The first cup is optimistic.
The second cup knows better.
You make it anyway. Not because the day has turned around. Or something shifted or clicked or resolved itself quietly while you weren't looking.
The day is exactly what it was. You are exactly where you were.
Kettle. Water. The small obedience of waiting.
Nobody witnesses this. Nobody gives you credit for it. The second cup doesn't make the story better. It just means you're still in it.
Which, on most days, is enough.
This afternoon I was pricing the furniture. Not all of it. Thirty-two pieces. The deck is called A Life in Objects and it is exactly what it sounds like — photographs, provenance, a short paragraph on each. Mahendra Doshi. Charcoal Project. Antique Dealers. The Edwardian Cabinet and the Gothic altar are
The ego is exhausting. It never leaves. It comments on everything. It keeps score, builds cases, rehearses conversations that will never happen. It is the noisiest room you will ever live in. And yet. That room exists only because something in you can hear it. The noise is not the
There is a tree I pass sometimes. Standing at a junction — noise, pollution, dust, the daily assault of a city that doesn't notice it's there. No canopy above it. No forest around it. Just concrete breaking its roots and exhaust filling the space where air should
I got off a call with a friend yesterday. He'd been told this year would be hard. And it is, he said. It really is. I put the phone down and opened YouTube. The first video waiting for me: a numerologist explaining why 2026 is a year of