There’s something oddly comforting about walking into the gym at 6:30 a.m. (or p.m., depending on how chaotic your life is) and seeing the same faces every single day. It’s like we’re all in some unspoken sitcom together—different lives, same plot: trying to get our lives together through exercise and endorphins.

Gratitude doesn’t always come easy—it’s something you trip over while surviving. But this year, between the chaos and the comfort food, I can actually feel it. The love, the laughter, the second chances. All of it.

It’s funny how it takes being completely wrecked by the flu to remember that I actually live inside a body. Not just some machine that keeps up with deadlines, coffee, and chaos—but a real, breathing, breakable thing. This week, it reminded me loud and clear who’s in charge. Spoiler: not me.

There’s a strange weight to having a male best friend. People see us together and immediately want to assign a label, a story, a script. “Are you dating?” “Do you like him?” “Is there something going on behind the scenes?” And the truth is, none of that matters to us. But the questions linger, because society doesn’t really know what to do with a friendship like ours.

Some relationships are easy to define. Some are neat, tidy, and fit into neat little boxes with labels like “dating,” “partners,” or “serious.”

It’s my dad’s birthday this weekend. He won’t want anyone to know that. He doesn’t like a fuss. Doesn’t want balloons or cards or sentimental Instagram posts—he’d rather just have his Heineken, a smoke with his morning coffee, and maybe a decent meal he didn’t have to cook. But I’m writing this anyway, because sometimes the quiet heroes deserve to be seen—even when they’d rather disappear into the background.

Yes, I am 41 and I keep a diary. Not a bullet journal. Not a gratitude notebook. A full-blown, messy, unfiltered diary.

I’ve spent a lot of time writing about love. About heartbreak, about longing, about the strange magic that happens when two people try—sometimes clumsily, sometimes beautifully—to choose each other in a world that keeps pulling them apart.

To both of my dads—the one who gave me life and the one who gave me everything else—I carry your lessons in my bones. I carry your love like armor. I’m who I am because of you. And I’m thankful for that every single day.

No curated playlists. No matching sets. Just breath, gravel, and whatever mood the river’s in that day. Rio Park doesn’t care if I’m tired or torn open. It just lets me show up anyway.

You don’t realize you’ve fallen in love with a city until it starts loving you back. Not in dramatic, fireworks-over-the-river kind of ways, but in the slow, quiet details. In the routines. In the tiny nods of recognition that only come with time.

You don’t just go to my parents’ place. You arrive—heart first, lungs adjusting to air that still remembers what it was like before concrete and deadlines.

It’s strange how absence has a sound. You don’t hear it until it’s deafening—until the familiar background noise of someone’s presence goes quiet and you’re left sitting in the echo.

There’s a kind of magic that lives in the early hours—the kind you have to earn by crawling out of a warm bed before the sun even remembers it has a job to do. It’s quiet here.

There’s something about a phone call with my mom that feels like stepping into an emotional tornado—equal parts chaos, unsolicited life coaching, and a kind of fierce, unshakable love that could probably power a small country if we figured out how to bottle it.

Let’s get something straight: I’m not above a cheesy rom-com. In fact, I thrive on them.

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