Aya Sofia is there, across the water, shrouded in the haze that blankets this city. The gulls form a pestilence behind the boat, little scarlet pistons flitting in the fractals of vestigial sun that are like molten gold on the surface of the sea. The day languishes, the lights of Galata and Taksim smouldering like galaxies of dying stars. The clouds are ribbed like the skeleton of a pan fish picked clean by stray cats.

She walks away from me, fingers following the railing, dancing atop its oxidixed cylinder. Scarf wimpling in the wind like a prairie of wildflowers. The poppy I bought her from the gypsies twirls like a whirligig between her fingers.

One year ago today my bus pulled into that last Moorish city. The lemon trees were in full blossom, and the whole city seemed bloated and lethargic with their ambrosia. I stepped off the bus into the sultry Andalusian heat. She wore a sun dress, her chest pink and peeling, her forehead damp. She broke into sobs when she saw me, fell to a knee. I felt something that had gone out of me come rushing back - an ineffable thing, nameless, a silence that can perhaps, for a moment, countervail the abyss that yawns beneath all of us. Something entirely unexpected. A grace. That’s the only word for it, I think. A grace that surprises you with its presence, and then surprises you again when it vanishes. A grace only measured by its vanishing.

I bent down to her, traced a finger behind her ear - how strange it was to miss someone’s ears - and kissed her on the forehead. Then I put my arms around her, and the two of us knelt for a moment, foreheads together, crying. That was one year ago. I had no idea. I could not have imagined. But here I am.

Grace, my father once told me, is hard. It is beauty beside sorrow, like a wolf in the desert and its shadow. Form and its void. It is not deliverance, or transcendance. Sometimes it is pure, in the way that only devastation and death can be pure. But, and this is the key, it is a gift, one that is always offered. We choose to receive it, or we choose not to. But it is always offered.

Aya Sofia is there, and the haze, and the gulls like pollen in the prisms of light, and the poppy already wilting but whorling in her fingers. Here I am. And I have no idea.