steam curls from green tea
quiet chairs in empty room
old friends take their seats
When I was sixteen, my mother handed me a notebook. She didn’t dress it up as a gift. She didn’t call it special. She just placed it on the table, the way someone might set down bread or fruit. The cover was a plain brown, the color of autumn dirt, soft and fragile at the corners.
“Maybe you should write things down before they disappear,” she said.
That was all.
I didn’t know what she meant. At sixteen, you don’t think anything will disappear. You think every day is endless, that nothing important could possibly slip away. But I opened the notebook anyway.
At first, I wrote about the weather. The rain that drummed on my window before school. The fog that swallowed the lamp posts and made them look like trees. The sunlight that broke through just before dinner, staining everything gold. Then I wrote about myself. About how tired I felt after cycling too far. About the way exhaustion could make your body ache and your thoughts blur. About the strange hunger that came after exams, not for food, but for silence.
Soon the pages filled with more fragile things. My girlfriends. The excitement of holding a hand for the first time. The disappointment when words didn’t come out the way I meant them. The awkwardness of being noticed. The loneliness of being invisible. The troubles at school—the teachers who didn’t understand, the friends who slipped away.
And then, quietly, something shifted. I began writing not only about what had happened, but what I wanted to happen. Little things. Hopes. Secret wishes I would never say aloud. A trip, a conversation, a chance. And sometimes—more often than I expected—those things arrived. Not like lightning, not instantly, but gradually, as if writing them kept them alive long enough to take root in the world.
It felt private. Sacred. Mysterious in a way I couldn’t explain. So I kept writing.
The notebooks multiplied. By my twenties, they were everywhere—piled in drawers, stacked in boxes, each one heavy with years that no one else had seen. Some pages were messy, scrawled in a hurry. Others were careful, written with a hand that wanted the words to last. They contained my loves, my failures, my wishes, my fears, my weather, my fatigue. They became a mirror, though I rarely looked back at them.
Travel deepened the habit. Japan, Slovenia, Switzerland. Trains sliding through the night. Ferries rocking on dark water. Mountain paths dissolving into fog. Each journey filled more pages. Some with landscapes: volcanic craters glowing at dawn, rice fields buzzing with insects, mountains breathing in their mist. Some with smaller moments: the taste of soup when I was too tired to stand, the sound of jazz leaking from a basement bar, the smell of rain on my jacket.
And still, hidden among them, the future appeared. Hopes I scribbled half seriously, and years later, I’d find myself living them. It wasn’t magic. But it wasn’t coincidence either.
One day I looked at the stack of notebooks and felt a kind of sadness. I had been writing for almost two decades. But no one had ever read a word. All those fragments of my life, all that weather and fatigue and love and disappointment, were locked away in paper. It felt like I had pressed entire years into flowers no one would ever touch.
That’s why I began this blog.
Not because I thought the words were important. Not because I believed the world needed them. But because they deserved to breathe. Because I wanted to see what happened when the fragments stepped outside of their boxes.
What you’ll find here is simple.
Travel stories, but not polished itineraries—snapshots, fragments, half-moments. A station at dawn. A room with a single cracked window. A temple so quiet it made me hold my breath. Reflections on walking until my legs turned to stone. Observations on weather—the kind of rain that forces you into shelter, the sunlight that arrives just as you are about to give up, the wind that reminds you how fragile you are. Lessons, too, though I don’t like to call them that—things I once wrote to myself as reminders. Notes about patience. About persistence. About paying attention.
I don’t live them perfectly. Most days I forget. But writing them down means they don’t vanish. Writing them down means they can come back.
Sometimes I wonder why I still write. Why I keep going. The answer is small but steady: because it changes me. Because the act of writing is itself a kind of living. Once something is written, it can’t be taken away. Once a thought has shape, it can guide you, or haunt you, or wait patiently until you are ready.
And sometimes, when I write something I want to happen, the world tilts. Slowly. Subtly. And years later I realize I’ve walked into the very scene I once scribbled in the margin of a notebook.
It doesn’t happen every time. It doesn’t obey rules. But it happens often enough to leave me humbled.
I think about my mother sometimes, the way she handed me that first notebook as if it were nothing. As if she had no idea what she was giving me. Or maybe she knew exactly. She never asked to read a page. She never pried. She just smiled when she saw me writing, as though that was enough.
And maybe it was.
Now, when I travel, I carry a notebook the way others carry cameras. I scribble on trains about the color of a stranger’s coat, the murmur of half-heard voices, the rhythm of the tracks beneath my feet. I write in cafés about cracked glass, about music that floats too softly to catch, about how fatigue makes even ordinary tea feel like medicine. I write on mountains about humidity, about silence, about the way the air becomes heavier as the body slows.
Each scribble feels small, but together they form a life.
This blog is not perfect. It is not complete. It is a mosaic of fragments: foggy mornings on ferry decks, the taste of miso soup when I hadn’t slept, the quiet of an empty street in Ljubljana, the sting of failure, the softness of love. Notes about weather. Notes about fatigue. Notes about lessons I found along the way. Some of them are practical, some are hopeful, some are simply there because I needed them.
That is enough.
This is what wabi-sabi means to me. Not perfection. Not a flawless story. But the acceptance that cracks are proof of life, that imperfection is the only true record of time.
So this is why I write here.
Because my mother once placed a notebook in my hand. Because I once thought words were too small to matter, and now I know they are the only way to keep anything from disappearing. Because travel, love, fatigue, weather, and memory are not trivial. They are everything.
This blog is my way of holding those things to the light.
If you read, I hope you find something here that speaks to you. Not in grand revelations, not in polished wisdom, but in fragments. Because fragments are all we truly have.
And if, someday, you open a drawer and find a line you wrote long ago suddenly alive in your life—don’t be surprised. It happens. Quietly. Almost always when you’re not looking.
life 