Dear Istanbul
Dear Istanbul,
You are not a city to me, you are a feeling that learned how to breathe.
You arrive without asking, salt on your lips, prayer in your bones, one foot in memory, the other in becoming.
You stand where continents hesitate, where history exhales and refuses to be done.
I have watched the sun rise on your shoulders, gold spilling across minarets like a promise kept.
I have felt your nights, heavy with music, smoke, laughter, longing as if every street knew my name before I ever spoke it.
You are discipline and seduction in the same breath.
Steel and silk. Order wrapped in chaos, chaos taught to dance.
Your waters don’t divide, they invite.
They pull men inward, teach them patience, teach them surrender without weakness.
In you, I am quieter.
More honest.
I listen better.
I walk slower.
I remember things I didn’t know I’d forgotten.
You don’t belong to me, and that’s precisely why I love you.
You remain sovereign, unyielding, ancient, alert yet somehow you let me pass through, changed.
If love is a place, it is not soft.
It is not easy.
It is layered, weathered, alive.
It is you.
Always watching.
Always waiting.
Never finished.
A man who keeps returning.
Dear Istanbul.
