The night was cold and clear. I remember that the cold hurt my body.

Our son had long since fallen asleep, his chest expanding and contracting as his little lungs took in the oxygen feeding his dreamy hibernation. He hadn’t stirred after the noise because he had long since crossed deeply into the Salvador Dali-land of dripping clocks and elongated people.

I was on the edge of our bed, when my wife opened the door.

We made small talk for a minute. Music was playing.

I had just given her a little peck on the lips when the sound of a loud boom nearby rattled in our ears. It was a low, half-a-second-long boom. It was a close boom. I can hear the sound now, in fact, in my mind. I had heard booms like that before in the movies. In explosions in movies. It was abnormally long and didn’t end in little pieces of fire falling to the earth after the explosion of a firecracker: those little crackles, like the feel of Nerds in your mouth.

I sat motionless. Shelley grabbed her face.

“O God, O God! Help them!” she said reflexively.

I denied the reality. She knew what had happened.

On our night was going to be different than either of us anticipated.

“What was that?” I asked about ten stunned seconds after the actual sound. Again, it also was reflexive. In times like this, your mind goes faster than you expect. Yet, time seems to slow down. You ask normal questions which later on sound ridiculous. The fact is, I also knew what that sound was. I desperately wanted it to be something else.

Going into my son’s room, I didn’t look at the motionless slumberer. Istinctively, I listened for motion from him as I made my way to our terrace door. Stepping out on the cold tile with my slippers on, I tried to see through the houses on the hill, a few hundred meters away, which separated us from the origin of the sound. It was impossible, so my ears did their best to hear beyond them and to fill in my mental picture of what was going on.

The night’s cold and wind struck me in the face like a splash of cold water. My hands held the cold railing of our terrace. Soon after that sensation, I realized my feet were cold. Only a minute or so had passed since the explosion. I was listening intensely.

There was another loud boom, much less than the first–so much less that I didn’t initially register it as an explosion. Then shots were fired. I remember the shots. My wife remembers the second, smaller explosion.

Is this another coup d’etat? Really!? Are you kidding me?  Who should I call? What should I do?! O God, help us.

I looked at Twitter. Nothing yet there. Were we the only ones who heard that! 

Three minutes had passed since the first explosion. Four. Nothing yet on the TV. Five minutes had passed since the first explosion. I decided to call a close friend who lives near by.

“Hey, brother, how are you?”

“I’m well; how are you?”

“Actually, not that good. Did you hear that explosion a few minutes ago?”

“Yeah, I didn’t know what to make of it. Was it fireworks or something else?” He asked in his usual calm manner.

Few of my Turkish friends get as panicky as my expat friends do about these events. Why not? My contention is that they are used to these things. This particular friend had been a devrimci (revolutionary) a long time ago, in a former life. He had become used to police and threats and attacks. Plus, he’s a Christian Turk. He’s used to the unexpected.

“I thought I heard gunshots, too,” I said.

“Hmm. Could’ve been.”

“I’ve checked the TV and social media and there’s nothing.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure what happened.”

We hung up promising to inform the other of learned developments.

I turned back to the TV.

The news of what happened began to roll in, like a wave of tear gas, penetrating deep into the cavities of Istanbul’s consciousness. We all seemed to know that there would be more explosions.

The ticker at the bottom of the television screen read, “Explosions in Beşiktaş heard across many neighborhoods in Istanbul.”

At one moment in time on that cold December evening, a truck laden with explosives, apparently targeting the police who had been protecting fans at a football game, blew up, and instantly killed multiple souls. Following that explosion, some other policemen approached a subject on the opposite side of the stadium. These were fathers, young men, brave souls who got paid a pittance to approach suspicious people, putting their lives in danger. They surrounded the man. But in an absurd kind or irony, actually, they were in danger. Because he blew himself and them into a thousand pieces.

Some others wrote in on Twitter: “loud explosions in Besiktas near the Vodafone stadium.” They included pictures of smoke ascending above the stadium, reminiscent of some Syrian town that had been bombed. Syria’s woes became real that night. Closer. Tangible. Imminent.

What has happened to our beautiful İstanbul?

My friend called me back. We spoke quickly and uttered wishes and prayers for God to protect us.