25 in 2025

“Yeah, Mom, I’ve reached home safely.” “The flight was okay.” “Sure. Cool. Love ya. Bye.”

I hung up, and the apartment felt immediately smaller and quieter — the good kind of quiet, the kind you only get back when you’ve been away. I hopped in the shower but didn’t wet my hair; curly hair is a production, and I had neither time nor patience for two hours of detangling and coaxing. I rinsed fast, changed into pajamas, and put a pot of water on the stove — my electric range is slow enough to remind you to lower your expectations. By the time I’d finished my skincare, steam had fogged the mirror and the water was finally bubbling. I dropped in instant ramen, wrapped myself in a throw blanket, cued Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and ate in small, grateful bites. The ramen tasted like a tiny victory.

 

The next day I slept late and attacked the apartment like someone trying to catch up with a life that continued without me: vacuum, mop, unpack, laundry, fold. Coffee number two and a banana in the middle somewhere to prove reliability to my body. I watered the plants and told them, out loud, “Hey, you guys — thanks for not dying on me.” It felt performative and true at once.

 

By four I’d realized I’d skipped lunch, so I DoorDashed dinner, then lit a candle, started a true-crime podcast on my Bluetooth speaker, and prepped for a proper, boringly luxurious shower — the kind where you stand and let the water drain everything out of you. Hair, skincare, robe. Food arrives. The whiff of the food made me realize how famished I was.. I ate, I watched, I ate dessert, and I was in bed by nine, energized by a small, ridiculous mantra: “Tomorrow is January 10th. 2025 officially starts. I’m going to make this my year.”

 

February 14

 

Valentine’s Day at the grocery store is the world’s most quietly moralizing holiday. I walked the aisles with a list: milk, wine,vodka, olives, almonds, eggs, carrots, celery, spinach, blueberries. Strawberries were obscene this time of year; I really want to pick a fight with the person who decided strawberries to be the fruit of love and lust. Couldn’t they have picked an apple or something? At the register, the total made my stomach dip. “Eighty-five sixteen,” the cashier said. I laughed because what else do you do when your sensible self has been outvoted by the impulse to make a perfect cocktail. “Wow, that much, and I didn’t even buy the wine I love,” I said. The cashier gave me a sad smile, and I left with a crinkled receipt and a full bag.

 

In the car, I popped blueberries and argued with myself about celery and vodka. A martini sounded like a strategy. At home, I turned the news on and off within the same commercial break and scrolled social until my thumb hurt. Everything in the world seemed grey and gloomy; the cloudy weather was just making it worse. It was all too much and not enough.

 

I made a dirty martini and talked to my mother while chewing an olive. “For dinner? Umm… a salad,” I lied with minimal conviction. I poured another martini, looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, and thought makeup hit different when you were a little buzzed — a braver version of your face looked back. My phone buzzed: Are we on schedule? I answered ‘YES’, with three exclamation points, and then winced at how eager I sounded. “Too many exclamations,” I told the mirror. “You sound desperate. It’s fine now.”

 

He showed up exactly like he’d texted: a little dusty from the city but smiling the way someone does when they genuinely like being in your orbit. Conversation unspooled in easy knots — jokes, stories, the kind of laughter that fills empty wine glasses and pockets of time. When he reached for my hand walking home, I let him. The air was a little sharp, and his fingers fit mine like a sentence completing itself.

 

“So — third date. That’s something,” I said, trying to sound offhand. “It is,” he agreed. “So do I get a kiss—”

 

I cut him off. Not because I wanted to, but because the world narrowed to two people and the rest fell away. I kissed him quickly, then longer. His lips were little and sure; his jacket smelled like library books and something faintly of citrus. My pulse thudded behind my teeth. When we broke apart, his eyes held a softness I hadn’t been expecting. It was small and enormous at once.

 

Once home, I peeled off makeup, sipped chamomile, and started a new series that turned Saturday night into an accidental all-nighter. Sunday night I lay awake thinking about being late to work and about how easy it had felt to let someone in, even a little.

 

Monday taught me about the way worry takes up residence. I went to the gym, worked a solid forty minutes until my limbs felt like they belonged to me again, showered, ate eggs, and logged on. Mid-morning a colleague asked, “Have you heard about Teresa?” The answer was the kind you’ve read in emails and Slack threads for months: layoffs, cuts, a company heartbeat that had lost a few keeps. “She was let go,” my colleague said. There was a way the office air thinned out when you name the thing that can happen to any of you next. I had deadlines — designs due Friday, work that wanted to swallow days whole — but the real work was the small gnawing in my chest that asked whether next week I would have fewer people on my team to hand things off to.

 

I buried myself in work to avoid the thought. That’s how the week went — late nights, caffeine, a calendar denser than my appetite for it. On Friday I poured a glass of wine and then another until the familiar ache hissed into place. Then nature did the thing that always humbles me: perfect timing. I got my Period. Weekend plans canceled, body clamped down, a private apology to hormones and Netflix. I slept a lot.

 

March → April

 

Spring felt irregular, as if the months had been stretched and overlapped. In three months it seemed like a year had tried on my life. There were good pieces — dates with him, hikes with friends, an edible on a Saturday that loosened something creative and bright — but mostly it was the same backbeat: work, emails, exhaustion. March was noise. Family emergencies, then another round of layoffs. People I knew were let go. People I liked cried in Slack. My workload tripled and with it my capacity for anything beyond survival shrank. I slept when I could, laced up for the gym when it was all I could control, and otherwise disappeared into streaming and instant noodles.

 

One Saturday, after grocery shopping and laundry, I sat with a bowl of ramen and a small edible because some nights deserve kindness. A comedy movie blurred into warm, stupid laughter and then into a pleasant fog that had my brain pinging with ideas. I pulled out my iPad and sketched for a while — lines and faces and a stupidly big plan. After an hour that felt like three, my phone buzzed.

 

Him: Hey you! Me: A bit wasted, in pajamas, about to put on a mud mask. What’s up? Him: Hold the mask. Ice cream then mask? I’ll help. We can start a new series after. Me: That’s a lot of commitment and work. Him: I’ll take care of everything. Say yes, say yes, pretty please. Me: Hahaha. Okay, yes. Joggers and sweatshirt only. Him: That’s how I like it. 😉

 

He arrived in ten minutes with a takeaway tub of gelato and a grin that made the cold outside irrelevant. We sat at the table outside the cafe, fingers numb, faces warm from the sugar and our own laughter. I had hazelnut-chocolate; he had matcha, and when I teased him he blushed like a kid caught with a comic book. We shoved spoons at each other and declared the cold weather a conspiracy against sensible eating habits. It was ordinary and ridiculous and exactly what I wanted.

 

For weeks we hiked on Saturdays. Routine became a small rebellion: early alarm, protein bar, walking shoes, green trees and always the same parking spot. He takes the sunny side the way others take oxygen — almost involuntarily. “Why are you always so positive?” I asked once, breathless on a climb.

 

“Do you think that’s a problem?” he answered, eyebrows up.

 

“No — I’m jealous. I’m probably the most anxious person you’ll ever meet.” It came out half as a joke and half a confession. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders, and the world smelled like pine and sunscreen. “I love that about you,” he said softly. “I don’t want to change you.” He kissed the top of my head and for a minute my anxiety fell into a pocket of quiet.

 

Then, on one walk, he asked the question I’d been trying not to rehearse. We slowed on the trail; the path looped back toward where we’d started, a short circle under a wide sky. He looked at me and his face was steady.

 

“So — where are we going with us? Forward or circling?” he asked.

 

My throat tightened. There was a literal trail beneath our feet and a less literal one between us, and I didn’t know which map to read. “We’re on the trail,” I said, too literally. He laughed, then folded his hands like he was choosing words.

 

“You know I didn’t mean the trail,” he said.

 

Panic rose like heat. Our conversation got disturbed by some familiar faces; we ran into some of my friends. We hiked together and then decided to get drinks. “You guys coming for the 4th of July celebrations, right?” One of my friends asked. “Yeah, we will be there.” He replied on behalf of both of us, and a tiny electric current of something like terror hit my ribs. When did we become ‘we’? Are we moving too fast? He felt so right and also dangerously unknown, like a book I’d started but not finished. I pretended I was feeling the wave of vertigo, told him I felt dizzy, and left early to sleep off the discomfort. That night I fell into a dreamless sleep and woke with an ache that was equal parts longing and relief.

 

Late June → July

 

Work crowned itself with more unexpected shifts. My routine slipped again — calls late into the night, deliverables that multiplied overnight. My manager let me work from home, which was a small mercy: the office had too many hollowed seats and nowhere to hide the quiet panic. I found myself apologizing to myself for not being better at the things that felt like essentials — cooking, keeping friendships, answering with the presence people deserve.

 

One Friday I walked into a bar with two margaritas already stacked like small, buoyant permissions. I was nursing my second when a woman sidled up. “Hey, pretty girl. How you doing?” she asked. I told her I was straight, which launched us into a conversation about dating that was equal parts hilarious and horrifying. She was Susan — blunt, opinionated, and loud in the best possible way. After I unloaded a mess of worry about being “too hard” to be with, she declared, with the evangelism of someone who’d learned from her own errors, “Girl, you’re the toxic one. You’ve wronged him; stop overthinking. Go apologize.”

 

For a while I wanted to argue, to build a defense out of midnight logic and gentle self-justifications. But alcoholic courage is brittle; Susan was right in the way that truth sometimes is: discomforting and useful. I tumbled home, ate a burrito, and passed out at eleven. I woke at four, mouth cotton-dry, and found Susan’s early-morning text: Girl, I hope you reached home safely, go apologize. You’ll thank me later. It was like a shove in the ribs I hadn’t asked for and secretly needed.

 

At 4:50 a.m. I pulled on workout clothes, smeared on a bit of moisturizer and a tinted lip balm, stuffed my phone and wallet into my Lululemon belt bag, and left the apartment. Running in the half-light — empty streets, one or two cars, a dog walker — galvanizes something that habit and adrenaline both own. The world is simpler at dawn: tasks reduced to breath and footfalls and the small, loud fact of being alive.

 

I called him because my voice needed to be a live wire between us. He answered, sleepy and distant. “Do you want to watch the sunrise?” I blurted.

 

“Uhh. I’m half-asleep. Can we maybe later?” he mumbled.

 

I said okay and hung up, but I didn’t go home. I sat on a bench near the park by his building and waited. The sky moved in soft, deliberate strokes: navy to periwinkle, periwinkle to bruised orange. I watched the horizon and thought about the many small ways I had built walls around me — schedules, sarcasm, late-night rationalizations — and how ridiculous it felt to put effort into things that should be simple.

 

My phone buzzed. He was downstairs. He appeared ten minutes later, hair tousled and eyes bright as if he’d been pulled upright by the same urgent, silly feeling that had pushed me out of bed. Seeing him made my chest stop performing that nervous jitter and breathe instead.

 

“Hey, handsome,” I said, which felt both ridiculous and exactly right.

 

“What are you doing here at this hour? Are you stalking me?” he asked, laughing.

 

“As I said — I wanted to catch the sunrise. Umm… With you.”

 

We stood in a tiny pocket of space where the city softened. The air was cold enough to charge your lungs. We walked slowly, shoulders brushing. When the first fully honest light spilled over the buildings, the world seemed to inhale with us. The sun rose like permission.

 

I surprised myself by saying, quietly, “You know I like you a lot, right?” I felt the words leave my mouth before I could edit them. His smile softened into something like recognition. He kissed my forehead, warm and grounding. “I know,” he said.

 

There was a hush after that, an easy, thick silence that felt like a room finally furnished. He asked if I wanted coffee and I said yes without hesitation. Standing there, watching the city wake in a wash of pale gold, something shifted. Saying yes felt less like surrender and more like choosing.

 

“Yes,” I said, and then, lighter, “Yes, boyfriend.” He grinned that smile that had been quietly building between us since the first time he laughed at my bad joke, and kissed me again — not the urgent kind but the steady kind that says I’m here.

 

The sun climbed, the coffee line behind us groaned awake, and life folded back into its usual shape: emails, errands, clothes that need washing, bills. The world wasn’t fixed. My inbox still pinged and my company still had seatless chairs in the corner. But there was a small, fierce clarity I hadn’t had in months: some things were worth the unsteady, awkward work of leaning toward them. I wrapped my arm through his and we walked toward a coffee shop that smelled of roasted beans and possibility.