(day)dream

I believe 2025 was the first year I didn’t give you a New Year greeting or message. Sorry about that. Saying I’ve been busy is more an excuse than anything else.

I feel oddly positive, or felt, towards this year, considering how much of a pessimist I can be. Given the political climate, that places like Gaza and Ukraine are still torn apart by genocide and war, that it became close to impossible to predict… anything, that we genuinely can’t tell what news we will wake up tomorrow — it’s a miracle to feel anything but heavy. I do feel heavy at times.

Being an adult comes with learning to carry a lot of things at once. I think I have written something like this before; I carry sorrow and a carry fear, as if they were key chains, jiggling. I carry sadness like an old lip balm that somehow never runs out. I carry gentleness. my favorite hand cream. I carry hope at the bottom of the bag, so far down I sometimes forget it’s there at all.

The other day a certain movie came out, the (loose) adaptation of ‘People We Meet On Vacation’, one of my favorite books. It’s a romance that spans for over 10 years, and Netflix somehow managed to take any of the depth those words carry and make a bland, mediocre, and at least pleasant to look at film. Strangely, I didn’t lose my mind, I wasn’t angry. Sure, I felt disappointed, but I surprised myself by being able to separate the two works, and by enjoying the movie for what it is on its own.

Do you ever get those moments too? Where you shock yourself? Where you can see a change from who you used to be to who you are?

I used to think I knew so much, and these days it’s like my page is getting emptier, blank. Nothing’s being erased, it’s… it’s as if the paper sheet of who I am is bigger than I thought. There’s so much space unwritten, left to complete. And I thought I knew myself so well. I used to even pride myself in that.

I’ve lived most of my life learning from fear and dislike. I try to keep an open mind to most things I don’t know, try to “embrace” a little bit of discomfort in my every day life. It feels as if most people in online spaces don’t know how to handle that, feeling uncomfortable. Discomfort is part of the human experience, though it doesn’t have to be the majority of it… or so I want to believe. This is a topic that is close to my heart and for years I didn’t really know how to tackle, I’m still learning to, still negotiating with the traction.

A friend once accused me of not being able to say I don’t like something, to which I replied it’s not me avoiding the words or not being able to admit them, and more that I don’t like closed doors, just like my cat who will complain endlessly if she finds one throughout the house, because it is her god given right to have all doors open for her. Past me was far too used to disliking, to know what to avoid, what to run away from.

I avoid certainties. I try not to cling so hard to truths, because clinging hurts. Maybe that’s one of my 2026 goals, letting go more.

This year I tried not to make goals, but I guess I must admit I have some hopes.

I hope to write much more. Particularly fiction, I want to lean to fantasy, to romance, to the not-so-real more. I’m even considering writing fan fiction and sharing it, though not here. I want to write more about my day-to-day, write more to and only myself, and yes, write more here too. But I said something similar in the start of 2025 so take this with a grain of salt.

There was a friend who told me a couple of weeks ago that I am allowed to feel my emotions. This happened after I mentioned that I don’t feel like I have the right to comment or complain about something, since my brain rushes to see all sides, to make theories, to explain and make sense of the world. It sounds like an obvious truth, but the obvious as a way to sound undeniable when it comes from the mouth of someone else. There are things you know, but don’t face. You know, but you don’t practice. You know, but maybe, maybe, deep down, you think you’re the exception to the rule.

So 2026 will be a year of feeling. I don’t want to be so… stuck. Or so focused on running away. Part of me has faith that writing fiction will help me feel some emotions — by submitting fictional characters to my pains and will, of course. By having them go through them, and come out from the other side with the happy ending I can’t seem to get from my own life.

It’s kind of funny, how growing up we have all these films, and more often than not we hope there’s a happy ending. Endings are important, you know the movie won’t last forever. It matters that it ends well. Are they synonyms? In my mind goodbyes have always been… sad. I dread endings. If I could I’d probably live life through only beginnings. Through that thrill, in that subliminal space between doubt and something more.

Turns out living isn’t just about endings, but the ends are a big part nonetheless. These days I see them everywhere, the goodbyes. Goodbye, colleague I grew to care about. Goodbye, to all the saturdays that I thought we’d spend together. Goodbye, this idea that my parents aren’t aging. Goodbye, to thinking I can bear it all alone, goodbye to the rejection of loneliness.

@himarichatani on instagram

I got sick while writing this, caught the latest variant of the cold, and before laying for a nap I was hit with a pretty dramatic thought. No one is curious about me. This prompted a cascade… I miss being found out, being discovered. I miss someone asking me questions, having someone.. care. Or rather the thrill of noticing I am cared for.. I miss someone looking at me, looking for my opinion, even though it probably would’t matter in the big scheme of things. I miss… it.

Though I do… I do have it… I have conversations with my brother about our lives, or about topics that come and go. I take with both care what the other thinks. My parents care for me, in that almost wordlessly way parents tend to care. I had a colleague-turned-friend tell me she noticed the sparkle in my eyes fading when I talk about work these past months. The truth is, if I pay closer attention, what I’m looking for does exist in my life, and I end up having the sense I’m rather ungrateful. Why does it seem like I’m only okay in the places where I shouldn’t be? Lurking in dark corner I have no business going to?

Sometimes life feels so… final. We never get to live through the same happiness twice. The love we get we’ll never have again. People leave, or change, both are as good as dying. Jobs don’t really care for us, any day could be our last if we really focus on that. I’m final. I’ll never get to be this young again. There aren’t the kind of things I think about daily, or in a direct manner… but I find other paths, this finality drives me insane. It makes me feel so hopeless. It makes me tired of hope.

Tired of having expectations, any hope at all… I’m tired of getting served reality time and time again. A job I like but whose quality has been shrinking, around people who don’t seem to care…. someone who won’t, likely can’t and doesn’t want to be more, an us, no prospects of romantic love and much less the belief I’m worthy of it, capable of it.. friends living in their own lives and fading from my own… no plans unless I make them.. despite being the truth of my days I (day)dream on the opposites. Ironic, because I’ve always been prone to nightmares in my sleep. I think I’m a little tired of hope. I’m weary. If I could I’d only have beginnings in my life, instead of these moments that feel like endings.

Though they do say that ends bring new beginnings. What lays beyond hope? What does happen when we become completely and utterly hopeless? I look at myself, look at these words, and feel like I’m 21 again, writing about how I’m such a sad person, a pessimist. All fancy ways that translate to pitying myself, wallowing in my hurt because it was my darn right to, a wordy way of saying Look at me! I’m hopeless, what now? I have tasted hope and I feel emptier than I have felt in a good while — was hope not the answer? Was focusing on the positive, on the good, on the nice meant to change me? Why am I still here, thinking about the ends? I’m angry, it irritates me, that speech, this way of looking at… myself. I am not pathetic, and I am not hopeless.

Do you ever get those moments too? Where you shock yourself? Where you can see a change from who you used to be to who you are?

Maybe in the past I’d feel tempted to believe so, and I’d want to stay here. But I don’t want to stop betting on myself just yet. I’m just… tired. If I ever learned I can’t remember how to say it, how to express it. I’m tired. I am tired and I am hungry. I want more for myself, and although I don’t know how to get it, my first step is to say it. To say that I want it. To take a step back and say yes, I am.. lonely. But take two steps forward and say I do have hope for this life, hopes, and I am hurt that right now they seem so, so far. But they can’t be impossible to reach. Even if they are, don’t they say what matters is the journey?

So, what’s with all this? What’s the point? Besides me trying to say, I can’t stop thinking about endings. I think about them so much I can’t seem to enjoy anything sometimes. I even see myself as an end.

I told someone, confided in them that I realised recently I never talk about what I love much. You know that phrase, if I loved you less I’d be able to talk about it more? This has a way to tie itself to the earlier thought, that no one is really curious to get to know me. If I am not asked I won’t speak. And it ties to another thought, the one where I see a Pattern where I seem to only get attached to people who can talk about what they like. Somehow I’m always the watcher, the listener. And I enjoy it, I like to see others happy, full of love, and I engage even when I don’t know… I’m happy until the emptiness come around. Somehow, I keep opening doors and finding the same room with furniture that breaks as soon as I try to use it. And the reply I got… kind of dug the nail deeper. I was thanked for my honesty, told I didn’t need to act the way I do. I was told that I do have a space to talk. But… there were no questions. The reply felt like an end. That was it. And I know, I know it wasn’t a rejection, I know I didn’t get told off, or told to shut up, or told that I don’t matter. I know none of that was true and I don’t believe in those things… but I think it’s time to stop watching for a while. To be alone, even if I’m lonely. I don’t think I can find myself in other people all the time. I don’t think I can talk about what I love without listening to it first.

This isn’t.. a call to hyper individualism. We only have each other, really. I just… if I keep walking behind someone, I keep walking in their shadow. If I have so much curiosity to spare to others, and people around don’t seem to have much left, why can’t I have some to myself? I think I have to be more selfish. More self centered. I was always told not to be these things. I don’t mean to isolate, and I won’t, I want to engage with what is around me, I want to keep making my friends laugh, I don’t mean to “reject the world”… but I don’t want to live my days this way, feeling as if I am only watching an end after the other. I don’t want this loneliness to consume so much of me that it eats me too. I want some love for myself. I want a lot of love for myself in this life. And I talk and talk a lot, I’m not even certain if this is something I won’t regret, or how exactly I’ll action any of this, but if both certainty and uncertainty are scary, where does that leave me? In the middle? Stuck again? If life is a sheet of paper bigger than I initially thought, I have ample space to get to know myself, to know what I love, to see that I matter and where I wish to stand. To want new things, different things. To reject some others. Maybe in a way I’m back to hoping again. Maybe all roads really lead to hope.

I’ll leave you with a poem today from Andrea Gibson, “every time i ever said i want to die”.

A difficult life is not less
worth living than a gentle one.
Joy is simply easier to carry
than sorrow. And your heart
could lift a city from how long
you’ve spent holding what’s been
nearly impossible to hold.

This world needs those
who know how to do that.
Those who could find a tunnel
that has no light at the end of it,
and hold it up like a telescope
to know the darkness
also contains truths that could
bring the light to its knees.

Grief astronomer, adjust the lens,
look close, tell us what you see.

edit: you best believe one of the 2026 goals will be to proofread