The other night I re-watched “Urban Cowboy,” the 1980 John Travolta vehicle that chronicles the lives of a young couple living in Houston. By day, Travola’s “Bud” character works a menial construction job. By nights he raises hell and rides a mechanical bull at Gilley’s, the self-proclaimed world’s largest honky tonk.

It’s not a great film by any means, but it stands, some 35 years later, as a thought-provoking time capsule. Back in the late 1970s, early Eighties, at the time the film was made, Texas was the new destination for young people. The northeast industrial belt — Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cinncinati — were depressed. The Sun Belt was the place to be.

My folks initially set their sights on Houston, and went there and applied for jobs, and eventually settled a few hours west in what was then the sleepy capital, Austin. Still, there was a feeling in Texas at that time that “Urban Cowboy” captures: the sense that Houston — Texas, in general — had a big future ahead of itself. National publications like Esquire (which ran “The Ballad of the Urban Cowboy,” a story which inspired the film) and the New Yorker were also quick to pick up on the emerging New West.

Again, the film is a bit dated, but the trends that captured back in 1980 were definitely spot-on: Look at Houston today, an international city, as well as Austin, a high-tech, trendy outpost that competes with the Bay Area. Also, the film’s soundtrack — who can forget “Lookin’ for Love?” — presciently capitalized on New Country music: Charlie Daniels Band, Johnny Lee, Kenny Rogers, et al., brought the sounds of rural America, with a pop sensibility, to the Billboard charts.

Watching the film sent me in search of the Esquire story that inspired the movie. My thought was: Wouldn’t it be great to find a story like that to capture the feeling of living here, in Istanbul? Seems a big stretch, I know, but not really.

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“Urban Cowboy” centers around Bud, a country boy from a small town in east Texas. He decides to move to the big city, Houston, where he hopes to earn enough money to someday return home and buy some property. But once he arrives in Houston, it’s a classic case of bright lights, big city.

He gets a job working with his uncle Bob at a big outfit. But the story’s action mainly centers around Gilley’s, the honky tonk where young Bud spends all his time. He meets Sissy, a sassy, pretty girl, and they get married after a few two-step sessions and bottles of Lone Star. The rest of the story chronicles their struggles, as jealousy, and a mechanical bull, provide important plot twists.

Long story short, Bud eventually rides the mechanical bull like a champion (the film’s climactic scene is a star-turning counterpoint to Travolta’s disco dance in “Saturday Night Fever” three years earlier), and he and Sissy seem to resolve their differences. They don’t ride off into the Houston sunset, but rather stroll together over to Bud’s pickup truck parked somewhere in the humid, Houston night, with Johnny Lee’s “Lookin’ for Love” playing over the closing credits.

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Now, you ask, how can we apply this story to Syrian refugees? We need a title: “Urban Refugee” (I know!) will do as a start. It gets us going anyway.

Our main character’s name is Besil. He’s a young man from Damascus. He and his family have fled war-torn Syria for Turkey. When the story begins they are living in Izmir, a large city on the west coast of Turkey. Actually, at about 5 million residents, the population rivals that of Houston.

Besil, his mother and father, and his young sister bring enough savings from Syria to settle in a small flat. They look for work, but it’s very hard to come by. The locals are getting tired of supporting the ever-growing influx of refugees. Their savings are rapidly dwindling. So they set their sights on going to Europe, where they hope to find better opportunities.

Around this time, Besil meets and falls in love with a girl from another Syrian family. They are also from Damascus.

We get to know Besil and the girl, and their developing love, through the girl’s journal entries, which are written in Arabic. They make plans to marry as soon as they can make the journey to Europe.

But the boy’s parents are against the marriage, for reasons that are not quite clear in the girl’s journal. Perhaps they feel Besil is too young, or that the marriage is not practical under the circumstances. Maybe they disapprove of the girl’s background.

Anyway, at some point the boy and his parents manage to get get a boat that takes them across the Aegean Sea to Greece, where they then make their way to Germany. The boy posts their arrival on Facebook.

The girl tells us, in her journal, of her joy when she learns that her Besil is still alive.

“I look at your Facebook profile,” her journal reads. “When I see you’re online, I almost rejoice. But I’m dying a hundred times as I’m away from you. I can’t live like a normal person. It’s like I’m dead,” she writes in one entry. “You saw me as a loveless woman but still went to Europe. You are cruel. Do you know how much I worry and feel sorrow? Were you freed from me when you got there [Europe]? You are living in my heart and soul. I want to be with you every moment. I’m living with you.”

(Why does he see her as “loveless?” Did they have a fight?)

She also expresses her hope that one day her lover would be able to read the diary.

At the end of the story, we find out that the girl‘s diary was found washed up on Dikili Beach near Izmir, alongside the bodies of scores of dead Syrians who were drowned when their migrant boat capsized.

Whether or not the girl was one of the dead is not known, for in her journal she never told us her name.

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You may think this all sounds like an overblown Hollywood film. But actually, the story is true. The story of this diary found washed up on Turkey’s Aegean shores, along with scores of dead Syrian migrants, was reported this past week in the local media.

For purposes of “development,” I have fictionalized, or speculated on details that were not known or reported, such as the circumstances of Besil’s family (I do not know, for example, if they had any “savings” in real life). Nevertheless, we do have the general outline of the story, and the passages from the girl’s diary, which were reported from the diary’s pages verbatim.

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I hope that you don’t get the impression I have trivialized the tragic events of this girl’s story, by seeming to make cheap references or comparisons to “Urban Cowboy.” I can almost see some smart ass, reading about the deaths of the refugees (and the possible death of the girl too) and singing ironically, “Lookin’ for Love, in all the wrong places …”

No, that was not my intention at all.

The fact is, we can often see the bigger picture more clearly, and perhaps more truly, through such “small” stories. Just as “Urban Cowboy,” with its cheesy cliche about country boy-meets-Big City-meets-country gal storyline, captured the story of my parents’ generation — packing up and heading to the New West — the story of Besil and the lost girl who authored the journal also tells a bigger story. It speaks to us more directly than a recurring, impersonal headline, like “60 Migrants Perish in Aegean Sea.”

The image of the diary, and the girl’s hopes of love, washed up on the shore, and the mystery about whatever happened to her, is evocative: We know what happened to those who drowned, but what of those who survived, like her Besil? (and perhaps her as well?)

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Returning to our “script,” I sense that we need to change our narrative approach. There are too many question marks surrounding the girl. We don’t even know if she is alive, after all. But we do know Besil, and his family, have made it to Europe — her diary tells us.

Yes! This would be a better setting — at least, a more achievable one — for our storyline. How about we pick it up by following how Besil and his family are adjusting to their life in Europe? Besil has just received word of the capsized boat, the dead migrants. He has even heard about the diary. How would he take the news? Maybe he has already tried to forget about the girl and focus on the tough realities of his new life in Germany …

OK, so he is doing that. Our story would follow him from there. Has he found a job yet? What about his family’s savings? Where are they staying? Have they encountered any problems with the authorities? What are the attitudes of the refugees who have already been living there? Are they angry, cynical? Do they feel homesick, or disillusioned about life in their new country?

How many others have lost loved ones along the way?

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So many questions to explore. Of course, many such articles have already been written. No doubt Hollywood has a few scripts floating around in conferences as we speak. The New York Times wrote an article last month that focused on Syrian refugees here in Istanbul, and how they struggled with the choice to either move on to Europe or remain here in Turkey. That would make for an interesting movie in itself.

At any rate, the story continues to evolve, and is certainly not going away any time soon.

For our film, it may be best to end with our lost heroine, speaking in voice-over, as the hushed waves of the sea dissolve against the Aegean shores:

“One day you will see what I’ve written in this notebook. That time will come. You have not tired of this love as much as I have. I know I must forget you, but I can’t. I’ve missed you so much and my heart wants to see you. I want to hear your voice. You are so far away from me. You are living a new life in the place you have gone to and you are with new people. But I have not forgotten you.

“There is emptiness in my heart and I could never find anyone else like you. I’ve never loved anyone but you.”

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James Tressler, a former Lost Coast resident, is a writer and teacher living in Istanbul.