Eleven Minutes

The guesthouse at the end of the village has a room with a table under the window and a wifi signal that arrives in weather. After lunch it was working. I had eleven minutes of it, which turned out to be exactly enough.

I have been meaning to do this since last November. Not thinking about it, meaning to do it, which is the worse of the two. In the end it cost less than the two dinners I ate in Karakol and took less time than boiling water does at this altitude, and I sat looking at the confirmation with my jacket still on, because the room is not heated until evening.

My own name, with nothing after it but a dot and three letters. I read the mail twice. Then I read it a third time, which I am recording here because it is the truest detail of the day.

It points at nothing. There is no site behind it, only whatever blank page a registrar leaves standing, and I have no plan beyond the fact that the name is now a thing I own for a year at a time. I am not going to build anything from a guesthouse with weather for internet. Tomorrow we drive on to the hot spring and I will forget about it for a while, the way you forget a key you have just had cut.

The lake was the colour it goes in late October, which is a colour I have still not managed to write down. That remains the harder problem.