will…