earthquakes.

Merve and I are being uncharacteristically talkative this morning - not that we aren't friendly, usually, but more often than not we exchange a few niceties and then retreat to our rooms and our phone calls or our homework or our friends while we eat our meals, if we cross paths at all.

Today I stand over a pan on the stove while she toasts bread and sips tea, and we talk about our studies and our futures and all the Chicagoans' looming departure this weekend. She grimaces, hopes her new roommates will be as polite. I'm surprised to feel so touched that she thinks she will miss us, and I feel guilty for the few times I've muttered under my breath, in my room, about her friends' loud sing-alongs in Turkish late at night, or her frequent and noisy calls home.

We're both a little bit ready to go home, if even for a visit - she says some students she meets feel that they never want to return, forget everything that's good, but she thinks that's not right. I nod. Home is home.

I ask her about Istanbul, tell her that my friend Jared from my university in Chicago has just moved there. She is shocked. Did he choose that? She tells me it is very dangerous, very big, very beautiful. Eighteen million people. This is not a number I can wrap my head around.

I should visit my friend in Istanbul, she tells me. It is full of things to see, big old beautiful buildings, and cheap, of course, cheaper than Vienna and the Euro. It is half Asian and half European. You didn't know that?

No, I shake my head. All I know about Istanbul is a movie I saw once, on a big IMAX screen, about an earthquake there a while ago.

Her face falls a little. Oh, yeah. The earthquake was in 1999. Now it is my turn to be shocked. I had assumed that this, like most other disasters you read about from far away, was enough removed from me and everyone I know that it must have happened twenty, thirty years ago. Or longer. Somewhere untouchable.

I was at the collapse, she says. She shows me her scars, this little one on her knee, that one on her hand, and another that she gestures to beneath her clothes. Her family was not in Istanbul when it happened, she says, but two hours outside, at a marriage. A wedding at her grandmother's house. The house was destroyed; her grandmother and mother were killed.

We are quiet now, my eyes darting between her face and the floor because the things I'm saying I know are meaningless, and probably not even important at this point. I thought it could never happen, she says, I mean, you don't know what an earthquake is. I was fourteen. I knew what an earthquake was, but it is never something that can happen to you.

I think that's what we always think, until it happens to us, I say. I feel insufficient to this conversation; I wish almost that I had a tragedy to offer up in exchange, not to equal hers, and not to make anything better, but just to be able to say in any small way that I understand. We talk about hurricanes, the closest thing we get in my part of the world, and how scarily unpredictable this earth can still be, sending out storms and opening up cracks that can shatter all our confident cities.

Finally I take my plate off to my room to work on the essay I'm struggling to finish, and she gets up to wash her dishes. Have a nice day, she says. Yeah, I say, you too.