Glory Ho

Back in Antakya with the girls, they treated us to a different restaurant each night, planning or outings as if they’d known us for years. Even when we were ready for bed, they insisted: more tea, more fatoush, more kunefe.  

I never caught the name of this particular place, but I’ll never forget it.

The air seemed finite, like the space inside a paper sack. There were endless rooms. Each wall was a giant quilt from Anthropologie, murals outlined with frayed edges wandered freely. Fake antiques and hanging hollow gourds tried very hard. Curtains and beads swung above a mud-room’s amount of leopard slippers. In every space, wood stoves grew up through the ceiling. Half-tended herb gardens lived in makeshift containers and macramé cooed from around fierce yucca plants while fat and flowered women wandered without obvious purpose. The ceiling was burlap. The floor a notch above dirt. Between, ropes and bamboo had been forced together to form a very odd couple. Buddhist and Roman statues posed with uncertainty as if they’d missed their stop at the museum. Men with apathetic expressions rolled dough for traditional Turkish dessert behind glass. Hookah pipes snaked round red and royal-blue trees of tar. This restaurant couldn’t decide if it wanted to live in Egypt or within the confines of a 1960s commune. Like any obedient customer, I mimicked what I saw. Utter disorientation.

In our brown room with old photographs and rugpiles, we were served Kunefe, a popular dessert in Southeast Turkey. Kunefe was essentially baked cheese, splashed with honey and covered with a thin toasted crust and a toss of pistachios. It was both heavenly and heavy. A languid women served tea on on a wood tray, each glass bottom already glistening with piles of sugar, the granules dreaming of the cavities they would soon create in my mouth.

But nothing could make up for the Fish.

Against one wall above the couch, a backlit fish tank hummed with purpose, as if only following the rules. Doing its job. Plugged into the wall. Inside, a goldfish shone bright in the corner of the tank, orange with the unnatural hue of Sunkist soda, twirling, flipping and sliding along the glass with the water’s current.

Except the goldfish was dead.

Who knows when the submission had come. When the food had been forgotten. Why the fish had not been flushed.

But worse than the discomfiting loss of life was the fish’s fate. To be a puppet to the kinetics of the tank’s current. To flip and flop without will or control as artificial life sent its body in circles. This too closely resembled the life of people who’d given up on dreams. . .on change. . . on going their own way. Because at a glance, the fish looked alive. But in reality, its fishy little soul was long gone.

So I sat there having a hard time not looking at it. . .hoping I would suddently realize it was actually alive, fidgeting at the icky energy of a place trying too hard to be trendy and failing with the most simple of Feng Shui principles.

And as much as I enjoy sushi, I am amazed that I still think of that dead fish with sympathy and sadness.