There is an old habit - to put small paper notes under your pillow. I used to write important lists there: buy bread, hand in a report, call a friend back. But then something changed.

Now completely different words live on my scraps of paper - short phrases like "don't forget to thank yourself" or "you didn't ruin everything." I don't know where it came from. Maybe one day I got tired of being afraid of forgetting something important about myself.

Sometimes at night my hand reaches for the phone - but I try to reach for the paper. The phone will throw out a thousand notifications, and the paper does not require anything except a pen and a few minutes of silence.

In the morning I find these notes, crumple them and throw them in a jar on the shelf. Sometimes I open them and reread them. My little vows to myself live there.

One winter I wrote a whole stack of these papers - they smelled of tea and pen. In the spring I burned half of them and realized that I don't feel sorry for anything. I have already learned everything important by heart.

Notes under the pillow - it's like a whisper to myself. No promises to others, only to me. Sometimes I write my little dreams there. Not goals, not plans - but dreams that can be left unfulfilled. It's just nice to know that they live with me, even when I sleep.

Sometimes it seems to me that if I could leave one thing behind - it would be a box of papers. So that some stranger would one day open it and smile, that I was also afraid, angry, laughed and always forgave myself in the morning.