We met while both working as tutors at my college. We soon realized we had many mutual friends, those from among the pseudo-intellectual, wannabe revolutionary crowds we both fit into. People who’d listen to me hold-court in my stained military jacket and black beret. They’d reach herbal nirvana as they nodded along on this physical plane, yearning for a larger stage to shout their metaphysical realities or even for more space to kick around the stones they thought nobody else could see.

We both fit into a group of refugees, travelers, and spiritual migrants, folks yearning for a way out without knowing the best manner of articulating such feelings. A group who sought comfort in the collective because they feared what the individual was capable of.

I was born with ptosis, meaning my left eye was slammed shut when I landed in the doctor’s arms. I had two operations to fix it, one at birth and one when I was two. They did the job, but my bum eye is still noticeable, especially to those who actively look for flaws.

I was always self-conscious about my eye, despite numerous women claiming that I was “physically attractive.” My droopy eyelid never allowed me to see myself clearly.

Around the time I met my friend, I was part of a hip-hop ensemble which had some local momentum. Performing over-the-top satirical gimmick rap before crowds who expected streetwise freestyles boosted my confidence. I learned how to hold a room that would be otherwise unwelcoming to my presentation.

The first time we walked into the art gallery, where we’d eventually perform weekly, and absorbed the audience and talent, the other members of my group were nervous. One of them decided to sit out the performance entirely. “We’re going to get jumped,” he said, internally comparing what we came to display with the other acts. We did not get jumped. Instead, the crowd jumped to their feet and danced along with smiles, as they did for all our subsequent performances.

When the [then] girl of my dreams said she found me handsome, I thought she was referring to my stage presence, a sort of unspoken charisma. There’s no way someone could look past my eye, right? While eating pizza together one day, she asked me to remove the dark sunglasses I always wore so she could stare into my eyes. I got nervous for the first time since I began rapping. I felt exposed, not measured, the same way my friend felt when he assumed our performance would stir up a violent reaction.

In the swirl of these events, I invited my dwarf friend over one day to hang out in my basement. The storm cellar under the brick house where my parents lived had become a local meeting place of sorts, a fusion of a literary/philosophical circle and basement scenes from stoner comedies. People would come and go. We’d work on projects, we’d watch funny movies, and in between that, we’d pass the time in collective, feigned bewilderment. He was excited at the invitation, more so after learning that two of our mutual friends would also be there.

Here’s the reason this story is relevant. The stairs into the basement had broken a few months prior to his arrival. We had to jump over three missing steps in order to land onto the basement floor. It was not a hard jump, but one that some females often misjudged, leading to funny moments of spilled limbs and fragmented egos. I failed to mention the broken stairs to my friend, not to purposefully mislead him, but because the jump had become a ritual for us and no longer an active thought. My oversight crushed my hospitality as we stood at the top of the stairs, looking down, with the hum of the fluorescent bulbs urging us forward. The lights also appeared to suddenly indicate his height, which had never come up in conversation.

We found ourselves in an unspoken struggle for maintained dignity. I had two choices. One, I could let him take the jump on his own, without saying anything, knowing it’d be a risk. Or two, I could ask him if he wanted help, or even if he forgot he had somewhere else to be. We stood there beside each other frozen in time, both understanding the gravity and not wanting to be the first one to break it. It was no longer than a minute, but one that stretched towards eternity and back. I didn’t want to spoil the budding friendship by choosing the wrong words…

I did what I do best: I fused the two seemingly contradictory choices into a playful question. “You gonna be able to make it?”

He looked up at me and laughed, “Sure.”

Without missing a beat, he took the plunge. The Jumpman silhouette cast a shadow on the dark walls. I nearly reached out, but my itching fingers thought the better of it. He was already halfway gone; he was either going to make it or he wasn’t, with or without my help. Instead, I gripped the hem of my collar, to give my fingernails something to do until the scene was over. He couldn’t see me, but I nearly ripped the threads from the neckline, knowing if I had to help him off the cement, both our masks would fall off for good.

His feet hit the floor with such grace that neither of us had anything to say about the matter. It was unspoken. If we had acknowledged the moment verbally, it would have lost all meaning.

I followed him to the circular kitchen table where my friends were gathered. I followed him with more than my feet.

Seeing him take the jump, make the jump, maintain his dignity, and continue life as if his height were not an issue awoke something in me. With the echoes of his sneakers against the cement floor, a layer of cement was removed from my soul.

I didn’t realize it then, but I accepted my eye that night. Or rather, my eye accepted me, opening enough to see the world the way my friend did.

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If you give me five minutes,
I’ll twist you,
turn you,
expose it all,
then fall apart
in front of you. 

If you give me ten,
I’ll hang ten. 
Someone said hang five.
I said double it,
shake it up,
twist is all around,
then back to less.

With twenty on the line,
I’d crumble under the pressure.
You know what that’s like.
We felt it together…
or was that someone else?
Anyhoo…

Back with stakes higher at thirty,
I’m back to handling it right away,
no time to spare!
no wheel too dull to spin!
Some wheels are too dull to slide, though.
And glide…

Did we ever glide together near forty?
More minutes, the better at this point.
This is the sweet spot.
Goldilocks.
Barbarosa. 
Medulla oblongata.

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At the time, another friend and I would visit this friend’s house, indulge in as many substances as we could manage, and then sit outside and talk philosophy and history for hours. In low-income neighborhoods, people often do just sit outside.

So this friend and I were talking about something political and the neighbor walked out. He was in his mid-to-late-50s at the time, with a graying flattop. He came outside wearing pajama pants, a white tank top, and indoor slippers with outdoor socks. He smiled at us and walked the few feet to close the distance with a coffee mug in his hand. Thinking back, it was probably not coffee in that mug. I found out later that the friend who lived there also served Burn ‘Em his daily dosage of herbs and spices.

My friend lived in how you might imagine a poor man’s condominium to look, with entrances and doorways all around which led to various full-size apartments, offset by a large lot. You entered his house by first going into the lot, whether in a car or on foot, and then turning left. His door was the first, with another behind it (or straight back), one on top of that with a stairway entrance, two directly in front of the lot, and several to the left of the building where my friend lived.

We were leaning against the wall in front of his house, facing the main road and away from the lot, when Burn ‘Em approached from one of the houses to the left (or, our right). He stopped next to us and listened to the topic of our conversation before nodding along.

“You boys talking about war?”

“Sort of,” my friend said. “Systemic causes.”

“Hmm,” Burn ‘Em scratched his five o-clock shadow. “I was in a war.”

We had nothing to respond to that, so we remained silent. It was a collective, unconscious agreement not to indulge the man we would don Burn ‘Em after this conversation.

“Yeah,” he went on. “Nam. It was wild, man.” Mind you, he was talking to three of us. “They would just drop me down with napalm flamethrowers and tell me to burn everything and everyone, man. Burn ‘em all, man! Burn ‘em down!” He began laughing in such a way that did not befit the tone of the imagery he was presenting us.

Thing is, this was a drive-by stop-and-chat. We wanted nothing to do with him.

“That’s terrible,” one of us said.

“What is?”

“Burning people alive for no reason. You don’t think that’s terrible?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, looking down, as if he forgot he wasn’t talking to his old war buddies and instead a group of drunk stoners in their early 20s. Then, looking back at us, “It is terrible. But that was what we had to do. I didn’t want to do it. I had to. Or someone else would.” He had a moment of clarity. “Wait, are you guys some sort of hippies? Commies?”

My hair was quite long. I was wearing a beret. One of the guys had a large, Italian afro, a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, and tie-die shorts. The other was non-descript in his white t-shirt and blue Levis.

Burn ‘Em’s eyes widened. “I love hippies, man! You guys have the best tree!”

We laughed, lit a few smoke signals together, and tried to explain the immorality of burning innocent people alive to a man who had gotten used to telling this story in a braggadocios way.

We might have used “burn ‘em” in a different context with him after that, if you catch the drift floating along the lines.

None of us are/were hippies.

A few years later, the friend who lived beside him told me that he found Burn ‘Em dead in his apartment. He was there, knocking on his door for his weekly milk and honey delivery, with no response for hours. He left, came back hours later, and still nothing. As an EMT, he felt obliged to enter and offer assistance. None was needed, as Burn ‘Em was lying on the couch unresponsive. He told us that Burn ‘Em was a hoarder in every sense of the word, but mostly of pills, with every type of pill scattered across every corner of that apartment.

My friend was arrested for breaking and entering and eventually blamed for robbing Burn ‘Em. He was absolved. I don’t think he actually took anything, but I also wasn’t there.

He has also since passed, and as of the time of this writing, I don’t know how.

I hope neither of them are burning now.

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I'm going back
and getting things
you didn't even know I had,
a life raft,
a gas mask,
a sack of maps,
the plans that turn you off,
just a tad.

I met you where the globe is leaking,
so don't pretend now that you're bigger
than the path.
You said my tongue's the cause of creaking,
it's self-defeating,
it's oft-retreating
the oft-repeating,
Which is when you proved
you never listened
in my class.

So now lay your back before me
as we honor those
who came before
and those who've passed.
And I'll strap the muzzle tight,
not just for tonight,
but for the last.
So you can unplug all that you hear,
all you hold dear,
and store my sounds under the stash.

If the game hadn't collapsed
before your eyes,
I'd call you blind,
I'd call you mashed,
I'd call you slashed.
Since we're off-time,
I'm on my knees.
I just relapsed
on the power out beyond
the cracking glass.

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Ever since I was a child, and long before I accepted Islam, I dreamt of living in Istanbul.

Growing up in the shadow of New York City, everyone spoke about how it was the most important city in the world. I wondered how they ignored Rome, Athens, Cairo, Baghdad, Granada, Delhi, and the others. I also noticed that one geographic region combined all the lessons and experience of those wondrous cities at the center of the greatest empires, bringing society to heights it hadn’t seen before or since: Constantinople.

Why was everyone ignoring the bridge between the East and the West? I needed to venture there, make my stake in the land, and test whether it was what I felt in my soul: the true most important city in all the world. Perhaps it was because I grew up beside New Jersey’s Little Istanbul? I think it was for larger reasons than this, though. I think I was raised near Little Istanbul to prepare my heart for the larger city.

I first arrived in 2014, on my way to study in Tunisia. I was immediately taken aback. It felt even more monumental and cultured than my wildest dreams conjured up when discussing the city in my internal monologue. I hit as many of the historic sites as I could in the short time I was there, before spending the night with Syrian refugees I ran into while looking for a coastline to drink coffee and smoke until sunrise.

I was sad to leave, but Tunis was calling my name. Zaytuna University and my fiancé were waiting there. So was my first imprisonment and deportation, after only a few weeks, but that’s a different tale altogether.

Upon being reset back home, returning to university, and continuing my Islamic studies with a private teacher, everything again pointed towards Türkiye as my ultimate destination. My teacher connected me with his classmates and government colleagues. They urged me to lay low until after the special referendum vote on presidential powers. An American Muslim convert with a journalism degree who had already been thrown in prison in a country connected to the Turkish empire was a special kind of threat. A potential spy by every measure. Together, we established Kayseri as my first residence. My fiancé had a friend there. It was my teacher’s hometown. It all made sense.

I spent nearly two years in Kayseri before eventually making my way to Istanbul. In the former Silk Road hub, my daughter was born, I published my first books, and I began working in academia as an editor and proofreader of graduate and post-graduate theses and articles. The eventual issue was, despite being one of Türkiye’s commercial hubs with lots of money to throw around, very little of it made its way into the pockets of foreigners. Respect was even harder to come by, once they got past the initial, “The gorilla can do a backflip!” phase.

Shortly after the birth of my first child, I was offered and accepted a teaching job in Medina. I remember crying tears of joy that Allah had invited me to the city where His Messenger (PBUH) migrated to escape persecution. That did not last long, as I realized the job was either scamming me or leaving me in a difficult position to front the bill for my visa. They wanted me to fly from Türkiye to New York, on my dime, pay for the visa, and wait to be reimbursed. My heart told me to abandon the move to the city of my Prophet and try something else.

Not long after, I received a ghostwriting contract, and then decided it was finally time to check Istanbul off the itinerary. I first took my wife and six-month-old daughter on a tour of the Mediterranean, before escaping Kayseri like a criminal. I did nothing wrong, of course. My evasive move was necessary because the school where I worked was known to hold the passports of its foreign workers and prevent them from seeking better opportunities. I did not want to get into a “right vs. wrong” match with a job that always paid me two-to-three months late. They still owe me two months’ salary and payment for a private student, if my math is correct.

We found a brownstone-style house, painted a vibrant blue, in the Balat neighborhood of the Fatih district of Istanbul, a few steps from the coastline where Mehmed the Conqueror and his army first entered the city. In other words, proper Constantinople. The year we spent there was nearly magical, if not for my wife’s immigration situation presenting its first challenge, and for the homeowners getting ugly at the end and refusing to return my safety deposit (an unfortunate trend when renting in Türkiye as a foreigner).

My wife (who was then pregnant with our second child, my son) and one-year-old daughter left the country for what was supposed to be a quick trip to renew her passport. It became a nine-month journey, with her fighting the Tunisian government to grant her the document, mostly because of their fear of me. Tunisia has never stopped attempting to ruin my life since 2014. She gave birth to our son there, in a land I couldn’t visit lest I offer up my neck. I left the four-story house with a view of the Golden Horn to a two-bedroom apartment in the basement of a modern apartment complex. It was supposed to be a temporary home until she returned. Then COVID struck.

In a tearful reunion at the airport with my nearly two-year-old daughter who had doubled in size, I held her in my arms and promised to never let her go again. I was also introduced to my then three-month-old son, who did his best to wear the guise of our Andalusian ancestors while nodding off in his carriage. My father-in-law accompanied my wife on the journey, making it easier for her to travel with two young children. We were a family again, despite the Tunisian government’s best attempts at stealing them from me. I remember, shortly after their arrival, pushing the double baby carriage around the Fatih Mosque complex when one of our friends mentioned the spread of a dangerous virus. I laughed it off at the time, remembering how little any of the other supposed pandemics affected our lives. How wrong I was.

While my wife and children were away, I began teaching for one of Türkiye’s leading research institutes, where I was soon offered the position of English Coordinator and a permanent work visa. Thankfully, I was able to continue teaching and editing online while everyone was losing their jobs. I also wrote several books, for myself and others, as well as continued to land editing and translation work. COVID was a great time for us financially because I was able to focus on nothing but improving (and proving) my craft.

With the fortune I found while locked inside the basement dwellings, we were able to move to a much nicer home, this time in the Üsküdar district, though still on the water. I was sad to leave proper Constantinople behind, but happy to move closer to my work (only a few minutes away on foot) and to improve my family’s quality of life. The children particularly loved the home, a massive duplex with five rooms, two baths, a jacuzzi, and balconies on every side overlooking the water (where my daughter and I started a garden on the bedroom balcony and we installed a swing and pool on the larger, front-facing one). My office there was larger than my entire current apartment. I rented the home from a work colleague, the best friend of the researcher who initially hired me. I intended to live in that house forever.

God and man had other plans. A year after we moved in, I got notice saying that the owner would not be renewing our contract. Everyone involved was well aware that since the time I had moved, the rent prices in Istanbul had increased at least triple in most areas, much more for houses like ours. They were also aware that for foreigners, it was nearly impossible to rent anywhere worth anything, as Turkish society had grown more evidently racist in the aftermath of COVID. My landlord and his family intended to profit off this situation, not maintain the honor they lent me and my family. My health, both mental and physical, hit new lows when I was forced to relocate my children away from the city and into a village that had no access for people like us.

It was a few days before my birthday when we moved to the new house. The only movers we knew would not rip us off were Syrian refugees whom I met through mutual friends in the middle of the same upturn. I don’t normally celebrate my birthday, but this was a particularly bad experience, where I had to wipe the tears from my eyes to be able to read the makeshift card my daughter drew for me. Seizures that I hadn’t felt in years crawled back, making it nearly impossible to maintain any of my normal writing, reading, or social habits. I was bedridden and hospitalized with severe, life-threatening pneumonia. I was placed on stomach medication, first to stop me from being constantly nauseous, then to give me some semblance of an appetite. The back issues I normally ignored now made it difficult to walk a few feet without incredible pain. I lost about 25 pounds. I could say for the first time since being falsely imprisoned in Tunisia, and before that since before accepting Islam, I was in a hole of depression that few could grasp. I still never missed a day of work.

I know that people lose their homes every day and are often forced into worse situations than we faced. This wasn’t only about the house – in a moment, I lost my access to the society I had spent years assimilating into. I no longer felt like an equal, not even among gypsies and kekos. Because I had attempted to live in Türkiye among the Turks, while the other expats attempted to recreate their homeland in closed circles, I was suddenly foreign, out of place, and pushed away. Those who forced my children to relocate were able to continue laughing as they cashed inflated checks. The only laughing I did, besides the mask I put on for others, was the maniacal repeated shifting of a frontal-lobe seizure that came out every time I thought on our situation for more than a few seconds.

There were beams of light, of course. The largest of which was being welcomed into an upstart publishing company, started by friends of an English teacher who worked for my department. Beyond having passion in the work we did, I found true brotherhood among those writers, artists, educators, and musicians, all working together to put out the best possible products for the global ESL market. Sitting in our office, I was able to forget some of the stress and physical torment. I had something to work on, focus on, build towards, even if the people I encountered along the way were hurling more and more racist comments and dismissive glances.

The primary editor of the publishing house found me another job at one of Türkiye’s premier high schools where he taught. In addition to that, I was invited to offer lessons at Istanbul University, a branch of Marmara University’s theology department, and a small Kurdish madrasa in my old neighborhood of Fatih. Then, I received an offer to work as the primary English editor for the Turkish government’s religious affairs and another from an independent publisher of academic articles. The money was pouring in again, when I was forced to send my family back to Tunisia to rectify another immigration issue.

Then the earthquake that devasted eastern Türkiye struck and tore everything apart. I was safe in Istanbul, not knowing that the fallout would ensure my life and career would be lost under the rubble. Every institute that paid me a fair wage before no longer felt it was deserving of a foreigner. As the economy crashed further, I saw my Turkish colleagues granted raises that helped them maintain their life standards, while mine were meager and only met the bare minimum, sometimes even less than the legal standard. Due to my family’s ongoing visa process, I had to keep my money in Turkish lira, not US dollar, as proof of support. Overnight, as the Lira crumbled, I lost over 60% of my savings. I went from being able to live comfortably and support my family, even planning on buying land to build my own home, to needing to borrow money from friends, colleagues, or even students to afford basic groceries. I would not have been able to bring my family back to Türkiye, nor eventually flee back to the US, if not for my publishing allies fronting the bill in exchange for future royalties.

The owner of our new apartment then removed his mask and told me that I would not be able to stay past our current term. He first lied about bringing his family into the building, but after being pressed, he admitted that my rent was too low for the value of the house. Based on the government’s recent rent increase policies, even if he raised me what was permitted, he would be losing money (if that makes any sense for a complex already paid off in full). Money became more important to everyone around me than honor, brotherhood, and loyalty.

I borrowed a few thousand dollars to bring my family to another apartment, small, falling apart, crowded with the owner’s own possessions, but in a decent neighborhood. I placed all of our belongings, the life we had built over seven years, into storage. My heart was locked in one of those boxes. It was the final blow.

At this time, an American “friend” told me he was recently promoted to a high position in the Saudi education department where he could hire his own teachers. He offered me a job where we could return to a higher standard of life. I told the head of the research institute that if they could not increase my salary, I had to leave the country. He was a former student of mine who had been promoted from within. A joy to have in class and someone who claimed to understand the economic collapse, I figured him to be a true ally. We were in the middle of publishing my life work to that point, the writing curriculum I developed and perfected over my 15+ years teaching. When he returned with the smallest possible number he could offer without overtly stating they wished me to resign, everything was clear. It should have been clear a few weeks prior, when at the graduation ceremony, while showing off the program I had chaired for five years, where I carefully crafted every single component myself, they showcased a Turkish teacher. The one who filmed and edited that video was another former student. When my students, those I gave more time and energy than my own children, turned against me, nothing more needed to be said.

The job in Saudi also fizzled out. The snake in man’s clothing stopped responding to my inquiries after weeks of procrastination. I had three job offers on the table when I decided to leave the city of my dreams and the greater country around it: two universities and one high school. The collected salaries would have allowed us to return to some semblance of a normal life. Normal, though, was washed away after repeated betrayals. And I had no guarantee the government would approve another work visa upon leaving my well-connected institution. I had to return home to New Jersey. I would have died of heartbreak if I stayed another month.

We sold whatever of our possessions we could and borrowed money to ship the rest of it back to my parents in America. A high school close to them had all but hired me over the phone. Since my wife was unable to travel to the US, she and my children had to return to Tunisia without me. As of this writing, it has been two years since I have seen them.

That high school did its best impression of the people I met in Türkiye and failed to make good on their word, trying to hire me as a substitute while I got another certificate they required. Same amount of work, a nearly 40% cut in pay. I had no choice but to work construction with my father. It wasn’t long before I pulled my back again, leaving me without a permanent salary for the first time since I left the US nine years prior.

Just when I was on the verge of falling into an unscalable pit, a group of religious travelers came to my door. Their leader, an elder whom I looked up to a great deal, invited me to join them on a trip around the US. The reason I got in the car was because for the first time since I could remember, I saw someone actually care about the story I shared of my recent happenings, a Cambodian Muslim convert who would go on to teach me many things.

As I outlined the betrayals I had faced, my failing health, and my stolen career, two of the brothers had eyes that were bouncing through space, waiting for me to finish so they could speak again. This Cambodian, on the other hand, was holding onto my fence with eyes locked onto mine, offering empathic huffs at every pivotal point. I eventually told the elder, “When traveling for the sake of God, one is usually faced with difficulty in either health, wealth, or family. I have all three. Do you still want me?” As his students were stuffing my suitcases into the aging BMW X5, he said, “We want you because of that, get in the damn car.” The story of this trip is a tale for a future book release.

After the journey, I thought maybe I could give Türkiye another shot. I had the publishing company, after all, with the brotherhood of shared growth to return to. I learned the editor-in-chief, my best friend I had met in the country, had gone to work for the institute which took everything from me. I am still pulling out the nearly fatal knife which struck through my chest at the news. My Turkish dream was forever over after that phone call.

I decided then to start my own publishing house, something that I could control and guide to success with all of the knowledge and experience I had gained throughout the years. I thought about bringing in two of my closest friends, one whom I knew since the old days, and another I met in Türkiye and thought we were estranged blood. Wouldn’t you know that the betrayals would continue, both striking at different times and in different ways. It’s alright. I forgive them both, and everyone back in Türkiye as well. You can’t blame people for not knowing what they don’t know. That’s Allah’s job, not mine.

I learned through all of this that there is no land, no person, no plan, no accomplishment that makes you whole, even if they are elements of your living dreams. I am the only person responsible for what I do and how I’ll be remembered. Perhaps if I envisioned Türkiye as the bridge between the East and the West, I could bring that internalization into my own being and share the glow through my own words and character. I hope that the dream of Istanbul is alive and well within my soul. Not the city, but the representation of everything I envisioned when I heard about it as a youngster with nothing but hope for a place that could bring me closure, safety, and meaning.

I used to shout into the nothingness of eternity that I wanted to go back “home.” From the age of around seven onward, I thought that meant Istanbul. Now, I carry “home” in my back pocket.

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growing up,
i always ate an orange
the way i was instructed:
using a knife
to cut the fruit
into small shapes
with deadly precision
before gaining access
to the tangy interior.

how incredibly inconvenient
eating oranges became.

then i started hanging
around immigrants.
they showed me how to de-peel
by inserting my thumb
into the small hole on the top.

the ease is unfounded.
now i can eat in nature.

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Originally published in Writings for Assorted Lunatics