The way this year's been

I'm tempted to say 2025's been more than 2024, but that may just be bias. May just be proving a point. Safe to say, it's been a fucking year, but then, which hasn't? With Winter Solstice and the cold more generally inviting self-reflection, I've taken a minute to process everything that's happened this year. I slowed down a couple of days ago from doing, and now can't seem to get back. You're not supposed to. It's the last week of the year (and, in many ways, so busy still). You need a little time to take it all in.
The magic and the murder. The way this year has been.

I keep catching songs that used to mean something, and sort of losing the plot. Thinking, oh wait, that's that song, remember when...? It's not 'when' anymore. I left a song that once mattered very much to me, this year, to somebody else, who might've needed it more. Has that made life less alien to me, or does it simply mean I've found ways to incorporate the alieness?

I don't know. I found I've let go of things that were really hard for me. That they've been laid to rest completely.

It's been a strange year. A coming-and-going year. So much good entered my life through people and places and things. So much left. A year of trying and failing.

I tried to write a book, but then had to realize that it doesn't work. That's just self-discovery. It wasn't an easy thing to come to terms with, at all. I have a hard time editing my own work. Like most writers, I'm selfish and proud, and don't like hearing what I wrote is shit, especially when it comes from myself.

I tried to be a grown-up about things. I've still got things to learn, though, as the muck keeps telling me. Fuck around and fall on your face. Maybe, if I'm lucky, 2026 will prove more enlightening.

I called an ambulance. Became gutsy in negotiating how much space my things get to take up on this Earth. I hurt my wrist opening a bottle. I felt things I've never felt before. I worried about suicide more than I would've liked to. It seems the older I get, the more I understand the urgency of whispering "Please, God" to the Universe.

It was a year of death, but life, as well. Trade-offs. It was a year of realizing that in order to feel such great, beautiful things, you need to also make your peace the terrible.

It was the year I was more afraid than I've ever been in my whole life. Still am. It was a vulnerable year. A growing-up year. Life asks. You can choose to rise. And there were so many times, I worried about falling.

2025 was feeling small and unproductive, but also becoming lighter and kind. It was a challenge. It was becoming. It was writing beautiful things in ways I couldn't have made beautiful things last year, or the year before.

And now? I've a sense of putting it behind us, but I'm also regretful of the ways 2026 will be emptier. 2025 brought so much good. The reason we don't think about good, though, is because we're taking it with us into the new year, or think we are, anyway. Can't help but think of all the things we thought we were taking with us into 2025.

What will be tomorrow? Self-contained morsels of good. A reminder that, despite all the things you lost or are losing in 2025, you are still, at your core, kind in ways you weren't the year before. And maybe that can be enough.

I don't know if I'll be around for the remainder of the year, much as there's left. So I just wanted to recap a bit, and also to say thank you to everyone on this platform, so close to me, who's brought me conversations, laughs, new music, vexing differences of opinion, and cheeky banter. See you in 2026 and Merry Christmas.

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Since it is, after all, Tuesday. Perhaps the last #threetunetuesday of the year for me. I couldn't help saying hi to @ablaze.