The written loom

There was a pause in my writing, yet not by choice, but by the body.. By health.. By those pauses you don’t announce, they simply happen, and leave you standing slightly behind your own life.

I am not returning to writing.. (i never left actually) And yet.. I have something to write..
Only I don’t know what it is.

Maybe it isn’t complete.. Maybe it’s just the sound December makes when it quietly closes the door behind it..

December is loud. Bright. Overflowing with plans, gatherings, lists, expectations..

And then January arrives..

The quiet month.. The month of reorganization.. the month that gets blamed simply for being quiet..

We’ve convinced ourselves that silence exists so we can set new goals.. Start fresh.. Become better versions of ourselves..
And usually, if we’re honest, we abandon all of it somewhere around mid-February..

And then what?

What happens to the new planner we bought? The fresh notebooks? The ones we chose because we liked the idea of recording our lives.. Or tracking the films we want to watch, the books we hope to read, all of it, this year.. Or maybe we bought them simply because we loved the cover.. And because we loved more than one cover, we bought two. Three. Promising ourselves we’d use them all..

And then we write nothing..

We keep notes on our phones instead.. All day long, ping ping.. People look at us, and we say, “It’s nothing. Notifications.”

We’ve handed our entire day over to a storm of notifications.. Notifications we never really open.. Thoughts that never land anywhere.. Words with no paper to rest on..

And somewhere here, not as a solution, not as a decision, a need appears..

Write without purpose

Write without a goal..
Without intention..
Without a plan..

Not to make something beautiful.. But to give your thoughts somewhere to land, so they don’t have to keep circling..

In the margins of a notebook..
In the notes app, this time without alerts..
On scraps of paper you won’t keep..

Half sentences.. Unfinished lists.. Thoughts that stop abruptly, the way we stop when we’re tired of explaining..

Maybe this is what January truly is.. Not the month of new beginnings.. But the month that allows us not to begin at all..

Just to set things down.. And rest for a moment inside words..

Tatiana,