3AM in Tokyo…& the birds still sing

Dear my lovely readers,

Wow. It’s been a few months. Life—life has been a whirlwind. The kind that doesn’t just sweep you off your feet but spins you in circles, leaves you dizzy, breathless, unsure where the ground is.

I haven’t been sleeping. People I love have passed away. And some days, the only things keeping me going are my family, my friends, and the birds outside my window that sing at 6 a.m. like they know something I don’t. Like they’re reminding me, you’re still here—breathe.

But sometimes, you’ve got to climb out of your grief, shake off the fog, and just… write.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about death. Not in a dramatic way. In a curious way. A why them and not me? way. A why them and not someone else I know? way. It’s wild how death chooses. Sometimes it taps gently, sometimes it crashes in. But always, it arrives.

And I wonder—am I living or am I just waiting?

There’s something terrifyingly beautiful about realizing that death doesn’t wait for us to get it together. It doesn’t wait for us to finally take that trip or apologize or say “I love you” out loud. It doesn’t wait for the right time, because there is no right time.

As Cory Taylor wrote in Dying: A Memoir,

“We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it.”

And lately, I’ve known it. Felt it in my bones. Lived with it sitting on my shoulder like a quiet shadow.

So here I am. It’s 3 a.m. in Tokyo, Japan. I needed to write. To escape the pressure cooker of responsibilities, expectations, decisions, and everyone else’s noise. I needed to remember what silence sounds like. I needed to live in the moment again….

And here I am. Awake. Alive. Writing. Living.

Lately, the only moments I feel fully awake are when I’m lost in a book, deep in a conversation with someone I love, or spiraling down a rabbit hole of wild conspiracies that sound just plausible enough. And when I’m writing. Always, when I’m writing.

Cory Taylor taught me that. Taught me to stop fearing the end and start embracing it. To lean into it. To live with it. Not in denial of it.

She also wrote:

“I still write so as not to feel alone in the world, but now I type. What is lost in the process is the hand-drawn aspect of the written word—some of the magic has faded, as it must do from all childhood pleasures. They begin and they end.”

And that line—they begin and they end—it stays with me. Like an echo. Like a truth too big to hold in your hands.

So I write. I write through the grief, the confusion, the endless what-ifs. I write so I don’t feel alone. And maybe—just maybe—so you don’t feel alone either.

We’re all spinning on this planet, hearts full of fear and love, aching for meaning. We’re all just one moment away from something ending. Or beginning.

So I force my mind to stop racing. I tell myself to stop worrying about the “what ifs,” and just live—live in the moments that scare me, surprise me, change me.

Like Cory, I write to connect. To send signals in the dark. To wrap my arms around your pain and whisper, me too. You’re not alone.

We are all just trying to figure out how to hold joy and sorrow in the same hand. And maybe writing is how I hold mine.

With love,

Me