madelaku

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

Søren Kierkegaard

August 2024

A helluva month. I’ve been thinking about the evidence of love in my life. I find love in:

  • Texts I get from friends, be it encouraging words or check-ins every day until they know I’m okay.
  • Texts I don’t send, because loving myself means keeping myself far away from people who left without a goodbye, who don’t keep their word, or who want my body but not the rest of me.
  • Bottles of kombucha, which my dad specially buys from Costco whenever I come home to visit.
  • Bags of food and clothes we drop off at the hospital accompanied by desperate, tearful prayers.
  • An empty kitchen sink in the morning. Because even though I might feel too tired to clean up the night before, one of the most loving things I can do for future me is to give myself a clean slate to start the next day.
  • The sky, in the endless forms of clouds, faint and brilliant rainbows, and ever-changing phases of the moon, as if all of this was created just so we could marvel and wonder.