a personal update and an invitation
The morning sun is drawing lines across the wooden floor and the cheap white Ikea rug. From the bedroom, I can hear my boyfriend’s soft snores. Further down the hall, the washing machine is whirring with his dirty clothes.
I snuck out of bed an hour ago. Love is to let him sleep in peace when I am restless and full of words that want to pour out of fingertips. Love is to want his clean clothes to be hung out to dry while the sun is still out after weeks of deluge.
When I got up I pulled on my £4 vintage Pink Floyd sweater that layed crumpled on the floor and picked up my laptop to hug to my lap while I lay on the sofa and write.
Now that I am here the many things I had wanted to put down evade me asking to be rearranged in my mind, to find a storyline, a thread to hold them together.
Two weeks ago we were in London. The day we arrived it was sunnier and warmer than in Portugal where we had come from, and we walked from London Bridge to Colombia Road Flower Market. A favourite ritul of mine, to meet one of my best friends and drink coffee and eat crossaints and hear the flower sellers shout their prices.
Twenty years earlier when I lived in Hackney I’d go every weekend. Back then the streets were shabbier, speciality coffee shops did not yet exist, and you could buy bouquets of flowers at ‘two for a fiver’. (Imagine that in an East London cockney accent.)
We were in London to renew my passport due to an inexplicable bureaucratic quirk: the Austrian embassy in London would accept the very paperwork that the Passport Office in Austria had rejected when I’d flown there weeks earlier.
I often joke that I thrive at the fringes of existence, belonging nowhere in particular, my official residence a mystery even to myself. An inconvenience only once every 10 years: when I need to get my passport renewed.
When I think about it London is the closest thing I have to a home. It’s the place I have resided in most often in my adult life. It’s the only country where the passport control officer says “welcome home” when I pass through. It melts my heart a little.
On our last morning we ate cinnamon buns in Sloane Square cutting through the pillowy sweetness with sips of bitter coffee. Standing in a slice of sun pouring between buildings we watched the corporate working world rustle and bustle their ways into their offices.
When I stand and observe mass humanity as I did that morning, I’m struck by the humbling realisation that each hurried figure represents an entire universe of hopes and struggles.
Strangers — clutching coffee cups, checking watches, muttering into phones — all orchestrating their complicated lives with the same earnestness I bring to mine. At the core of each life, beneath the professional veneers and morning routines, pulses the same fundamental need for connection and meaning.
Love, in its countless expressions, remains the gravitational center around which we orbit. This truth makes the artificial structures we’ve built — the endless pursuit of productivity, status, and material gain — seem profoundly misaligned with what actually sustains us.
The day after we returned, my friend Hannah arrived like a gift.
After weeks of relentless rain drumming against windows and seeping into spirits, the clouds parted. For two precious days, we traced paths along the wild, rugged coastline that embraces the little village I’ve called home since autumn.
The sea air carried the scent of salt and possibility as we navigated rocky outcroppings and windswept bluffs, our conversations flowing as naturally as the waves below.
This landscape, in its raw, untamed ways, has become my sanctuary. Despite an unexpectedly brutal winter — longer, wetter, and colder than I had prepared for — I’ve made it my ritual to seek out nature’s company whenever possible, finding in its rhythms a counterbalance to life’s uncertainties and a reminder of what endures.
Today, I have three weeks left here.
The past two days we, and two friends, helped my boyfriend dismantle the home he has inhabited for four years. Box by box. Bag by bag. We hauled his life down flights of stairs. Until nothing remained. On Friday, he leaves with just a 40-litre backpack. Nothing else.
His devotion to non-attachment is both inspiring and daunting. I’ve promised to follow with carry-on luggage, but I can’t match his minimalism. Some outfits and useful treasures must join me in my journey.
I’ll document this bittersweet sorting soon.
My deepest heartache is leaving my cat behind. I scroll through our six years together and grief floods my body. There’s wisdom in the saying “your new life will cost you your old one,” but knowing this truth doesn’t soften its sharp edges.
I had found what seemed a perfect family for him, but their recent hesitation has sent me into a desperate search for someone who will cherish him with the same devotion I’ve offered. He has been the steady heartbeat at the centre of my existence; love incarnate in fur and purrs. This is the most painful sacrifice I’ve made in years.
But there is a new life waiting for me out there. I expect the energy of New York to lift me up and reinspire parts of me that have gone to sleep. I anticipate the world showing me what is possible for me in a way that I had not known.
And with all of this I have had to shed various versions and identities of myself that I had created. Many of them more self-protection than authentic. I am learning to let go of them to be replaced by something new, alive, real, responsive.
A huge piece of my growth recently has been learning to observe, not absorb.
I’ve promised myself I am finally going to start writing a book. Starting on the flight to New York.
Cringe! I hate even writing that.
My biggest fear is that I’ll start and never finish. Or that I’ll say I am going to write a book and not do it. But I promised myself I would and I try to always keep my promises to myself.
I’ll write for an hour each day—morning or night. Whatever emerges. These words, unlike my private journal entries, are meant for strangers’ eyes. Same practice, new purpose.
Then I thought: What if we wrote together?
A group of writers: would-be/could-be/want-to-be established, aspiring, curious writers and we all wrote together.
Every day. For 6 weeks.
Not necessarily an hour. Maybe 10 minutes for you. A sentence. A page. A journal entry. A poem. Whatever meets you at your edge.
I’ll help you find your achievable aim.
Science says 21 days forms a habit. We’ll do twice that. Together.
so,
let me invite you to:
the art of noticing ~ a 6-week writing club 📝
Come write with me, every day, for 6 weeks:
There are creaks coming from the bedroom. My boyfriend must be waking up now. The morning sun has shifted, no longer drawing lines but flooding the room with golden light. The words I’ve poured onto this page can go and live their own lives out in the world now.
Observations are made in the living, not the writing.
I close my laptop and set it aside. The washing machine has gone quiet; I’ll hang his clothes in the sun. In a moment, he’ll emerge from the bedroom, hair tousled with sleep, and we’ll begin our final Sunday ritual in this place that has been, however briefly, our home.
The thread I was searching for earlier reveals itself. Love is the storyline that holds everything together.
Vienda Maria 