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.
Trăim vremuri în care graba a devenit stil de viață, iar liniștea o raritate suspectă. Între titluri mari și concluzii pripite, politica pare tot mai des un zgomot de fond. Și totuși, în miezul ei, politica nu e zgomot. E alegere. Direcție. O întrebare pusă fiecărei generații: ce fel de lume vrei să lași în urmă, ce fel de om vrei să fii în ea?
Să ne pese de politică nu e un capriciu intelectual. E un act de responsabilitate, în sensul cel mai profund: acela de a imagina realitatea altfel, dar cu picioarele bine înfipte în pământ. E nevoie de luciditate pentru a visa cu folos. De aceea, să ne cunoaștem opțiunile nu este un lux, este începutul maturității civice. Pentru că atunci când nu știi ce alegi, nu mai e un vot, e o aruncare în gol.
There are books we outgrow. And then there are books that grow with us. The Little Prince has always been, for me, a kind of compass – one that pointed inward, rather than north. It was one of my favorite books as a child, the one I returned to obsessively, first in French, then in English, later in other languages I was learning, as if by changing the language I could uncover some deeper, truer layer of meaning. This weekend, I read it again, this time in Italian, and something shifted.
Heartbreak has a way of shaking your world, leaving everything you once knew upended.
In those early moments, survival was my only goal. And, honestly, that felt ambitious enough. I just wanted to make it through the day without the constant ache of loss threatening to swallow me whole. If I could go a few hours without staring into the void, I considered it a win. But somewhere in that effort to simply stay afloat, I found that I was doing more than just surviving. I was starting to rebuild, piece by piece, in ways I hadn’t expected. I was actively choosing to care for myself in ways that strengthened me, both inside and out. Here’s how I found my way through.
About two years ago, I stood on the edge of a life I thought was permanent, watching it slip through my fingers. A five-year love story dissolved into nothingness, leaving behind a silence that spoke louder than any words.
Heartbreak, I’ve learned, is a quiet, devastating undoing. It doesn’t announce itself with a crash, but seeps in slowly, unspooling the world as you know it. One moment you’re in the orbit of someone you love and the next, you’re floating untethered, staring at the wreckage of something you thought would hold. I’ve sat in that silence, wondering how something so intangible – a bond, a promise, a shared future – could leave such a concrete absence.
Day 1: Lufthansa flight LH-smth-smth from Munich to New Delhi. Am un déjà vu. Or better yet, un déjà vécu. Au trecut 4 ore din zbor. Le-am numărat în poezie și Amélie Poulain. Urmează un documentar cu Frida Kahlo. And my first airplane meditation session.