blood-red excitement, green and settled loneliness

As I stood still on my bike, time had frozen for a brief moment, one of those moments that you feel like a decade has gone by, at the red light on a 3-way junction. The gray clouds barely moved as a man with a gray coat hesitated for a brief moment to cross the street. 2nd floor of the "Med Kitchen" behind the semi-transparent windows were revealing the preparations for the evening's meals. The chef looked out into the traffic that had stopped simultaneously, saw the dying sun's late lights reflecting over the bricked exteriors of the houses across, wiped the sweat off of his forehead. The drums started to kick in as the fiddlestick gently helped the guitar into weeping. As my ears filled with the sound of ice-cold Icelandic melancholia, I remembered the elongated shadows moving harmoniously on the stretched fabric of a tent on a fine summer's evening a few years back. As London did not seem to let time slip by, all of this had taken place in a matter of few seconds. As the lights turned green, the track skipped a D note (color green), new melodies followed as I passed by Angel station, turned left and rolled my bike down the City Road into Bethnal Green, to attend a series of presentations and an exhibition.

E.'s note, left on my desk, came to my attention as I woke up this morning, indicating that he had left timely to catch his plane back to Istanbul. His arrival initially coincided within my brief exam period, but nevertheless it has been a long weekend of festivities stretching into this week and even today. It's just been a week of craze, the peak moment clearly marked by Turkey's comeback against Czech Republic, the second incident of potential heart-attacks for a nation that is unfortunately best at 'leaving it until the last minute'. As I was procrastinating to leave the last bit of my studies for the exam the following morning, rather lonely and the silent studio room of our studies had turned into a nucleus of sheer amazement. The rest of the week followed with more football games, birthday outings in the parks, graduation exhibition shows of arts college student friends, two couches left on their own for our comfort on Brick Lane, and social networking with a bit of a Curry sauce.

I had a weird dream in which I was asking my "mate" Fatih Akin about a girl that my friend O. used to like (which is not even a fact in reality). Another E. warned me stating that it was rude of me asking such an 'important' person, such an irrelevant question. The dream had ended in a awkward hostel with me going for a long sleep with 2 friends and a cousin of mine.

As I woke up from another eventful night with that interesting fream, I just bought some "Greek style yogurt" from the market for breakfast. I recalled our lazy Danish-Greek breakfasts in the 47 degrees of heatwaves last summer in Athens, committing ourselves not to leave the house before it was bearable enough to avoid my Danish candy-friends from melting. I peeled a peach, washed the strawberries and put them altogether with some banana and honey in a cup that filled the kitchen with fresh smell of fruit from far off lands. As a ruthless peeler, half of the actual peach also went into the waste with my efforts. The short presentations given in the "Green & Thrifty" event, a part of the London Sustainability Weeks, also reflected on our contributions to CO2 emissions (or rather wasted energy) with the food waste we are throwing away. As I was fighting my own H2O emissions on another morning after drinking, I thought E.'s presentation was the one that stood out from the rest for the whole green evening.

Some of my Turkish friends are heading back home for some vacations as people from my program wait anxiously for the launch of a book "London: The Outer City" that includes our portfolio works from the second semester. Now that D. is also on the way to far away lands in the East, a strange, yet a composed and settled loneliness glooms over me with the hanging clouds. As 'less is more' on many occasions, departure of the few comes with effects that have stronger effects than imagined.

Some may claim that the best way to get over those who have left is, to leave. Now that the exams are over and that I've got the official stamps to move around, it may as well be a good alternative. The full moon will most probably help the excited nature of the Portuguese with whom I affiliate myself more (longing for Lisboa might have an effect on it), but my heart is with the Germans tonight. I may watch it with R., with whom we strolled around on the exact same street in Hamburg during the 2006 World Cup Final broadcast, 1.5 years before we actually met each other. An extremely appealing line-up on forthcoming Sunday following the longest day of the year with Elbow, The Notwist, Calexico, British Sea Power, Sigur Ros and Radiohead (all on the same day) awaits on a festival land I shied away from traveling to last year around these times. Journeys to far south, hitchhikes or train rides could as well exploit the potential of 'free time' while there's more to work for for upcoming Thesis meetings and the Istanbul research for the part-time work. As my mother once likened my behaviors and extrovertedness to her grandfather, long passed-away from a heart attack at a rather young age, I wait in awe how much excitement there is to come for me in the coming days: be it last-minute goals against the men on the green, or last-minute grasps of endless white papers, all seemed too distant for that brief moment that had frozen yesterday evening at the red light on the 3-way junction in Angel.