On observation

I write from the position of someone who watches. Not a detached observer — that is a fiction — but someone who has learned that attention is a form of respect, and that respect has limits.

The city teaches you this. Baku is loud and intimate at once. You hear arguments through thin walls; you see grief on a bus and joy in a courtyard. The question is never whether you notice, but what you do with what you notice.

Prose, for me, begins in that gap: between seeing and saying. I am interested in the moment before language — when something has happened and has not yet become a story. Essays are my way of staying in that moment a little longer.

To observe is not to own. Every text carries a debt to the people and places it draws from. I try to write with that debt visible.