I want to go to Istanbul

There are so many things to see out of the windscreen, in the blue cab of a truck taking twists and turns through the oaks and down to town I get to thinking

Sometimes about why a baby blanket hangs in my parents basement. Much needed rain turns main street into a fishbowl for the afternoon, the sheets of rain look like blue blankets sometimes from the top of the mesa.

The people watching cars out the windows of shops are just happy goldfish swimming in and out of my vision, colors in the palette other people see driving in a rainstorm, forearms cold out the windows for lack of a blanket.

The brass of eastern Europe cracking in the stereo.

It’s a shame you will never see these things. Telling a joke you’re proud of, eating dinner with friends, Stepping out of a snowstorm and into a warm room that smells like soup. It occurs to me you had never seen a car.

I wish I could have held you, and you could have held me, and I wish we could sit across from each other and talk about the wonderful things neither of us have seen and stare out the windows of diners in moments of silence watching rain.

I think about the baby blanket hanging in the basement and the engraved brass bell on the bookshelf the same way I think about novels set in faraway places, because I would ask them all for council as a child. They were always present and never changing.

Turning through a red light to go home in the rain It occurs to me that for all the thinking I do about the mythical city of Istanbul, I have never been there.

The dust rising in the dawn, birds over the Bosporus, the satin color blue in every shadow of a city waking for the first time. A name that hides in the corners showing what this place was and could have been, like a blue baby blanket used once.

again I am struck. More than anything, I want to go to Istanbul.