I remembered standing in the snow talking to you about your future, and mine, but I forgot looking for the aurora with you. 

I don't know how I forgot. It was bloody cold outside and I didn't want to go out. But I did, I think. And it was dark outside, we needed to use our phones as torchlights, but it was hard because it was cold. And the snow was thick. And the sky was black with a few sprinkles of stars and no aurora. Even though we waited for some time and checked a few directions. No aurora. 

But it was dark and freezing and you were there and I thought it wasn't so bad, nothing could be too bad, if you were there. 

 

"...that there were forms of strength the desert had not taught him to recognize. That did not make them lesser. Only rarer. And perhaps rarer things were harder on those who had to guard them precisely because their survival seemed, at first glance, impossible." 

The biggest advantage I have ever had is loving books. 

I've had books since I could sit up without support. My earliest memory is staring at a poster with pictures and words under them, imagining that CAKE and BALL were real. I read enid blyton and charlotte's web and archie comics - thank you, grandparents. I grew older and read harry potter and heidi and anne of green gables - thank you, parents. 

Years passed and I read TKAM and Disgrace and Jane Austen - thank you, school. 

Books have always been my friends. More, they let me live a thousand lives within my own short timespan. 

When I read, I see the story in my mind. It's as if I'm standing there, in front of the characters, watching the smoke drift across the snow. I smell it. I feel it. The chill of winter brushes my ears, and the silence in the woods echoes in me. 

I grew older, and started reading nonfiction, learning other people's life lessons. Almost no magic, but a lot of mentoring.

I love books. They make me laugh out loud and often make me cry. Every great book I've had is a gift and I've countless ones. 

sometimes you need someone else who has the talents you do not, to express the emotions that you cannot.  

“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.” - J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

take me home - jess glynne

I think everyone makes a choice, consciously or not, about whether they will live authentically. We decide whether we will stand for what we believe in, or whether we will hide. 

It's not an easy choice to make, because there are consequences for speaking up. You can't come out of it unscathed. You have to be harder on yourself, because others will be harder on you - they will ask, who is this person to speak up, to have a stance? 

There are no easy answers, too. But speaking up doesn't obligate you to come up with the solution. I think the solution to difficult problems, 'wicked problems', requires everyone's effort. We have to move together towards a better way, towards positive change. 

And does it matter? Speaking up for what you believe in - whether it's every human's right to care, or women's rights to equal pay and opportunities? I think it does. Our voice matters more than we think. And it matters to me, too, that I stood for it. It matters to me. 

"Is what you're doing right now helping or hurting you?" 

"Yes." 

December is a strange month. It feels like cold air, the kind that chills your lungs as you breathe; the inside of a hotel room in Japan, and all the decembers after that, remembering. 

It often sends me on the same train of thought - the melancholy makes me wonder about the meaning of suffering; that makes me think about whether life is about creating meaning from suffering, or if there is more than that, something that has managed to lift away from suffering, something that can call itself pure joy. 

And that makes me think about what I should do with my life, and what one human can do, and whether what I can do is the same as what I should do. 

And that makes me tired. 

I remember I'm supposed to count my blessings; and that all of our time on earth is short.