Mehmet only spoke once – when I first climbed into his passenger seat. He asked where I wanted to go. I told him I wanted to drive across the Bosphorus Bridge, then straight back to the hotel. 

“No stops?” 

“No stops.” 

He didn’t seem to find my request strange. I suppose lots of tourists take this trip if they’re in Istanbul. There aren’t many opportunities to see two continents in one short taxi ride, after all.  

I’m grateful Mehmet didn’t ask me why I was taking this trip, since—in my fragile, porous mood—I might have told him. What would he have said if I’d told him I was searching for Steven, my lost son? He’d have asked when I’d last seen him, and I’d have had to say ten years ago. He’d have thought me a bad mother, at best, or perhaps crazy. Thankfully he kept his silence, and let me keep mine. I’m grateful: I can’t be distracted. Not this morning. 

As Mehmet drives us downhill through the cramped and scrappy old town, I try to tune into Istanbul. It’s an idea borrowed from Steven. He once posted on Facebook about his backpacker rituals when he arrived into new cities. He’d start with a long walk to try and pick up the hidden frequencies he said vibrated through every city’s streets. He said it was like turning the dial on an old-fashioned radio, seeking clear notes amidst the hiss and fizz.  

I lack Steven’s sensitivity, but I try to think like him now. I try to notice. I absorb the coffee and leather scent inside the taxi, the middle-aged men setting up food stalls by the roadside, the way the rising sun bounces off windows we pass. If I can tune into this moment, perhaps I can tune into Steven. Or who he was when he was here, at least.  

Mehmet nudges the taxi into the tangled traffic which swirls around the old town like a metal whirlpool. A hundred horns blare around us from swarming cars, though surely nobody can know who is rebuking who. The cacophony fades, which puzzles me until I hear the rippling notes of the call to prayer, loud enough to be heard over the engines. I know the call is broadcast from the spindly minarets above, but it sounds ancient and deep, as if it’s rising from the stones beneath us. 

Steven would have loved this moment. Once, on a crackling long-distance phone line from Indonesia, he told me he’d just walked by a river, and heard three mosque loudspeakers competing for the ears of the faithful. He lay down and the tremulous wails weaved through the air into something so beautiful and textured he felt like if he reached up he could touch it. My son and his poet’s heart. 

Is it a blessing or a curse, that I remember everything? Everything he told me, at least.  

The traffic releases us without warning. Three expansive and near-empty lanes usher us toward the Bosphorus Bridge. Steel spears the dawn sky, holding it aloft. Martyrs Bridge is its true name, but I flinch from it. 

Close now. It’s a little harder to breathe. 

“Yavas gitmek,” I say, one of the few local phrases I’ve learnt. Go slow. Mehmet smiles at my bad Turkish, decelerates, and eases the car right to gift me a better view. 

The Bosphorus reveals itself, a ragged ribbon of glittering water. Incredible that something so slender separates two continents. Borders are always thinner and less solid than we think, whether on maps or inside our minds. 

I think of Steven’s pride if he could see me now: his old mother crossing into his beloved Asia for the first time in her 59 years. 

I try to look for what Steven would have seen, hoping it might help me feel what he felt. I look for the men with fishing rods Steven photographed but, no, that was a different Istanbul bridge. There’s no footpath on this one, of course. That’s why Steven had to take the taxi. 

I look across at Mehmet, still softly smiling. I imagine how his expression would change if I grabbed the door handle now and threw myself from his car. 

It’s so hard to believe my soft-hearted boy once caused another taxi driver such horror. I can’t imagine it. I just can’t. I know it happened, but my mind can’t make the leap. 

Even if Steven’s taxi drove as slowly as ours drives now, it’s obvious how much that tumble onto concrete must have hurt him. How could he be so determined that he managed to climb the railings after that? What were his thoughts in those last seconds before he hit the water? 

I’ll never know. 

Three words that live so deep in me they’ve become my heartbeat. Sometimes I forget they’re there, but that’s only the brief relief of distraction: they’re always pulsing beneath my skin.  

As we descend from the bridge and Mehmet finally speaks again—“welcome to Asia”—I know nothing has changed. Those three words are as true now as they were this morning, as true as on the first morning I woke into a world without Steven, as true as on every morning in between. Ten years, to the day. 

I’ve failed again. I didn’t really expect to succeed. This was always a frail hope. I’m not Steven. I can’t tune into a city and I can’t tune into him. I’ve learned nothing I didn’t already know: he is lost and he is gone and I don’t know why. As long as my heart beats, I’ll never know. 

Jaime Gill is a British-born writer living in Cambodia. His stories have been published by Litro, Exposition Review, The Tulsa Review, Pinky Thinker, voidspace, Beyond Words, coalition, In Parentheses and Write Launch. Several of his stories have won or been finalists for awards including Flash405, the Bridport Prize, The Masters Review annual contest, the Rigel Prize, the Exeter Short Story Competition, and Plaza Prizes. He consults for non-profits across South East Asia while working haphazardly on a novel, script, and yet more stories. Find him at www.jaimegill.com, or on Twitter, Instagram, and, at jaime.gill@gmail.com.