The Pudding Shop was the place to be forty years ago, back when my mother was young and love was free. She’d been there in the heyday, back when the hippies hung out there trying to catch a bus to Afghanistan or India.
‘IT’S STILL THERE? YOU HAVE TO GO!!!!!!’ said the Madre in an email.
It’s now a cafe like any other, except full of only tourists and the hiked-up prices that come with them.
‘My mother came here forty years ago,’ I tell my waiter.
‘Everyone wants you to know they like your eyes,’ he responds, seeming less than interested in my family history.
But he gives me a few postcards of the place for my mother, and doesn’t ask the full price for the pudding I ate. He asks around but none of the staff had been there forty years ago. Things had changed.
I spend my final hour breaking apart a simit and feeding it to the birds in the park outside the Hagia Sophia. I know I’m supposed to feel sad that the Pudding Shop has been taken over by the tourists like me. But really it makes me happy because I know there’s somewhere else now and I just have to find it, and this time it’ll be for me and not the guidebooks to write down. And obviously nothing disappears, it only transforms, reemerging in a form strong enough to combat its age. Just like the Hagia Sophia, which now hangs over me, first a church then a mosque, now sacred to no one, belonging to everyone at last.
this is real this is fiction 