Naming Emotions

Adulthood has a way of narrowing things down without asking for or caring about your approval. It doesn't happen overnight, but gradually, like a path that becomes overgrown when you stop walking it. Days start to resemble each other; routines become set in stone. You stop expecting much from Tuesdays, strangers, or seasons. Life becomes something you manage rather than something you experience. I wasn't exactly unhappy, just settled into a certain smallness. I moved through the motions with the settled assumption that this was simply what things looked like now. Then, without any announcement, a friend arrived. Someone whose season was different from mine .. still in full bloom,  unhurried and unguarded, and he carried a freshness that I had forgotten life's seasons could hold. There was something untroubled about this presence. Not careless, just grounded in a way that felt almost unfamiliar to me. It was like he had already decided what mattered and what didn't and w...

  There is a particular kind of person who cannot enjoy a sunset without quietly grieving that it is ending. I think I am that person. It isn't pessimism. It isn't an inability to feel joy. It is something quieter and more stubborn than that ,a kind of loyalty to permanence that I never chose but have always carried. I love deeply and I love with the silent assumption of forever. Not because I am naive about how things work, but because I genuinely cannot love any other way. I buy artificial flowers. I know how that sounds. But real ones, no matter how beautiful, come with a countdown I can feel the moment I bring them home. The petals will soften. The colour will leave. And I will have grown attached to something already in the process of leaving. So I choose the ones that stay. The ones that don't ask me to enjoy them quickly before they're gone. I think this is how I am with people too. The fear isn't abandonment exactly. It's something more specific  that I ...