The Newest of Years

How to unravel a decade of your life? How to look to the future? What is transient, what is permanent, what demands observation, what demands action, what demands surrender?

How do you begin to unravel a decade of your life?

Not with answers, I think. Not certainty. Maybe not even language, at first. Just a quiet returning. A hand on the wall in the dark, searching for the outline of something you used to believe in.

Ten years and change. A decade plus of trying and failing and trying again. A baker’s dozen of loving too hard, or not enough. Of cities and leaving cities. Of damage, and of what rebuilds. Of learning the difference between enduring and living. Between being seen and being safe.

How do you look forward after so long looking back?

I keep circling this question as I wake early and take my meds. As I make tea. As I put poems into a shape, or try to. The future no longer feels like a promise or a punishment—it feels like a series of small, steady permissions. To rest. To speak. To begin again. To keep going like humans do if given the chance and stability to want it.

Lately I’m preoccupied by what is transient and what is permanent. What demands observation, close, granular, reverent attention. What demands action, even when it's messy or slow. And what demands surrender, and what I’m still clinging to out of habit or fear.

This is the season of letting go.

Of soft edits.

Of making room.

There are days I feel entirely new. Other days I’m right back in it, all, the wreckage, the grief, the tight old patterns. But even that feels different now. I don’t believe in anything linear. I believe in cycles. In tides. In keeping the door open to myself. In how more can change in one year than in the decade before.

If you’re here too, somewhere between endings and beginnings, welcome.

I don’t have answers, but I have questions, and a willingness to stay with them.

Let’s stay with them together.

— Max