The past does not announce itself.
It lingers, waits, folds itself into the creases of memory until one day, without warning, you find yourself living inside it again.
The Book That Was Never Written
If my life were a book, it would begin in the dark.
Not the kind of darkness that swallows you whole—no, something quieter. The dim light of a train station at midnight, the muted glow of a cigarette ember in an alley, the soft hum of a fridge in an empty kitchen. The kind of darkness that makes you feel alone, but not lost.
It would not start with childhood or love or any grand proclamation of purpose. It would start with leaving.
Because my life has always been about departure.
The Geometry of Goodbye
Some people live in straight lines. Their stories move forward, predictable, deliberate. School, career, marriage, children, a house with windows that face the morning sun. A path that moves ahead, unbroken.
But I have always moved in circles.
Every attempt at escape loops me back to the places I swore I would never return to. Every farewell is an orbit, every door that closes is a doorway back in time. I have spent years learning how to leave, only to realize that nothing ever truly lets go.
We are stitched to the moments that made us.
- The first time you stood in an airport, watching the people you loved get smaller in the rearview of your life.
- The last time you heard someone say your name the way only they could.
- The sound of footsteps fading down a hallway, knowing they wouldn’t turn back.
I carry these echoes in my ribs. They beat in my blood like phantom limbs, like words left unsaid.
Wabi-Sabi and the Fractured Self
Wabi-sabi teaches that beauty is found in the broken, the incomplete, the things that will never be whole again.
A chipped teacup is still a teacup.
A cracked mirror still reflects.
A person who has left too many places is still searching for home.
And maybe that’s the point.
Maybe life is not about arriving. Maybe it is about becoming. About accepting that we are never finished, never complete, never fully healed. That we are mosaics—fragments of love and loss and memory, held together by the simple, stubborn act of continuing.
Maybe the book of my life is not one that can be written in chapters.
Maybe it is a collection of unfinished sentences.
Lessons from a Story Without an Ending
- You do not have to be whole to be real.
- Some doors are meant to stay open.
- Leaving is not the same as forgetting.
- The past is not behind you. It is within you.
- You are not lost. You are just unfinished.
The Page, the Pen, the Sentence That Begins Again
If my life were a book, it would begin like this:
“I thought I had left, but I was only ever learning how to return.”
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