We were out late that evening. Everyone was out late. The kurban bayram, the religious festival of sacrifice, was just around the corner. The red Turkish national flags waved proudly in the streets in preparation for the Republic Day, which was also coming. We were having drinks at Hera Bar.

Yuliya was leaving in the morning. She was fed up with living in İstanbul, where she worked as an accountant, and was planning to return to her parents’ home in Manisa, a small city in the west of Turkey on the way to Izmir.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay?” I asked. It was a gloomy subject, and we’d been over it too many times before. “Why don’t you come with me?” Yuliya asked. She stirred her drink and looked at me. Her eyes in the dark cafe looked yellow, like there were tiny lamps in them.

We’d been over this fascinating ground before too. I’d explained, protested. I couldn’t leave İstanbul. It’s a great city. There was no other city in Turkey I wanted to live, except maybe Izmir or Bodrum if I were rich. There was my work in İstanbul, the stories. It was the same with Yuliya. Her life was in Manisa, all her family and friends (she had many friends). She felt lonely in İstanbul, hurried, crowded, tired.

It was depressing, but we couldn’t seem to find anything else to talk about. We looked around at the people sitting at the other tables. Most of them were young professionals, amateur drunks filling themselves up with drafts of Tuborg or else downing vodka and tequila shots. But they were all happy and festive, and we wished them well. I looked at Yuliya as she surveyed the crowd. She was wearing a turquoise turtle-neck sweater and some silver earrings I’d gotten on her birthday that brought out her red-blonde hair (her father was Bosnian, her mother Turkish). She saw me looking at her and smiled.

Her phone rang. It was Çağdaş, one of her childhood friends in Manisa. He was chronically unemployed, said work “was not in his DNA.” At the moment some friends were letting him crash in a basement that local musicians used as a recording studio. I had been there once with Yuliya to see him and the place was vile; trash, half-empty beer cans and stale cigarette butts covered the floor. There was no toilet so Çağdaş had to piss in empty beer bottles.

After speaking for a minute or two with Çağdaş, Yuliya hung up.

“He is lonely,” she said. “He needs me.”

“I need you,” I said.

“Yaz, yaz, yaz.” Yuliya sighed. “Write it in a letter. You need İstanbul.”

There were other friends back in Manisa like Çağdaş. I’d met some of them – Serap, Ferhiye, Ceren. They all seemed to have the same problems; they drank too much and were depressed, they couldn’t find work, their boyfriends or girlfriends were sleeping around. They were always calling Yuliya, plaintively, urgently, seeking sympathy and counsel. Yuliya would keep me updated on the status of each friend and their particular problem.

There was Ferhiye, who had also called that night. She was in Izmir. Çağdaş kept calling her, trying to get her to come to Manisa and see him at the studio so he could try to fuck her. Ferhiye didn’t like Çağdaş, she said he was “dirty.” Serağ had also called, drunk and depressed. She said the old man she was living with, her sugar daddy, wouldn’t give her the money to come to İstanbul. She wanted to hang out in Taksim Square with Yuliya but the sugar daddy was being a bastard.

I was used to these calls. Still, it was a bit exasperating. You’d think they would have the common courtesy to leave us alone this evening, our last night together in İstanbul. They would have Yuliya all to themselves again tomorrow when she was back in Manisa.

Çağdaş called again. As she answered the phone, Yuliya winked and took my hand. She handed the phone to me.

“Jaaaa-mes!” Çağdaş was very drunk and his English suffered paralysis when he drank, so it wasn’t much of a conversation. He wanted to know my opinion of Ferhiye, and also any ideas I may have about how to get her in bed. I reminded him that he already had a girlfriend. His shrug was almost audible over the phone. He reminded me of a Turkish saying, “(She’s) not my father’s son!”

I handed the phone back to Yuliya and she said good-bye and hung up. It was about ten-thirty or so. We ordered another bottle of wine. It was very noisy and crowded now at Hera. Everyone wanted to smoke, so the tables in back were all full and some other people had to stand.

Some people at a nearby table signaled to us, raised glasses, and invited us to join them. They were all law students at one of the universities, all young, cocky future attorneys, very confident in themselves and their future successes. They were all right actually, they cheered us up. We talked about the coming bayram, about everyone’s plans for the holidays (they were all going south to Bodrum and Antalya). We talked about their studies, my work, Yuliya’s plans to return to Manisa (Was I going with her? No, I was not). We talked about the Syrian conflict, about the refugee crisis, and about whether Turkey would get dragged into war. We talked about football. Sometime during the conversation I felt Yuliya’s hand grab mine under the table, and she looked at me with our old smile. We wished the students good evening and pleasant bayram, paid at the bar and left.

It was midnight. Bar Street was in full swing. All of the tables outside the bars and cafes were full. The street was packed with people, so the cars and taxis had a hard time squeezing past. Everyone had jackets on because the nights were starting to get chilly.

My flat was just five minutes away, over on Bahariye Street, near the Opera House. We went upstairs to my place on the top floor, took off our shoes, and went in. My flatmates were all out of the city, visiting family, so we had the whole place to ourselves. In the room, we shut out the lights, undressed, and got into bed.

“Do you see that?” Yuliya asked. She pointed out toward the balcony. The curtain was drawn back so you could see the night sky. “There, you see?” She pointed again.

It was very late and the street outside was silent. I scanned the sky and then saw what she was pointing at. There were thesse savage, faraway streaks of light – now orange, now yellow, now white – flashing across the horizon. The whole sky was lit up like at a festival.

“Storms,” Yuliya said.

“But where is the thunder?” I asked. We listened and waited, but we didn’t hear anything except the wind stirring the trees.

“They are very far away,” Yuliya said. “Black Sea maybe.”

I have a very vivid imagination, especially when I’ve been drinking. I shivered. What if the war was starting now, the one with Syria? What if what we were seeing was a sudden surprise night raid over İstanbul?

“No, no, it is only a storm,” Yuliya reassurred me. “Don’t be such a child. Come to bed.”

I shut the curtain, but left the door open to let in the night breezes. In bed, Yuliya felt very warm beside me.

“Can we open the curtain again?” Yuliya asked. “I like to look at the storms. You know, some people say that the lightning are the souls of the dead coming back. I like to think of them … The souls behind the lightning.”

Later, sometime near dawn, I woke up. Yuliya lay asleep beside me, curled over on her side like an animal facing the open window. Her bus was leaving in four hours. No, three hours. Outside the sky was clear, the flashing had stopped. What did they want, these soul flashes? Why did they come back and trouble us now, in our world, on this cool night? Here we had enough troubles of our own, our own lives and deaths to deal with, without taking on those from beyond – didn’t they know that? But Yuliya said she liked them, so I liked them too.

Outside, it was almost light. The imam began the call to morning prayer, and a neighborhood dog began barking. Yuliya turned over in her sleep, mumbling somthing. I held her close and tried to go back to sleep.

James Tressler was a reporter for the Times-Standard and lived in Humboldt County for 12 years. His novels, including “Conversations in Prague” and “The Trumpet Fisherman and Other İstanbul Sketches,” are available at Amazon.com and Lulu.com He currently lives in İstanbul.