Sometimes, as you walk through a city, it seems almost as though it keeps placing the same motif in your path, no matter how much you try to look elsewhere, and in Istanbul this is especially hard to miss: stop by the water, linger near a fountain, or simply look up between two buildings, and sooner or later a minaret will appear somewhere in your line of sight, slender and motionless, as if it had always been there waiting to be noticed...
...while a moment later gulls begin circling around it, turning that stark vertical shape into something almost alive, and then it no longer feels like a coincidence but rather one of those strange urban patterns you only begin to notice after encountering them several times...
...until eventually the city seems to carry that motif all the way through, because that same evening, when you are almost home, the same silhouette appears against the sky, with a thin crescent moon beside it, and for a moment it feels as though all the elements of the scene had known about one another in advance and were simply waiting for you to finally look up.
@alexanderfluke
@monochromes