It's been several weeks since I've known the ache of restlessness in my bones and the fog of little sleep in my mind, but the bus ride from Istanbul left me exhausted.

I woke up on May 1^st in Europe, my neighborhood, ElmadaÄŸ, was a mess: police and protesters battling out May Day in front of my eyes. I marched double-time up the hill towards Cumhurriyet Caddesi to water canons blowing protesters back down the street, stones crashing into windows and the faint whiff of tear gas in the air. It was a good time to get out of town.

The drive was amazing--eye candy the entire 18 hour trip, even as the bus sped along in the darkness I watched the moon skip and jump on the ripples amidst Tuz Gölü. The stars, even through the fogged up windows of our sealed bus twittered and chirruped like tiny glowing birds at night. When I fell asleep I was racing across a quiet, empty landscape, not quite Asian, but in Asia no less. Sleep overcame me about three in the morning. I dreamed, but all the while I felt the rattling and shaking of the bus and a soft mewling cry of a baby up front. Sometime between sleep and waking around seven we crossed the Euphrates.

I was in Mesopotamia.

I'm not sure what I expected of Åžanlıurfa but stumbling across a very ancient Silk Road town was not one of them. This morning as I sat along one of the pools in the Gölbaşı meydan I felt like I was sipping tea with the old imams who play chess next to the Lab-i-Hauz. Mulberry trees shaded the banks of the pool, as young men rowed people out and around the basin. The amber tea in tulip shaped glasses was sweet and the sounds of several different languages echoed off the tall rocky hills running upwards to the north and south, making the Gölbaşı a natural amphitheatre.

Then I recalled the last hundred or so kilometers from Gaziantep to Şanlıurfa, sparsely vegetated rolling green hills, narrow defiles filled with cypress and plane trees where crystal clear streams tumble down to the Euphrates lowlands. Towns of rough-hewn stone glittering in the morning sun atop 'tepes'--also known as tels, places that aren't natural hills, where the accrued detritus of civilization elevate small villages or more often lay abandoned now that modernity has arrived. I saw minarets on the horizon, some Ottoman, others Damascene. In that thought a powerful sense of deja-vu ovecame me. There aren't many places in the world where I feel totally at home. I can wax eloquent about the Hill Country in Texas any day, but I've never felt a deep attachment to the life and people there. Perhaps it is strange to say, but it feels almost foreign to me.

The feeling grew stronger yet when I ambled through the tight alleys and narrow warren of Åžanlıurfa's bazaar. Here, still, all the business of the town is done. All the rumors and news are traded and young boys dash in and out of hidden alcoves with the express purpose of tripping up the foolhardy foreigner trespassing on their turf. Saws buzz, hammers pound out repoussé copper plates, blue puffs of cherry flavored narghile smoke cloud the alleyways. Women with the traditional white laced Kurdish head scarves watch a butcher behead a squawking chicken while men wearing black and white checkered keffiyehs inspect a recently butchered lamb. Silk brocade and scarves are are as common as the denim for sale in almost every stall.

For the last several years I've spent a great deal of time wandering around the old Silk Road. Rarely do I recall dreams. But there have been many since 2003 when I made my first journey across the great middle spaces. They are all almost as clear as that first experience in the Muslim Quarter in Xi'an where I heard my first 'azan.' Nearly as vivid as the Registan in Samarkand, and that wild day of blue skies and amazing clouds over the Torugart Pass in Kyrgyzstan? And in some I could detect the mustiness of the old Masjid-i-Rum in Damghan, Iran. I've absorbed the landscapes and memory of the Silk Road; the myths, the stories, fables, values and atmosphere of the Silk Road are instincts now. But the people?

I remember seeing green and blue eyes on moon faced Kyrgyz horseman in the Tien Shan. And I recall seeing almost European looking faces with narrow, oriental brown eyes and thick black eyebrows in Iran. From Kashgar to Istanbul there is no one specific look. The only thing that unifies them is the look of frontier wildness, a face that betrays the ache to hop on a horse and ride off.

I didn't realize how much I missed that look. And how much of it has become me.