Letters from Istanbul... The Sound of Coming Home
Two pink suitcases, one cold Coke Zero, and the city that taught my soul how to exhale.
Did I ever tell you about the moment I always knew I was almost there?
Not when the pilot announced the descent. Not when I spotted the Bosphorus from the window, that silver thread cutting through the city like something out of a dream. It happened earlier than all of that. It happened the moment I heard Turkish being spoken somewhere in the cabin — a family across the aisle, two flight attendants laughing together near the galley — and something deep inside me would quietly let go.
My shoulders would drop. My breathing would change. And without meaning to, I would exhale.
Every single time. Like clockwork. Like my body had been holding itself together for weeks and finally got permission to stop.
I’ve thought a lot about what that exhale was really about. Because here’s the thing I don’t always say out loud, the part that’s harder to explain than the joy —
Leaving was never simple.
You have to understand what I was leaving. Not just a country. People. People who have known me since I was young, who remember things about me I’ve half forgotten myself. Family. Friends who go back decades. People who love me in that deep, rooted way that only comes from years and shared history and showing up for each other through the hard things.
By the time I got on that plane back to Istanbul, I was always full of them. Their faces. Their worries. The conversation we’d had over dinner that I was still turning over. The one who wasn’t doing well. The one who needed more than I had time to give. The invisible weight you carry when you love people well and you’re about to put an ocean between yourself and them again.
And I knew — I always knew — that most of them didn’t understand.
Not really.
They were gracious about it. They smiled and asked about Turkey and said how wonderful, how adventurous. But I could feel it underneath sometimes, that quiet bewilderment. Why would you want to live so far away? What does Istanbul have that we don’t? What are you looking for over there that you can’t find here, with us, at home?
I never had a clean answer for that. I still don’t, not one that fits neatly into a conversation.
How do you explain that a city can hold a part of your soul? That a language can do something to your nervous system that your mother tongue somehow doesn’t? That home isn’t always where you were born, and that realizing that is both a gift and its own particular grief?
So I would hug everybody. I would say my goodbyes. I would carry all of them with me in my chest like I always do.
And then I would get on the plane.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, the miles would start doing their quiet work.
By the time I heard Turkish again, something had shifted. Not that I loved those people any less. Not that the leaving didn’t still ache somewhere underneath. But the joy — and I mean real joy, the kind that rises up from somewhere you can’t quite locate — that joy was stronger. It always was.
There is a particular chaos to arriving at Istanbul’s airport that I have always loved, and I mean loved in the way you love something that is completely itself, unapologetically alive. Families clustered everywhere. Children running ahead, ignoring instructions in two languages. Men talking with their whole bodies. Women calling to each other across the terminal like the distance between them is merely a suggestion. Cart wheels rattling over tile floors in every direction.
It should feel like too much. For a lot of people, I think it does.
For me it felt like being exhaled into a room that already knew my name.
And then — did I ever tell you about my suitcases? They were pink. Blindingly, unapologetically, two-giant-flamingos-crossing-continents pink. I bought them after one too many near-disasters reaching for the wrong black bag at carousels in several countries. Practicality won. Dignity lost. I never looked back.
They were always heavy, those bags. Stuffed full going both directions. To America: Turkish scarves, small gifts, little treasures I thought someone might love. Back to Istanbul: medicines, cortisone cream, things you couldn’t easily find there. My life for a long stretch of years was this constant carrying of one home into the other. Literally. In pink luggage.
Sometimes kind Turkish men would offer to help me wrestle them off the carousel. When I was younger I probably would have insisted on managing alone. But I learned — eventually, slowly — that accepting kindness gracefully is its own kind of wisdom. Especially when your bag weighs fifty pounds and you’ve been traveling for eighteen hours and your back has strong opinions about both of those facts.
Before leaving the airport, I always had one small ritual.
Coke Zero.
Not Diet Mountain Dew, which would be my first choice in America without a second thought. But something about Coke Zero in Turkey tastes different to me. Better. I’ve never been able to fully explain it. Maybe it’s exhaustion finally settling. Maybe it’s relief arriving in the body before the mind has caught up. Maybe it’s just that certain ordinary things taste like joy when you are exactly where you are supposed to be.
I can still picture those moments so clearly. Standing beside my pink luggage cart, Turkish voices moving all around me, twisting off the cap, taking that first cold sip while my whole body said quietly, without drama:
Oh thank God. I’m back.
And then passport control — which I know sounds like a strange place to feel anything worth writing about. But the first time I came back carrying a residence permit tucked inside my passport instead of lining up for a tourist visa, I felt something I hadn’t expected. Not pride exactly. Something quieter and more private than that.
I live here. Not passing through. Not borrowing someone else’s home for a while. I am building a life here.
There is something sacred about being recognized as someone returning rather than simply arriving. I don’t know if that makes sense unless you’ve lived abroad before. But I think belonging always feels a little holy when you’ve had to grow into it slowly, one ordinary day at a time.
Though honestly, that isn't even the part I've been thinking about most tonight.
