I make tea. Tea is my compass ☕️. It warms my palms, warms my thoughts. Sometimes it seems that tea knows more than me: it can be patient, wait, without demanding anything in return.

People hold hands in the subway. Sometimes their fingers seem like a map. I study the lines, but I don't touch. My fingers are an empty map. Sometimes it scares me how emptiness can be so familiar.

Yesterday I saw the sunset. It screamed about someone's love, but I was silent. Silence is my ritual 🌅. I hear my heart beat quietly. Sometimes it beats in rhythm with a song that no one hears 🎵. sometimes it seems like the world around is a huge instrument, and I am a small note, heard only by myself.

love comes like thunder, and sometimes like an ant. I prefer an ant. quietly, imperceptibly, but it is felt. I am learning to appreciate ants. I am learning to appreciate myself 🐜. I am learning to see that warmth is not always bright, that closeness is not always the presence of another, that sometimes love is the ability to be close to yourself.

at night I write notes to myself. tomorrow I will read and be surprised: who is this, who thinks so much? it is me. always me. and that is enough 🌙. sometimes it seems like the whole world is a huge city without maps, where everyone is looking for someone, and I am looking for myself.

I collect moments, not people 📸. one day - laughter with colleagues, another - a conversation with myself in an empty room. there is warmth, it just comes in a different form. sometimes i close my eyes and imagine that someone is holding my hand, but when i open them, i see emptiness. and that's okay.

sometimes i want to scream into the void, sometimes i just want to listen to the silence. i listen. silence teaches me to understand myself, to distinguish noise from meaning, expectation from the present. it slowly, almost imperceptibly, shapes me.

and in this silence i learn to be close to myself, learn to appreciate my oddities and weaknesses, learn to see joy in little things: in the dawn, in the sound of rain, in a favorite song, in the feeling of warmth in my palms 🌞💖. sometimes loneliness is an art. the art of seeing the world and yourself at the same time, without dissolving in other people's stories, without losing your boundaries.

and i believe that someday someone will appear with whom loneliness will become a shared space of warmth, but for now i am collecting pieces of myself, and this is also love ✨.

Iria