One of the books I’ve read in the past month is Matthew Perry’s memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing”. I didn’t expect to cry reading it. And I didn’t expect Matthew Perry, a man I knew mostly as Chandler Bing, the sarcastic glue of one of my favorite comfort shows, to tell my story, in a way.
Sunt lucruri pe care le tot amânăm. O vacanță. O conversație. O plimbare. Ne spunem că mai e timp, că o să facem „la vară”, „când se mai liniștesc lucrurile”, „după ce termin cu X sau Y”. Dar timpul nu se oferă. Timpul se fură din graba zilnică, se construiește cu voință și se dăruiește celor care contează.
I recently found myself on a journey through parts of Asia, crossing borders, changing languages, swapping currencies, collecting stories. Each place offered something wildly different. But of all the moments that stitched themselves into memory, there’s one solo trip in Vietnam that keeps resurfacing. Just a single day, really. But it felt like a whole novel.
There are moments in life that you don’t just remember, you feel them long after they’ve passed. This past month was full of those moments.
Earlier this June, I spent three days immersed in a mental health event that offered more than just education. It offered integration. And it brought together voices from across disciplines (therapists, artists, educators and survivors) into workshops, conferences, games and conversations that didn’t just inform, but moved. There were tools to take home, strategies for resilience, but most of all, there was a sense of collective permission: to feel, to reflect, to unravel a little.
Unii dintre noi s-au născut într-o Românie în care părinții vorbeau în șoaptă, iar bunicii păstrau ziarele sub saltea. În acea tăcere forțată s-a născut, mai târziu, o sete de voce, de curaj, de strigăt. Iar acum, după atâția ani, încă ne mai bântuie reflexul de a confunda volumul cu adevărul.
The past month has been a month of literary indulgence. I devoured eleven books, but there is one that’s stuck with me in a way I didn’t expect. ‘Tales from the Café’ by Toshikazu Kawaguchi.
There’s something quietly seismic about Kawaguchi’s writing. His prose doesn’t shout, it listens. It asks questions with the gentleness of steam rising from a cup and yet the answers land with the weight of lives half-lived, regrets unspoken, love left lingering in doorways we didn’t return to.