I haven’t written here much. Not because I lack words, but because too many press against each other, tangled with context I don’t always feel safe enough to explain. Some things feel too intimate for a space this public. Other things feel too interconnected to tease apart cleanly. And then, there’s the simple truth: I’ve been thinking about leaving this space entirely. A different domain, a different name. Maybe even a different version of me, one who can swear without wondering who’ll notice, one who breathes loudly and doesn’t apologize for it.

Is change a choice? Sometimes no. Sometimes it happens to you, and you’re left catching your breath and trying not to drop everything at once. Maybe how I respond is a choice—how I absorb it, what I do next. That’s what I’m telling myself, not because I fully believe it, but because I need something to hold onto. There’s a lot I can’t explain yet, even to myself—not now, maybe not for a while. But I don’t owe anyone that. I don’t even owe it to myself in this moment. Explanations aren’t the price of change; they’re part of what spills out afterward.

If what I’m saying sounds vague, it’s not because I mean to be. It’s just the shape my thoughts take right now: half-formed, suspended in fog, not yet ready to name themselves. Maybe I’ll be the only one who ever reads this. And that would be enough. But if you’re here, somehow, reading alongside me, I hope you recognize this feeling too. The in-between. The ache of not knowing. The keeping on without all the explanations clearly laid out just yet. You just need to breathe through the blur. That’s what I’m doing. Maybe it is grace. Or, perhaps, it is just grit wrapped in gentleness.

And oh, gods, don’t I try. I try to stay soft. To bow my head. To make space in myself where grace might land, even when I don’t know if anything is listening. But I’ve learned that prayers aren’t the only way to summon something sacred. Change takes time. And for everything time has taken from me, it has given me something else: new places, new people, new pieces of a life I didn’t imagine at first. Is it always better? Is it ever worse? I don’t know. Maybe I won’t—not until my time is up.