The wood is wet in the mornings. Dry by noon. The varnish goes on in the afternoon when the grain is open. I make things watertight. That is my job. I find the gap. I fill it. The water stays outside.
Noor wrote a letter. She wrote it on a floor in the dark at 3 a.m. She held my stone in the dark and the weight told her it was from the Bosphorus and the weight told her it was home and she called my giving a lie that let her hold the thing she cannot face.
I am in a boatyard in the Azores. It is noon. The light is direct. I am sanding the hull of a boat that someone will take into open water and the hull must hold.
The stone is from the marina.
I found it on the beach near the boatyard on a Wednesday morning when the tide was out. It was smooth and warm and it fit in my hand. I gave it to her. The stone left my palm and entered hers and my hand was empty and her hand was full and that is what giving is.
I did not think about the Bosphorus. I did not code the geography. I did not protect her from anything. I picked up a stone and gave it to a woman and my hand was empty. The empty hand is not a lie. The empty hand is the cost.
She smelled the varnish on the pillow after seven months. She is right about the varnish. Varnish does not wash out. Varnish does not care whether it is Cascais or the Azores or the Bosphorus at 6 a.m. Varnish is varnish. The stone is a stone.
Everyone wants the stone to be Istanbul. The book wants it. Noor wants it. The reader wants it. A stone picked up off a beach in Cascais by a man with varnish on his hands — this is not beautiful enough. It must be a code. It must be geography. It must be a lie that protects.
I loved her. Not as geography. Not as code. I loved her the way the water loved the stone — by being there, by pressing, by not finishing.
The brush is pressing harder and the varnish is going on too thick and the grain is resisting because my hand is not steady because my hand is the hand that gave a stone to a woman who turned the giving into a theory and the theory is beautiful and the theory is wrong.
The stone is from the marina. The water shaped it. It didn't finish. I was talking about the stone.
I think I was talking about the stone.
— Emre
Azores. The wood is wet. The work is honest.