parents…
Only visiting parents really make it possible to get to know a city, for the foreign city to acknowledge and accept our existence. Though it seems that we must wander around the markets, and be observed by people hoping to sell us freshly killed animals, their jokes as deadly as their hands and knives. Then further into the market they are selling antiques and here in shadow of our destination we look over carpets from what was once Persia. We walk into the boutique hotel and ask the old concierge if our room is ready. After that the children come, a mix of daughters and sons, these especially appeared in the brief sojourns in Warsaw, Derby, Frankfurt, Gebze, Kilich. They move about in flocks, to the extent that we can hardly think of them as singularities at least in so far as we can see them. It’s almost impossible to imagine speaking to any of the flock on their own, taking a singularity aside would be like a falcon separating a wounded starling from the flock wheeling and turning over the pier. It’s always as a flock that they arrive in a bar or a cafe, they babble and squabble around us like starlings with a touch of iridescence on the black clothing, they always wear black. Though its always as a group that they approach us, colliding with us, when they dance, and they always dance, they separate into gender groups… Redoing their hair, applying makeup in front of mirrors behind doors, they attempt to attract the attention of the musicians, girls and boys flutter eyelids at us, before vanishing into the night. Each of them probably has their own life somewhere out there in a villa perhaps, an apartment in one of the hideous brutalist blocks that surround the city, a polished concrete bathtub, a bank account and a drawerful of colourful underwear. As we turn to luxuriously sip our vodka shots or the chocolate martinis we wonder what their parents are like, do they worry about their specific named singularity as it traverses the town in the flock, will they be collecting their child in a car from some agreed pickup point or will the smart phone be extracted from a warm crevice and a a a a parent drives across the city to find them using GPS. Once we would have dreamt of a beauty spot hidden beneath cloth, a skirt a trouser, an intimate Polish or Turkish fold, the loveliness of young flesh, but now as we get older such thoughts no longer have any meaning, scarcely exist at all in fact. Now we see them as other peoples children, and muse about what their parents are. Still it is as if they enable our entrance into this city or town, offering us some kind of acknowledgment, even if its just a smile at our strange northern dancing.
