Facebook called it a memory.

Eight years ago today: a photo of two paper cups on a windowsill, steam rising, the blurred outline of a street neither of us lived on anymore.

I don’t remember who took it. I remember we had been walking for three hours and hadn’t noticed.

That was the whole point of her, you never noticed time passing until it already had.

Her name still lives in my phone under its original contact, unchanged, the way you leave a room exactly as someone left it without meaning to make it a memorial. I don’t call. She doesn’t either.

But I keep the entry there like a quiet acknowledgment that the person who saved that number still exists somewhere in me, even if she no longer has anyone to call.

I used to believe friendship was love with the stakes removed.

Romantic relationships came with the vertigo of potential loss built in, you fell, and falling implied the possibility of landing badly.

To be Continued..

A small note before you read on

Substack has been a home for my writing in ways I didn’t expect. The readers here have been generous, with their time, their attention, and sometimes their words in return. That has meant more to me than I can easily say.

Writing is my way of being in the world. It’s also, quietly, how I make my living. And lately I’ve been trying to find a way to honour both of those truths at once.

So some of my essays, the ones that feel closest to me, will now live in full on my Ko-fi / Buy Me a Coffee page. I’ll always share the beginning here, because I want this to remain a place where my writing can breathe and be found. But for those who’d like to read all the way to the end, and perhaps help me keep writing this way, the rest is waiting there.

I hope you’ll come with me.

Author’s note

I write personal essays shaped by books, attention, and the inner life,

staying with language long enough for it to clarify something we’re already living through.

If this work has been meaningful to you and you’d like to support it, you can do so here:

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