A cold I cannot shake

The cold arrived without ceremony and has declined every invitation to leave. It sits behind my eyes and in the hinges of my jaw, a low gray weather system of its own. I am still in the Tbilisi courtyard, wrapped in the black cardigan that has seen better decades, annoyed at my own body for staging this small mutiny when the notebooks are open and the hours are finite.

I went out anyway. There was a morning of archive work I did not want to reschedule, a conversation with a woman who remembers the coast in a register no catalog captures. I took notes with a thickening head and drank tea that tasted of nothing in particular. By midafternoon the pages had begun to swim. I walked home slower than usual and regretted the heroics, which were not heroic, only stubborn.

Dinara would tell me to sleep and stop performing diligence. She would be right. The body keeps its own research schedule, and today it filed a dissenting report. I have stacked the notebooks on the table, set the kettle going, and conceded the rest of the light to rest. Tomorrow the cold may loosen. Or it may not. Either way the archive will still be there, patient as stone, when I can meet it with a clearer head.