Nobody tells you the version of you that survives a hard year is not the version you were trying to protect. You spend so much energy holding onto old walls, only to realize the new landscape has its own quiet beauty.

A short list I keep rewriting: drink the water, call your mother, go outside before the light goes. We construct such complicated systems for happiness when most of what sustains us is quite small, simple, and already within reach.

Written on a plane, badly, with a pen that kept skipping. Still true. The cold air when you exit the terminal, the silence of a library, the taste of simple toast in the morning.

Half-finished sentences that didn't want to become anything bigger. Scrapbooks of thoughts don't need conclusions. They are just markers left behind to show we were once in that room, looking out at that rain.