About Unwritten

One of the first things I realized while wandering the streets of Paris with Julian is how old the city is.

The limestone facades, carved as early as the 1600s, have held their breath through centuries of revolutions, romances, and quiet afternoons just like this one. They were built to outlast the memory of anyone currently walking these pavements. It is a humbling, almost dizzying realization. Standing in the shadow of a monument that has stared down the same street for four hundred years, my own existence feels like a speck of dust.

Our time here is finite. The light will shift, and the person I am at this exact second will eventually be replaced by someone else entirely. It is easy to feel small when you are surrounded by so much permanence. But there is a strange, fierce comfort in the truth: we will never be here again.

Since moving here, I find myself tethered to a familiar weight: the low, constant hum of anxiety about what comes next. I worry about the future, the milestones I have not reached, and the life I have not quite built yet with Julian. I look at the walls that have outlived the worries of a thousand people who walked these paths before me. I realise, with a sudden, startling relief, that my current anxiety is just a guest in a timeless place. They will not matter in time to come, and neither will the source of them. If this moment is all I truly have, then holding onto this worry is such a waste of the sunlight.

If our time here is merely a flicker against the stone, then let that flicker be bright. Let the heavy, unnecessary anxieties about the future dissolve into the architecture around you. You will never be lovelier, never more real, and never more present than you are in this very heartbeat. Go chase, fall, fall again, and try again until you reach where you want to be in this lifetime.

After all, we will never be here again.