i braced for a year that would swallow me whole. i had signed up for the kind of job that takes your evenings as quiet collateral, and i made peace with the trade before it even started. so when march tipped into april, then april into may, i didn't know what to do with the surplus. the work stayed manageable. the weekends stayed mine. the nights kept opening up. you can prepare for a thing being hard. you can't quite prepare for it being easier than you expected.

i thought i'd care more about the job, too. i'm fine at it. i like the people (enough). but it doesn't pull at the part of me that used to want it most. that part is awake now, looking around for somewhere else to go.

a few weeks ago i was at lincoln center, alone, after what consulting calls a beach day — a day with no work to do. there's a small grass terrace on the roof of a nearby restaurant and i found myself sitting on it with my legs stretched out, watching the plaza below soften into its slower self. people met friends and tilted their faces toward each other. someone laughed too loud at something a date said. the fountain caught the last of the light and held it there, glittering, for longer than seemed fair.

what i kept noticing, sitting up there, was how easy it would be to miss all of this.

i sat up there thinking how good it would be, eventually, to write something here. to put words down somewhere quiet while the city kept moving without me. the last time i'd written anything for the pure fun of it was sixth grade, a fantasy story about a life inside minecraft, written with my friends, taken very seriously by all of us. somewhere between then and now i had stopped reaching for words to make sense of my own life and started using them only to perform a job. that was the first time this, whatever this is, felt like a real idea instead of a passing one.

nyc was supposed to solve the social part. people warned me it wouldn't and i didn't believe them. but you really can be in the densest place in the country and still spend most evenings alone with your own head. that isn't a complaint exactly. it's just the weather i've been writing from.

i've been more reflective than usual lately. some of it is the unexpected time. some of it is a girl i met recently — limerence, as a friend put it: the involuntary state of being mentally fixated on someone, turning the volume up on every other thought you were already having. either way, the noise in my head got loud enough that it needed somewhere to land.

i watch college friends disappear into investment banking, into routines that sometimes ask a hundred hours a week of them, and i don't think they're wrong. they've made trades i can see the logic in but can't make myself want. i pity the version of myself that would look up at thirty, blink, and find that he had paid for the last decade in installments he barely noticed making — a quiet life of weekends he doesn't remember, friendships he let thin, a body that started to ache in places he hadn't earned yet.

i've always been growth-oriented, which is a slightly embarrassing way to put it. i have a tattoo of a flower for it, which is a more embarrassing way still. but the truth underneath the embarrassment is that i want to be a more thoughtful person at thirty than i am at twenty-two, and i don't think that happens by accident. it happens by paying attention. and writing, for me, is one of the few reliable ways to make myself pay attention.

so. this. a place to notice things. somewhere to put the noise.