The Ones Who Leave Marks

Monday arrived with fire — sudden, unannounced, the temperature climbing from nowhere until the world felt altered. It's a dry heat here, the kind that burns clean, the kind that doesn't apologise. The kind that feels, strangely, like being alive.

A friend is leaving soon. So I made some barely convincing excuses to be near today, and I don't regret a single one of them.

I don't fully understand why certain people leave an impression so deep, so fast — arriving like something you weren't prepared for and settling in places you didn't know were empty. At first they feel almost like wounds. That deep, that close. But over time they soften, and in the softening they reveal something — a value, a meaning, that only distance and time can fully name.

I haven't missed anyone in a while. But I can already feel the shape of this particular absence forming, even before it arrives.

Having someone to talk to — really talk to — turned out to be something I hadn't known I was missing, hadn't known I wanted. Simple conversations about not very much at all, the kind that only seem to exist inside a place like this, between people who are here for something larger than they can always explain. I have friends to talk with; I want to be clear about that. But these conversations were different. They lingered long after the last word was spoken, carrying something that stayed.

I think I was lucky to have had that. And I know it will be missed.

And yet — even as all of that quietly consumes me — it only adds fuel to the reason I came here in the first place. To know myself. To sit with what arises and not look away.

This month I have been soft with myself. Slow sessions, easy mornings, the kind of practice that makes you feel connected rather than tested. Next month will ask something different, and I will have to meet it with whatever I have when it arrives.

The lessons keep coming in small, hidden forms — like gems buried beneath excess, beneath noise, beneath everything that isn't quite the thing. They have always been there. They will always be there. You just have to be willing to do the work of finding them, and patient enough to recognise their beauty when you do.