Still here, still writing

A week has gone by in the ordinary way. The air in Bishkek sits heavy by midmorning, and I have taken to opening the kitchen window before the sun clears the roof opposite, so the apartment can breathe. I make coffee in the battered cezve, pour it into the thick cup with the chipped rim, and stand there longer than necessary, listening to the courtyard: a radio somewhere, a child arguing in Kyrgyz, the scrape of a chair.

Sundays still mean Osh bazaar if I can face the heat, melons and tomatoes and the woman who always remembers I like my greens without too much dirt left on them. Saturdays still mean the banya if Dinara texts in time. Nothing dramatic. Just the season doing what it does.

I have been wearing the same three black cardigans in rotation, sleeves pushed up, because the evenings cool enough to want wool even when the afternoons do not. The shortwave sits on the shelf by the samovar corner, occasionally muttering through static when I switch it on out of habit rather than purpose. Aigerim came by midweek with a bag of apricots from her aunt and we ate them over the sink, juice running to the wrists, talking about nothing that would look important in a notebook. That felt like the correct use of a Saturday.

Somewhere under all of this, an idea has begun to circle. I will not name it. I barely have a shape for it myself. It arrives the way heat arrives here in August, gradual and then suddenly the only thing you notice, a restlessness behind the ribs when I am meant to be doing something else. I catch myself reaching for a fresh notebook and then putting it back. Not yet. For now there is fruit to wash, tea to steep, and the long light on the balcony tiles. I am still here. I am still writing, even when the page stays blank a little longer than usual.