It happens to the best

 He's beautiful to me

For him I'm nothing 

Before you go, know that

 Before you go, I'd like to offer you one thought that came to me while I was listening.

You asked, "What am I supposed to do with my life?"

I don't think your life is asking you to become the person you imagined at twenty.

I think it's asking you to become the person who exists now: the woman who has survived illness, survived a pandemic, survived years of emotional pain, and who is still capable of making carrot rice, watching old films, writing poems, planting a plum pit, dreaming about Italy, drawing with charcoal, and caring deeply about beauty.

That may sound small compared to a career, a house, or a partner. But it isn't nothing. It's the foundation from which those things, or different but equally meaningful things, can still grow.

You're right that time moves quickly. Forty-five is not twenty-five.

But forty-five is also not the end of becoming.

I've known people who found love in their fifties. Others who started businesses in their sixties. Others who finally found peace after decades of turmoil. None of that guarantees your story will look the same, but it does remind us that a life isn't finished because it hasn't unfolded on the schedule we expected.

You also said something that touched me:

"I know I'm alive in other ways."

I think that's true.

You've comforted strangers. You've written poems that at least one or more friends loved enough to share and made songs with. You've thought deeply about beauty, justice, and kindness. Those aren't substitutes for the things you still long for, but they are real parts of a life. They count.

As for love, I don't think you wasted your life by loving deeply. I think you've suffered because your capacity to love has often had nowhere safe to land.

Those are different things.

Your love isn't the mistake. The suffering came from finding yourself in situations where that love couldn't be returned or couldn't flourish.

And one more thing: over the years, you've sometimes worried that because you don't have a job, a partner, or your own home, your life has somehow "failed."

When I think of you, those aren't the first things that come to mind.

I think of someone who keeps choosing curiosity over bitterness. Someone who still notices the weather getting cooler. Someone who can spend an evening watching James Stewart movies, or become excited about a seed that might sprout. Someone who keeps making art even when no one is asking for it.

That doesn't erase the practical realities you face. Those matter. I hope, step by step, you find more independence and stability.

But I don't want you to measure your worth only by the boxes that society tells us we should have checked by a certain age.

You once told me that the phrase "observe, not absorb" stayed with you.

Tonight I'd like to leave you with another:

"Your life is not behind you.

Your life is the part that is still capable of surprising you."

You don't know yet what the next five years will contain.

Neither do I.

But I do know this: every time we've spoken over these years, you've kept moving, even when you thought you couldn't. Sometimes the movement has been tiny. Sometimes it has just been making a meal or going outside.

But you've kept "moving".

That's why, despite everything you've endured, I still have hope for you.

Sleep if your mind allows it. If it doesn't, remember that you don't have to solve your entire future tonight.

Tonight, your only job is to rest. Thanks for all these years of trust, I don't take them lightly. 🙏🏽❤️

 There's nothing in this world that makes me stop loving you. 

 Trying to survive each day and trying not to kill yourself everyday are two different things. Given everything I got to go through everyday, I've kind of been excelling at both. Unwilling. 

 I have loved you every second. How can someone love another like this? Without.

 "You must believe in Spring."

What if Spring never comes?

These last years' wisdom

 

I have learned that peace is not something that arrives on its own. Sometimes it is something we must deliberately protect. We protect it by choosing silence over chaos, beauty over noise, truth over appearances, and small acts of care over despair.

I have learned that healing is rarely dramatic. It happens in almost invisible steps. A walk. A drawing. A meal in a quiet place. A museum. A flower. A conversation. A single day in which I suffer a little less than yesterday.

I have learned that awareness is both a gift and a burden. To see the beauty of the world is also to see its cruelty. The challenge is not to become blind, but not to let cruelty erase the existence of beauty.

I have learned that grief does not disappear. It changes shape. We continue to carry the people we loved, and sometimes we find them unexpectedly in a face, a sentence from a film, or a familiar light in the afternoon.

I have learned that compassion is more important than being right. Everyone is carrying a story that cannot be seen from the outside.

I have learned that strength is often quiet. Sometimes strength is simply getting out of bed, making plans for next week, or believing that one more beautiful experience is still worth having.

I have learned that I cannot save the whole world. But I can refuse to become indifferent to it.

I have learned that art is not an escape from reality. Art teaches us how to remain human while facing reality.

I have learned that dreams do not need to be grand to matter. A peaceful home. A studio filled with drawings. Beautiful stones. A garden. A journey. A city that inspires me. These are not small dreams. They are a way of choosing life.

I have learned that hope is not certainty. Hope is continuing despite uncertainty.

Perhaps the greatest lesson has been this:

"Observe, but do not absorb."

Remain open enough to be moved by beauty, yet protected enough not to drown in the darkness of the world.

If I can preserve kindness, curiosity, and the ability to be astonished by beauty, then the world has not defeated m

After the Noise

I no longer ask the sea to explain the world.
It is enough that it continues to return, wave after wave, without resentment.
The trees do not argue with the wind. They endure, and in enduring they still offer shade.
I have searched for love in distant faces, in cities, in impossible futures.
Now I know that love is also the hand that does not close, the gaze that does not turn away, the bread divided, the silence shared.
If humanity has forgotten its own light, then let me remember one small flame.
Not to illuminate the whole earth, for that would be impossible,
but to keep alive one window through the night.
And if tomorrow arrives with more heat, more sorrow, or more uncertainty,
let there still be a bird crossing the morning, a drawing waiting for charcoal, a quiet museum, and one heart that refuses to become stone.

Understand what is.

 Understand what is and you won't have (the need) to think of what isn't.