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It has not been a particularly kind week for me. There have been too many things happening at once, multiple breakdowns, and all I could do was put one foot in front of the other and get through the day. And after a week like this, I found myself craving something ordinary. A stupid joke. Talking and laughing over something silly with someone I love. Just some hours where I don't have to think about what went wrong, what still needs fixing, or what tomorrow might bring. A few hours where the noise in my head can have a rest. Maybe you know that feeling too. When we are struggling, it is easy to believe that we have to remain in the storm until we have figured out how to get out of it. We think we have to have the difficult conversations, make sense of our feelings, and put our lives back in order before we are allowed to breathe again. But perhaps we don't. Sometimes, you can have a terrible week and still decide to have a lovely evening. You can still find a little softness in the middle of all that heaviness. You can still let yourself breathe, even though there are things waiting to be figured out. The storm is still there when the laughter ends. But for those few hours, perhaps you don't have to stand in the rain. Maybe that is what I needed. Not another answer. Not another conversation about everything that is sitting in my head. Just a little normalcy. A little distraction from a week that asked too much of me. So if you are having a difficult week too, I hope you let yourself breathe a little. Take the coffee. Watch the ridiculous movie. Laugh with someone you love. Talk about something completely unimportant just because you can. You are allowed to have a good hour in the middle of a bad week. And I believe this isn't running away from what hurts. It is simply giving yourself enough room to feel calm before you face it again. M. | August 2026

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Is it just me, or does growing older make you feel less connected to people? My circle has become smaller. Friends become distant. Family became conversations I sometimes don’t know how to enter, and somehow, I have become quite comfortable with the distance. I used to want to belong. To be part of something, to be understood, to feel at home among people. I don't think I want that anymore. Or perhaps I no longer feel the need to. Solitude feels easier now. Silence does not ask anything of me. The walls I built around myself have become calm enough to feel like home, even when they leave me lonely. I know I am a misfit. Maybe I always knew that. I just spent years trying to belong anyway. And sometimes, in a crowd, I notice someone who feels like me. A blue among whites, looking lonely even while surrounded by people. I wonder if they, too, have stopped looking for a place to belong. Maybe some of us simply stop searching for the room where we fit. As I learn to make a home of the space I have instead, I have become rather good at becoming a stranger myself. And that's okay. I'm going to be okay. We are all going to be okay. M. | August 2026

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Love, I learned, is the act of falling, over and over again, for the same person. Falling for them through the changes they needed to undergo to become the person they had buried beneath the façade and all the versions of themselves they had created just to belong. There are parts of us we learn to hide because they do not seem to fit into the world we have been given. We become familiar with a life that still feels strangely foreign, learning its language, its rules, its expectations, while quietly wondering where we are supposed to put the pieces of ourselves that seem so out of place. And then, somehow, you find your person. And you begin to realize that perhaps you were asking to fit into the wrong world, when all along, you were simply waiting to find a world where you did not have to. Because with them, the things you once thought were too much begin to feel ordinary. When you look at their world, you recognize pieces of your own. You show them the things you thought no one would understand, and somehow, they already do. As though they have been holding space for you without even knowing your name. And maybe that is one of the strangest, gentlest things about love. You do not always find someone who completes your world. Sometimes, you find someone who has been unknowingly making room for you in theirs, long before either of you knew you would meet. Perhaps love was never meant to offer certainty. It was always an invitation to the unpredictable, a door opening into a life neither of you could fully see yet. Perhaps love is not a promise that we will never be lonely or hurt again. And perhaps that is why it asks us to be brave. Because you will keep changing. So will they. And you will have to meet each other again and again, in every new version, learning each other, making room, and falling all over again. Together. M. | August 2026

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Because I am angry. I am angry that their fears mattered enough to be protected, while my pain became an inconvenience to be managed. Angry that their wounds were given patience, their silences were given reasons, their struggles were given room to exist, while mine somehow became something I was expected to heal from, or simply get over. And for once, I want to be allowed to see it only from my side. To say, they hurt me. Without immediately following it with all the reasons why they did. But I can't. That is the part that makes this so much harder. Because even while I am angry, I can see the fear beneath their actions. I can understand the things they were trying to protect, the wounds that made them retreat, the parts of them that were simply trying to process and move on in the only way they knew how. And somehow, understanding does not make the hurt any smaller. It only makes it heavier. Because now I am carrying both. My anger, and my empathy. My pain, and the reasons behind theirs. The part of me that wants to scream, “what about me?” And the part that keeps whispering, “but maybe they were hurting too.” So I remain caught between what I feel and what I understand. I cannot fully condemn them because I know pain can make people act from places they barely understand themselves. But understanding where they came from does not mean the hurt simply disappears. And perhaps that is what has been eating away at whatever sanity I have left. Not the anger itself. But the constant negotiation with it. M. | August 2026

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I wish I could hold on to this feeling, to the safety I feel whenever we are together. To trust that this time, I am truly safe. I wish I could simply lay this grief down, loosen its grip around my heart, and finally tear down the walls I have spent years building. But every morning, I wake as though my mind has been quietly rearranged while I slept. I find myself standing in the same familiar place where everything once fell apart, watching my hands build wall after wall before the day has even begun. The warmth I felt the night before slips somewhere beyond my reach, replaced by a numbness that feels older than reason itself. It is an incredibly cruel cycle because every morning, I have to find my way back to you again. Still, as the day goes on, the walls begin to soften. Again. We talk. We laugh. I remember how deeply I love you, and for a while, the fear loosens its grip. I believe we will be okay. I believe in us. Then morning comes, and it is as though none of it happened. The numbness returns before anything has gone wrong. The trust I held so easily the day before feels distant again. I question my heart, my feelings, even my desire to stay, as though love itself has been erased overnight. And so I spend another day searching for what I know I felt only hours before. Perhaps that is what makes it so exhausting. Not because I keep falling out of love, but because I keep waking up inside an older version of myself, one that still believes walls are safer than open doors, one that has not yet learned that love can remain, even after sleep. It feels like grieving and relearning safety over and over, every single day. More than anything, I wish I could wake up and still remember the peace I felt the night before. To trust that I do not have to earn safety from the beginning each morning. To believe that I no longer have to rebuild the walls just to survive another day. M. | the walls I wake up with August 2026

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“So long, dear July. May we meet again with both of us finally being soft with each other.” Life, despite everything, has carried me here, to another August. Through unfinished thoughts and unanswered questions, sadness that still sits beside me, and hopes that have somehow refused to leave, I bade July farewell. Perhaps every goodbye leaves behind a quieter version of ourselves. One that has learned to love with more caution than before. And I think somewhere along the way, we become careful with our hope. We stop looking up when the sky changes colour. We stop noticing the shape of the clouds. We stop believing that beautiful things can happen on an ordinary Tuesday. Perhaps that is the quiet tragedy of growing older. Not the passing of time. But the slow disappearance of wonder. I don't know what this month will bring. So perhaps we should leave a little room for the unexpected. To believe that life still has stories we have not heard and waiting to be explored. To have faith that we can change the way we see ourselves. That gentle things could happen on days we had already decided would be difficult. And if none of those things happen... Then let us remind ourselves that we are still capable of finding beauty in small, ordinary things. In places we have walked past a hundred times before. In a morning that descended gently through our window. In an evening sky washed in shades of pink and blue. In the quiet company of home and those we love, who never ask us to be anything other than present. And to believe that maybe wonder was never something the world withheld from us. Maybe it was simply waiting for us to look up and give ourselves a chance again. M. 1 August 2026

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