The memory of youth is a ghost, slippery as sunlight retreating from a window. At thirty-six, the version of you who was eighteen feels less like a former self and more like a character in a book you once loved but can no longer quite quote. Back then, the world was a raw nerve. Every song felt like a manifesto, every glance a promise, and the nights were long enough to hold every impossible dream. Life was urgent, and you were at its centre, burning with a reckless, beautiful friction that seemed capable of changing the world. Now, the rhythm is a steady, heavy march. Responsibilities and compromises have settled on your shoulders like a well-worn coat, sturdy but stifling. The fire has cooled into a hearth, fuelled by the quiet pragmatism of showing up. Yet in the smell of rain on hot asphalt or a chord on the radio, the years collapse. For a heartbeat, you are eighteen again, aching, hopeful, and dangerously alive, realising you have not lost that person. You have simply become the vessel that carries their ghost. And here you are in March, standing quietly, carrying both the past you loved and the days still unmapped ahead. M. | March & unmapped days March 2026
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