Beginning Again

The year goes round again, as years all do.
Nothing remarkable about that.
The sun keeps up its patient work
and the days fall off the calendar
like bits of paper no one bothers to keep.

I stand in it the way everyone does,
watching things bloom and then give up.
Time feeds the rose for a while,
then takes it back.
No mystery there.

Still, a life accumulates.

I spent years learning how to listen—
to the piano mostly,
to the stubborn honesty of keys
that won’t say more than you mean.
Eventually someone put a name to it,
a degree framed in careful Latin,
as if skill were something you could seal.

I remember Amsterdam most clearly:
rain on the canals,
the sound of music carrying through rooms
that had heard centuries of it already.
You play, and for a moment
the echo pretends to be yours.

After that there was travel—
Greece bright with the remains of gods
nobody expects to wake;
Belgium with its patient stones;
San Diego breathing salt and sunlight;
San Francisco hiding the skyline in mist;
Dubai burning like a warning;
Austria ringing with bells
that seem to know something you don’t.

All of it impressive while it happens,
though afterwards it settles
into a few photographs in the mind.

The deeper journey was less visible.

Therapy, mostly.
The slow work of returning
to rooms the mind locked years ago.
Childhood, which everyone says is over,
waiting there like a bill unpaid.

Grief turned out not to be an enemy.
More like a teacher with bad manners.
It insists you listen.

Music helped with that.
A good teacher once showed me
how to stay inside a single tone
until it finishes saying what it can.
After that even a small room
can feel almost sacred.

Time, though, doesn’t pause for discoveries.

People drift away—
family sometimes first—
their promises thinning out
like frost in the morning sun.
Beliefs follow them.
The ones you were given early
start to look less convincing
once the body begins to argue.

Then came the word you expect someday
but still don’t quite believe: cancer.

Nothing theatrical about it.
The doctor spoke calmly.
Outside the sun kept doing its job.
Cars passed.
Someone somewhere was buying groceries.

Yet the shadow moves across the dial.
You notice breath more.
Notice how every hour
is quietly being spent.

Faith loosened after that.
Not dramatically.
More like a coat you realise
you don’t need to carry anymore.

What remained was simpler:
this life,
this hour,
the faces that still look back at you
without asking for proof.

So the year goes on.

I don’t argue with it now.
Enough has happened—
enough lost, enough kept—
to know the arrangement.

We live briefly.
That is the whole design.

And because of that
the world, surprisingly,
is still worth loving.