The Middle of It

Months in, the heat sits in the flat like a second tenant. Curtains drawn against the glare, still the air thickens by noon, and yesterday it reached thirty-seven. The banya is closed, which sounds minor until you live without that weekly reset of steam and cold water and other people’s ordinary talk. I boil the cezve morning and afternoon, more ritual than need, and keep the shortwave murmuring so the rooms do not sound quite so convinced of their own borders.

I have not sat with Aigerim or Dinara in person for weeks that have blurred into a single long corridor. Video calls help less than I expected. Faces pixelate; laughter arrives a half-beat late; someone freezes mid-sentence with an expression that does not belong to the joke. We try. We fail gently. Afterward I stand in the kitchen and rinse the same cup twice, unsure what to do with the leftover wanting.

The days have a specific flatness. Same walls, same cardigan over the chair, same strip of sky above the neighboring roof. Errands, when allowed, feel theatrical: mask, distance, the brief shock of sun. Mostly life has narrowed to this apartment for a stretch long enough that I have stopped counting it in weeks. I move from desk to window to samovar corner and back, a small circuit that leaves no mark.

Writing is the only thing with edges left. Not inspiration, nothing so flattering. Just the work of sentences that either hold or do not. I turn to the women history mislaid and find, in their incomplete trails, a shape firm enough to lean on. The page does not care that the city outside has gone muffled. It asks only whether I will show up and try again. On the worst afternoons that is almost enough. On the better ones it is exactly enough, which I count as a kind of weather.