Bratislava (Interlude)

So, picture this: a kid born and raised in Ankara, Turkey, who has had his fair share of bullshit from his peers.  That was me.  I'm not posing here to say "oh, woe is me." I never meshed, that was that.  I was into shit like Cypress Hill, most didn't understand it.  Some wondered why I didn't rap in my mother tongue when I wrote rhymes - forget the fact that Turkish is a more suitable language due to words being able to carry multiple meanings (sometimes up to five or six), and that suffixes are easy to rhyme, it just didn't carry what I was interested in.  The entire context of hip hop was missing, the context that even offshoots of it had.

In any case, my father had been working for the UNDP for a while then, and he managed to get himself a post in the Bratislava regional office.  I remember us talking about for a good long while, using the term "going international" for what he was doing.  He went on ahead to take a look, see what's what.

That was the beginning of a time I remember with fondness and a lack of desire to remember it at all.

See, what he did was, he stayed in the Danube Hotel (don't know if it's still there) and then told us he actually had seen what's what.  When tensions rose between my parents, we followed suit.  This was also influenced by the fact that my father had issued an ultimatum, that none of us wanted to call him out on.  So we went.

Disaster struck on our first night.  My mother somehow managed to acquire a tooth infection during a 2 hour flight, so bad that, while she did manage to get through dinner, she began throwing up.  So it was my sister and I in a hotel room, waiting for them to come back.  It was an era without cell phones, where internet was still in dial-up mode.  We turned on the TV to see if we could find something, but all the channels we found were either in German, which I spoke very little and my sister didn't at all, or Slovak, which we didn't speak at all (we just noted that it was a Slavic language, to be sure.)

Two things happened in that hotel room, staring at that T.V. One was that we came across a German-dubbed version of The Vision of Escaflowne, to this day one of the finest mecha anime I have ever watched*.  The second was that the video for Eminem's Lose Yourself was on.  That was an interesting moment for me - to see that he had elevated his game not with a baby step but with a flying leap.  Like a splash of cold water to the face: Em had grown, and he hadn't just grown, he was so sharp, it could cut armored cars in half.  This drilled into me right then and there a need to outperform myself constantly, or just not to drop below where the bar previously was.  Thanks, Slim.

We stayed in that hotel for about a month.  My mother, sister and I often went out during the day, to discover the city of Bratislava.  There was nothing.  Well, not nothing, to be sure, but nothing to appeal to us.  The European architecture that we had found so mesmerizing lost its allure quickly to the blistering cold and the awareness that you didn't speak the fucking language.

When my father finally found a home, we began to move in.  Moving day, I got to understand just how difficult it is to coordinate eight people who don't really speak the language into putting the right box in the right room.  With my mother sitting on a rather sturdy cardboard box with the entire manifest, with me constantly directing everyone around me, with my sister bored, and with my father pissed off for some reason, the day went by in a blur.  I supervised everything from the moving of those damn boxes to the installation of the IKEA-like furniture by the movers, who basically did a good job of putting up the basics, such as wardrobe doors, but in reverse position.

I wonder if they were more frustrated than I was.

When the night came, we were too tired to move.  So while my dad went out to get some pizza, hungry, cold and in a house with no electricity, my mother,sister and I slept on the unopened boxes stacked up in the living room.  I don't recall any food tasting better than that stale, cheese-only pizza I had that night, before or since then.

Then, it was time to get settled, get moving.

Since I was on my senior year before we had gone to Bratislava, and since my sister was five years younger than me, a school was found for the both of us.  The International Baccalaurate was picked out.  My sister would be learning Slovak.  I didn't have to, since education was done in English, but I was given a year to audit classes - responsible for the work, not getting graded for it.  This was all fine and dandy on paper.

On paper.

I hate the paper.  The paper's an asshole.

See, the weather in Bratislava was enough to drive any slightly unstable person to suicide.  Constant snow, sub-zero temperatures, insane wind, and very little daylight did not a pleasant experience make... I mean, not unless you were a gothic rock band, and I wasn't.

But regardless of the paper, it all went south pretty quickly.  Having never been outside of my birthplace, much less in a place where people from different walks of life, different cultures were, where the weather was basically either really cold or really hot, and the really hot didn't come around until summer, I found myself in situations and places I had never imagined I'd be in before.  Yes, it improved my writing as I obsessively wrote rhymes, trying to get better flow,better rhymes, better vocab.  Writing started to provide me with an escape.

Things deteriorated at home.  My parents were constsantly playing the escalation game.  My mother's dissatisfaction and depression was pitted against my father's seemingly endless rage and resentment, and my sister and I were caught in between.  My sister was never the sharing type, but during this time, she retreated into her shell and never quite came out again.  I was still a good long while from having my little psychosis come out in force, but the depression I had been wrongly diagnosed for at 14 was wearing me down.

Around this time, I would also meet someone who would influence me in more ways than I care to count.  She was the only other transfer student, except that she was a full-on student, not an auditor like me.  She wrote poetry.  I said I wrote raps, which counts as a form of poetry.  She wanted to read.  We compared notes.  Her writing, as well as other things about her, remained a significant element after that.  In the years to come, it turned out that we shared a dysfunction as well: she was bipolar, I knew, way before I found out that I was bipolar as well.  So different from me, yet much the same.  The time I spent in Bratislava and with her would later turn me towards poetry, proper, which would snowball into something similar but different.

So the time came and I decided that going to classes weren't compulsory (a running joke between one of my friends and I.) But there was enough bullshit going on at home that I didn't actually inform anyone of my newfound perspective on the nature of attendance.  The only place open from dawn to dusk in the school was the library.  Nobody cared at all what you were doing there, you could eat and drink all you liked, and there was no silence rule... just a "a little bit of hush hush, if you want." So I went there every day.  I had a corner, between a bookshelf full of Slovak translations of books, some of which I had read, and a waist-high cupboard.  There was a mat there, the kind you found in gyms, so I settled down, and I spent the day doing two things.  The first was writing, of course.

The second was listening to music.  I listened to any album that I had with me during the day, in between conversations with friends, and the occasional class I bothered to go to.  I kept listening on the trolleybus that I rode to get back home.  Since I didn't think to get more than one album with me lest my folks got suspicious, it was one cassette, which would be roughly 45 minutes long, for the entire day.

I had nothing else to get away.  Music gradually became a form of escape for me, in that when I put my earbuds in and pressed play, the world stopped being the dull, suicide-inducing prison cell with cheap wall insulation that let the wind through. It transformed into this beautiful, dark, twisted Wonderland* that shut everything I hated about it out.  Things moving "out there" stopped mattering, stopped being important.  Trivia, that was all the world was, but when I had music surging through me, I pressed my hand on the wall and felt the wind rushing through the cracks and the holes within, as if the air could actually caress my skin.  The dead, yellow lights of the library became luminous orbs, the worn-out books a gallery of decay and a special kind of dead.

Music got me out of my head.  That was the one place I needed to go in those days - out of my head.  Almost 18, in the grip of a difficult situation, feeling the early symptoms manifesting but without context, out of place and learning that I was just that, the outsider*.  Music became my shrine.

In many ways, Bratislava changed me.  Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but regardless of which way any of me went, my love for music was to gradually take a different turn.

*Footnotes: 1- Of course, Neon Genesis Evangelion shares the top spot.
2- Around this time, upon discoverring fanfiction, I have also stumbled across the first version of Lani Lenore's legendary American McGee's Alice fanfiction, Behind Sanity.  Only then, her pen name was psychotic_butterfly.
3- This does read like posturing, but the outsider isn't the outcast.  There is a very real difference.