how to romanticise life when it feels hard

let's just focus on today

On New Year’s Eve I ran a bath and read a short story where the dog died so then I cried, of course, and tears mixed with the epsom salts and rose petals and for a few moments there, all the words were blurry.

Two pages later I laughed out loud and kept turning the pages, reading right through the next story, immersed till the water got cold.

I never want to shy away from feeling this much when I read or write.

This year I don’t have any grand plans; I just want to focus on today. We find clarity when we attend to the smallness of life and ourselves; a breath, a thought, the sky at this very moment. Can you measure a season this way? I think you can.

So far, summer has been floral sheets on the line and sandy towels slightly hardening from the salt. Days stretching out till 9pm, dinner outside on an odd collection of camping chairs, starlings flying in the fading light. The noises of settling; a bed creaks, a page turns, a light switches off. And the next day it begins again, this summer rhythm dictated by sun and tides where there’s nowhere to be than right here.

And I realise: here is the only place we ever can be.

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