FREEFORUM

Not the big things. The stupid things. I'll start: the noise the gas meter in my grandmother's flat made when it got cold. Like a cat clearing its throat.

The bread seller in the Alatau Heights plaza who shouted "kümöch!" at exactly 7:10 every morning. Including Sundays. Including June 2007.

You miss it? It's here. The gas meter still makes the noise. Buy a ticket.

Ak, let them miss things. Missing things is the only hobby that is still free.

Not diaspora, but I answer for my cousin in Yekaterinburg: he misses the tram bell on Azatlık. He recorded it and uses it as his ringtone. His Russian coworkers think it's a bicycle.

Not diaspora either, but every Nurzhan person who leaves says they miss the refinery smell. Then they come back for a week and complain about the refinery smell.

The marshrutka music. Russian chanson, then Mor-Wave, then a sermon, then Russian chanson again. Istanbul buses have one station and it is the driver on the phone with his wife.

I have not left. But I miss the people who left. Our street had eleven families in 1991. Four now. Every summer somebody comes back and stands in front of the old door for a minute. I bring them tea.

olddog. I had to stop reading for a while after this one.

Sunflower seed shells at the bus stop in Dastgoh. In Moscow there are also shells. Wrong shells.

I am not diaspora. But the young men from our village who work in Kazakhstan send voice messages from the building sites, and in all of them they ask the same thing first: is the river high. Not their mothers. The river. Then the mothers.

istanbul_simit posted:

Russian chanson, then Mor-Wave

there was a marshrutka in talas that played tüntolk's jolchu on repeat for all of 2009. i rode it to the end of the line twice just to hear it. not even diaspora, still miss it

I've been to Talas once (2015, age 13) and I miss: the neighbour's rooster starting at 4 am, the Fanta that tasted different, and every grandma asking if I was hungry every 20 minutes. Can you miss something you only had for 3 weeks?

Can you miss a place you've never been to? Asking for me. I think the song did this.

Snow on the Alatau from the hospital roof at 6 am, at the end of a night shift. Houston has a roof. It has no mountains.

Being warm. In Nurzhan I complain about the radiators. In Surgut I would marry the Nurzhan radiators.

The Talas bargaining. In Almaty they tell you the price and that is the price. Where is the theatre? Where is the walking away and coming back?

Twelve years later, bumping. My mother passed her Canadian citizenship test this summer. At the ceremony she whispered to me that she misses the gas meter. Same cat.

Congratulations to your mother. The gas meter will wait for her.