She came home one day around dusk, this woman I had met and befriended for the few days that she was in town. I often did that back then. I was moving a lot, too, an extended wandering around the world, encountering many people along the way, heart connections, brief and deep.
This was 2014. I was living in Istanbul then. I had left Cairo a few months earlier, in the wake of a military takeover in Egypt that had rendered our nascent revolution stillborn. I was broken, trying to put myself back together, and Istanbul was a balm. I found an apartment with high ceilings and big windows, awash in light and air. I grew edible plants on the balcony: radishes and purslane and mint. And when I craned my neck out of a side window, I could catch a little glimpse of the sea.
