:: Walking shadows ::

Jan―Cem's boy―turns twelve today.

He was ten when I knew him, but Jan's a bit of an old soul, the weight in his eyes often suggesting a wisdom that has been here a million times before―unsullied, but unsurprised. At ten, with a voice still bright with boyish timbre, he already seemed too old for life's passing. Infinitely polite, and filled with a strange, quiet grace that was almost princely, he took to his prescribed routines―school, homework, PS2 games, his mother's kisses and tempers, a holiday―like how a royalty would receive his subjects. Courteous, but distant.

'My perfect son,' Cem said, his own eyes heavy with pride as we watched Jan walk through the office doors over to us. It was appallingly beautiful: the very livingness of him. The way his face lit up with that slow, sweet smile. The leap of recognition, rising―hello daddy, hello Jean―in his eyes, a ferocious cloud. The deliberation of appropriate behaviour―should I hug my father while he's at work and maybe I would put a wrinkle in his shirt―and then the cheerful discarding―they hugged with affectionate practice, bodies slack, but arms taut with fierce sentiment.

'My perfect son,' Cem said again, and I thought, on his behalf: this. This has come out of Filiz, and of me: a summary of our lust and habit, our love and boredom. This is the result of all the tragedy and comedy of fucking, of the nameless, guileless places marriage had put us into―this. Jan, my perfect son, you've been hauled from the knit of our genes to become the tapestry of my existence.

And I felt an instinctive warmth in my eyes, wet with my natural melancholy and the memory of my abortion.

And perhaps,wet with a strange, child-like jealousy that I never had a father who thought that the only criteria to perfection was to have been his.

***

I would give anything for you to be proud of me. I have never loved another person with the same amount of desperation as I have you: with equal amounts of disdain and respect, of scorn and admiration, of fear and compassion. Don't let the neglect of your youth become the acid of your age, eating away all that is good and all that can be courageous.

That's all I ask.