The Season of Half-Burnt Cigars

from Beylikdüzü to Etiler, half asleep

Lately everything I touch feels like it’s in some slow process of turning into something else. Projects become products, ideas turn into decks, plans dissolve into long nights of debugging and rewriting. After the Radical Innovation Summit in Mexico with Umut, even inspiration started to feel like work, motion everywhere, but not always direction. Yet, somehow, my humidor has become a perfect metaphor for how fragile that order really is. The humidity sensor started acting like a moody bureaucrat; showing 85 one day, 55 the next and before I knew it, my cigars began curling like old papers. A few even looked ready to be rolled into dolma.

There are those drives at 5 a.m. from Beylikdüzü to Etiler with Elif, the city still quiet & dark, headlights carving space for love and silence to coexist, and the quiet realization that we need to visit more restaurants before we rust. Some nights stretch into projects with Onur, Yusuf & Pınar, endless whiteboards, grant applications, and half-finished frameworks. Others dissolve into dawns with Umut, watching lines of code flicker like constellations thanks to Cursor.

I don’t even smoke most nights anymore; I just open the humidor, look, adjust, wait. Not everything broken is wasted. Sometimes the leaf just needs air, Emir please buy me a Raching.

CDR Youth 2025 events are finally over, the dinner with the Consul still feels strange in memory, and the soundtrack to these weeks is “Lacrimosa” by Zbigniew Preisner, a piece that makes even silence sound like confession.