It is a strange thing, picking up the pen again after ten years. At first it feels awkward, like speaking to an old friend whose voice you can barely recall. The words hesitate at the threshold, testing whether I am still someone worth inhabiting.
In college, writing was my fever. I filled pages with love and coffee, with metaphors that strained for brilliance, with the reckless urgency of someone who believed every thought must be preserved. Back then, I mistook words for permanence; as though each line pressed my thumbprint onto eternity, some small defiance against the forgetfulness of time.
But ten years of silence humbles you. I stopped writing, and nothing collapsed. The world kept turning. Empires rose and crumbled at history’s margins, stars burned themselves out in distant galaxies, lives began and ended without ever touching my awareness. My absence from the page left no dent at all. Against the scale of the universe, even a decade is barely a blink; and I am smaller still.
When I wrote then, my words were preoccupied with beginnings; first loves, first heartbreaks, the intoxicating dizziness of possibility. Now, my subjects have shifted. I write less of what I hope to become, and more of what I have endured. Loss, survival, quiet reckonings: these have replaced the restless declarations of youth. The page is no longer a stage for performance but a mirror where I bear witness to what has shaped me.
And politics; perhaps the hardest change of all. In youth I was dyed red, convinced that truth belonged to a colour, a side, a cause. My notebooks dripped with urgency, intoxicated by the clarity of opposition. But age, or perhaps disillusion, turned the pigment grey. Not the grey of apathy, but the grey of philosophers; those who dwell in ambiguity, who find meaning not in victory but in paradox. Certainty dissolved into questions: Is justice still justice when it bends? Is freedom diminished by its contradictions? What remains when every system frays at the edges?
The years I did not write were not empty, though at times they felt that way. They carried other kinds of stories. Grief wrote itself into me with a heavy hand. Work etched its endless repetitions. Silence carved its lessons quietly but deeply. And I found a sweeter form of love: no longer the fevered confessions I once scribbled, but the kind that endures quietly, steady as a hand held in the dark. Even when I wasn’t putting pen to paper, life was writing on me. Perhaps that is what I bring back now; the marks left by living.
And yet here I am, writing again. Not because the world needs my words, but because I do. I no longer mistake writing for permanence. I know that every sentence will fade, as surely as I will. My words are not monuments; they are whispers. And perhaps that is enough.
I do not write to be read by eternity. I write to make sense of my own silence, to leave a small trace of who I am in this moment before it vanishes. There is no illusion of grandeur, only the honesty of fragility. I am a tiny voice speaking into a vast canyon, knowing the echo will fade; and marvelling at it anyway.
To write again after so long is to accept my smallness, and even to find comfort in it. I am not central to the universe, nor is my return to words. But in the act of writing, I feel a brief alignment; as though, for a moment, the infinite allows me space to speak. The words may not last, but while they exist, they are alive.
And so am I.
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