The ones who suffer, the vulnerable ones, are not the foreign teachers living in solid steel and cement apartment buildings on a private school campus, or the rich dialing cell phones from the balconies of wooden houses that line the flowing Bosphorus. They are not the neighborhoods that surround Topkapi Palace. The destroyed are those lining the perimeters of these cities. The farmers who moved their whole families to the city because farming is no longer a living. The others who live in tenements and apartment buildings stacked like leaning card houses.
Tragedy strikes unevenly, discriminately.
As for me, I will pour a glass of wine tonight and watch the sun settle beyond the hills of old Istanbul, secure in the knowledge that for thousands of years this city has borne great earthquakes and sieges and wars and fires, and still it stands, the center of itself in gaudy streetlight. And while the eerie call to prayer reverberates throughout the city and thousands pour into mosques to pray, I'll be thankful that the sadness that echoes off the cracked walls of the city is somehow separate of me, and I'll realize that luck is not always luck and fate not always fate. Published in In Motion Magazine September 19, 1999.