After we had been going out for a few months we flew to Salt Lake City for a conference she was attending for work. One evening after her meetings had let out for the day the two of us went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. The food was excellent and the conversation was going really well, but she seemed nervous about something.
I already knew that she had been born and raised in Istanbul, and that her parents and brother and extended family were there, and that she had lived abroad all of her adult life. But after dessert she added that before we had met, she had decided it was time to go home to Turkey for a while, and now she had this relationship and didn’t know what was going to happen to it.
I thought about the situation for about 10 seconds, and then I said, “Well, I’ll come with you.”
I had never been to Turkey before. In fact, I had never even been close. Turkey was one of those places I had figured I’d never visit in my entire life, not because I was actively resisting it, but simply because there would always be something higher on my list of priorities. And yet in 10 seconds I made the decision to leave my nice, cozy little cocoon in Seattle and head out into the complete unknown.
Over the coming weeks whenever I’d tell my friends about my decision, they’d say, “Damn, this must be some girl!”
Three months later I was preparing to turn my house in Seattle over to renters. I cleared out my belongings, giving most of them away and putting a few into storage. My girlfriend went back to Turkey ahead of me, and so between bouts of painting and clearing out the basement I would stand on my wooden deck in Seattle’s Indian Summer sun and talk to her long distance on the phone.
When I finally arrived in Istanbul, I found out my luggage had been lost on the flight over. Everything I brought had been stuffed into two bags and one carryon, and now most of it was somewhere else. I spent over an hour in the airport’s lost luggage area, trying to establish through a language barrier that yes, they would try to find my luggage, and if they did, they would deliver it to me. Good enough.
My hands empty, I walked through the sliding doors into the greeting hall, and there she was, my girlfriend, waiting patiently for me. She had been sitting there for over an hour, long after the last of the other passengers had left the airport. She had had no way of contacting me, no way of knowing where I was or even whether I had been on the right plane. But there she was, smiling at me and happy to see me.
My baggage had been lost, but I felt safe. I knew I had come to the right place. I knew I had done the right thing.
We hopped in a cab for the ride home. It was an excellent welcome to Turkey.
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “No dog, no Turkey” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]