(1)
January 2025
Lately I have been training myself, time and again, to accept the idea of uncertainty outside necessity, outside what is established with absolute certainty. And many times, when I catch myself naively drifting toward certainties, I reproach myself for my supposed immaturity and turn with determination toward probabilities, toward that fragile zone between the possible and the impossible, to find peace, the peace of one who has freed herself from an old desire to control everything.
I often recall a moment at the start of 2025, New Year’s Eve in Brussels, Belgium, in a Gothic-style restaurant that had chosen to celebrate the occasion for its patrons by hiding behind masks. We all wore masks and sat there, freed from the certainty of our established identities whose very first definition rests on the full features of the face of the person sitting across from you. I watched how people were, in some way, lighter. Not one of them attempted to remove their mask even as the countdown began, And we entered the new year. They all settled into that moment beyond control, into the strangeness that made them believe they were someone else, outside their own histories and personal experiences as though it were a voluntary amnesia.
It was precisely at that moment that my partner brought up the subject of marriage, from behind the mask we had chosen together. I knew him completely as the person behind that mask as he approached his thirty-sixth year. But on my side, I was imagining us as other people, choosing my own amnesia until his question brought me back to reality.
In any other circumstance I would have been seized with dread. But in that quiet moment of mine, I moved toward the matter with far greater lightness.
(2)
January 2026
We had just finished dinner with his family in one of their homes. At every gathering I observe how they never speak of a single particular home, even though it is the same family spread across those many houses between Moscow, Brussels, Amsterdam, Dubai, Budapest, Montenegro, Salzburg, Belgrade, Cairo and Vienna. They move between these cities with effortless ease, exchanging their occasions according to mood each time one home, one city, then another without taking any place too seriously. I studied a family album in which they mingled all those homes as though they were one, as though it were all the same city. I do not know whether this owes to a long history of wandering and trade, or to a long-cultivated awareness of the uncertainty of place as well. Many faces dwell in those albums some are before me now, even if their features have changed, others are absent yet in their solid, cohesive mass, they do not appear as people whom any loss has passed through, like sleepwalkers in a prolonged state of uncertainty about life.
It was snowing heavily outside and the accompanying roar of the wind presaged an imminent storm. But inside, beyond the public sphere of the place, they moved about unconcerned with anything but being together. I thought of Tolstoy and his observation that what distinguishes families is their sorrows. But what is singular about the family before me which shares some root with Tolstoy is that what distinguished them, in that moment of their existence, was the voluntary fragmentation that had gathered them.
I try to slip away from that noise, remembering an old wish regarding Vienna as an alternative city. I try to search for their photos there rather than among the others, and I feel nothing but a deepening fluidity and haziness around place. Yet instead of feeling unsettled, I am overcome by a profound sense of lightness within the lostness.
(3)
29 February 2026
I take many photographs of the most self-evident moments of our life moments in which certainty seems a luxury, and for some reason I want to hold onto it, to return to my original naivety. In the midst of all this noise and confusion I read less, and writing attempts seem lesser than what I might call attempts, even in the effort to describe the mood of the moment. So many reports, statements, images and rumors here and there, All in the service of searching for some certainty at either extreme: that nothing is happening yet, and that everything is happening now.
(4)
Mid-March 2026
There is a fog over the mind most of the time. You seem like someone waiting for a train that has been delayed en route to its station. You know the train is coming somehow, but in that state of waiting you try to arrange the consequences of this disruption. There is also that incomprehensible pattern of things the compound bewilderment. Going out into your usual routine day while fully aware of what is unfolding backstage, a war you are part of and not part of at the same time, its shape unlike anything you know of wars and their eruptions. A passing question crosses your mind: could this be the shape of wars in the new century? In their ghostly concealment and their way of eluding you while barely showing themselves except in news headlines and a handful of images. And though you are at the heart of the event, paradoxically your existential safety is far removed from it as though you and the event occupy the same geographic spot yet inhabit entirely different cosmic dimensions. You search for the obvious, but the obvious offers you no help, perhaps because the world is now in a state closer to fantasy than to reality. And in the midst of your silence, you feel as though you are the noise itself, that the screaming emanates from within you rather than from what surrounds you. You then remember your own limitations, before continuing to type your password into your desktop computer to begin a workday that is supposed to be ordinary a small, simple, self-evident, clear moment, yet without it you might have dissolved into a vast probability of uncertainty. And so I find myself searching paradoxically for the very certainty I had long trained myself to relinquish.
I am not alarmed.
I do not rejoice.
But I enter an inexplicable state of floating.
(5)
4 April 2026
There are two ways of looking at stillness, at opposite poles.
Stillness in its reduced sense of petrification remaining rigid while everything passes through you, left stranded in distance and place and time.
And stillness in its synonym that leads to groundedness resisting disintegration, not letting the cracks probe you to shatter you, but to refine you, chiseling the interior so it appears clearly.
And I, trying in the midst of the noise to hold onto the stillness I long scorned in its first meaning
for stillness implies that I am resisting an essential part of life, fleeing change and movement stillness in the idea of becoming the stone.
And like someone who left their birthplace so long ago they have forgotten it, the idea of return resembles the exploration of a virgin place they never truly knew.
In the midst of all this, I see his stillness arrive effortlessly. There was no alarm from the very first moment, nor afterward only a quiet attentiveness and the exploration of practical scenarios. I watched him from my place of unrest, longing for his level ground, even though we stood on the same earth. I was trying to understand the roots that made him stand there is it something connected to the Slavic side of his constitution? We are the same age, after all, and given the current global situation, the transformations are the same for all. He has not experienced a full-scale war, any more than I have. Even the one currently raging in his birthplace, he had always been distant from it by virtue of his travels and movements between study, exploration and family business across Europe.
I pause at his absorption in choosing to buy a holiday home in one of the cities we recently visited. His absorption was not an attempt at escape, nor a way of passing time, nor a form of distraction from the current situation which he discusses with me in detail even as he flips through images of seaside houses before him.
His stillness was an essential part of his person, independent of age and experience. It was something I could not fully understand at the time, yet I knew that this stillness had in turn granted me the time to catch my breath and grow calm.
(6)
10 April 2026
The peoples of the world today seem anesthetized by their small troubles. The idea of collective annihilation has contracted
to something very limited indeed. And salvation, in its modern conception, means leaving the threshold of your home and returning to it finding the door, the house, and yourself without looking toward what surrounds you, or toward those who surround you, as a matter of necessity.
But is this even a viable choice today?
(7)
12 April 2026
Before me are several wedding catalogues, and another collection of them arrives in my inbox with suggestions for themes and ideas. The wedding coordinator calls me incessantly to choose a single theme around which everything will revolve. I joke with her about the possibility of the theme being “the existential question,” and it throws me off that she does not understand the implicit humor. She asks me in her Australian accent to give her a clearer sense of what I want in the form of examples or images. I had explained this to myself at the time by saying that
tones over the phone are deceptive. But she came back to ask me later, face to face, as we walked around to choose the right venue for the celebration. I contemplated her in silence, thinking that this might be her way of dealing with things perpetually moving toward some goal, however small and marginal, in the midst of all the chaos.
We sit over a cup of coffee and I tell her I was joking, explaining my witticism. She laughs after a brief moment of bewilderment. She insists we hurry up and choose the general color of the theme because time passes, just as everything passes.
She moves with a natural ease and I cannot determine whether what she said falls within the carelessness of one’s twenties, or whether she has been gifted with a wisdom through which she perceives things that surpass her years.
At some earlier point, I think I would have immediately judged her for her detachment from the world and her selfish individualism. But something about the current state of things makes you more sympathetic toward the choices of others. No one can judge anyone’s choice today without first placing themselves in their position. And she, from her position, has chosen to look toward the temporary that which is more stable than what endures.
(8)
1 May 2026
A constant fear unites us our great shared human experience. And yet we find ourselves searching for reasons to feel solidarity, a form of tragedy that unites us on the surface, I believe, without any deep awareness that we came into existence while sharing that first root. No one is more deserving than another here. It resembles a discrimination built on the premise that some people are less human than others does it not? And then, does the idea of a selective solidarity built on the surface of the reflected image of suffering alongside its enormity not also turn you into another kind of beast?
I believe it was James Baldwin who perceived fear in eyes whose colors ranged from light to dark, yet who shared, in their depths, and despite the walls of racial segregation of that time, the very same terror.
(9)
3 May 2026
The tightrope walker in the circus has always been seen as a break between one important act and another,
Adding a degree of excitement to the larger act that follows while softening the intensity left by the preceding one. Not like fire-eating, not like confronting lions, not like attempting to give the appearance of separating one part of the body from another. There is silence, watchfulness, a long waiting, and a careful balance in the effort to keep the feet from slipping off the rope so the performer does not fall into the void.
I think about how much this resembles following the news in the midst of a ceasefire how much it resembles walking on that taut, slender rope except that the void here is another unknown, with no safety net like the one prepared below for the circus performer.
Yet that thin, Extended rope teaches you something else as well: that you cannot stop and hang suspended up there, and that this slender rope is your path now with caution, yes, with the possibility of falling and stumbling, yes, but it is your only crossing for now at least. I believe that if it were to be named in another time, it would be called a test of maturity. A maturity that, this time, is not only at the level of personal experience, but as a collective trial of place.
(10)
5 May 2026
Has humanity fulfilled all its dreams, to the point where nothing remains for it but to set about embodying its nightmares?