Second entry

Early January has a tone.
Not loud. Persistent. Like someone gently clearing their throat and waiting for you to announce who you plan to become.

I keep thinking about New Year’s 2005. Boston. Cold, but honest about it. I was young enough to feel solid without checking in with myself every five minutes. I didn’t know it then, but that was probably my last New Year before life turned itinerant. Before cities became verbs and people became temporary accommodations.

I had a resolution that year. Lose three pounds.
That was it. That was the dream.

Twenty years later, I can say I achieved it. Slowly. Along the way I also lost cities, apartments, friendships I thought were permanent, and a carefully curated selection of men and women who all felt essential until they didn’t. The weight loss part really held up, though.

Every New Year after that scattered me somewhere else. Different places. Different people. Same confidence at midnight, same quiet detachment by February. Sometimes it was friends. Sometimes lovers. Sometimes a mix that should’ve been a red flag but felt efficient at the time.

I remember one New Year years go - different city, different life - where I announced my resolution loudly at a party, like a dare. I was going to finally get my shit together. Career. Love. Direction. Big words. Ten minutes later I tripped on the stairs going out to smoke, dropped my drink on someone’s shoes, and cried in a bathroom with a woman I’d met an hour earlier while she held my hair and told me I was “actually doing great.”
We never spoke again.
I didn’t get my shit together either.

Now it’s 2026. And January is back, doing its little routine. You need a plan. A vision. A sentence you can put on paper without rolling your eyes.

Plans look great on paper. In real life, the universe treats them like a personal invitation to humiliate you creatively. You outline. It improvises.

What do you even plan in a city like Sofia? It doesn’t care. It doesn’t reward ambition or punish resignation. It just absorbs you. Grey. Steady. A place people end up when momentum runs out—or when they stop pretending momentum is the same thing as direction. A graveyard for crushed dreams, yes, but a quiet one. Respectful. No headstones.

There have to be others like me here. People who didn’t implode, just adjusted downward with dignity. People whose dreams didn’t die, just stopped shouting.

So no resolution for 2026. I’m not fixing myself. I’m not reinventing anything. I already lost the three pounds. That was the goal, apparently.

If there’s a plan, it’s this: notice someone like me. Another person who stayed. Someone who knows the difference between giving up and opting out.

January will keep asking.
I’ll keep disappointing it.

That feels right.