The year closes not with a sound but with a thinning, like breath against cold glass. Days gather themselves into corners, into receipts and wilted calendars, into the residue of things once said and not answered. Time has grown porous. It seeps through me. I find it everywhere: in the pause between steps, in the small ache behind the eyes, in the way afternoon light hesitates before it abandons the room.

I have been counting without numbers. Not the achievements, nor the griefs — those insist on their own arithmetic — but the intervals. The spaces where nothing happened and yet something was decided. A year, I discover, is not a line but a tide that recedes unevenly, leaving behind objects that were never meant to be kept. A sentence begun and never finished. A name that no longer fits in the mouth. The memory of a laugh that seems to belong to someone else.

There is a peculiar intimacy to endings. They draw the world close, compress it. Streets become narrower; voices carry further. I walk through December as though through a house after a party — cups abandoned, a faint sweetness in the air, the sense that joy was here recently and has gone somewhere without explanation. What remains is not sadness exactly, but a listening. A waiting for the walls to speak.

Sometimes I think of the self I was in January, so certain, so loosely assembled. She believed in progress, in the gentle curve of improvement. Now she feels like a letter returned to sender, unopened. The year has written on me anyway: in tiredness, in a new caution of the heart, in the way I no longer rush to fill silences. Silence, I have learned, is not empty. It is crowded with what we cannot make useful.

At night, the mind loosens its grip. Thoughts drift like unmoored boats. There are moments when the question rises — quiet, almost polite — about endurance, about whether the labour of being is an obligation or a choice renewed each morning. I do not answer it. I let it hover, because answers are heavy things and I am already carrying enough.

Yet there are small resistances. The way tea warms the hands. The stubborn persistence of dawn. A sentence that arrives intact, asking to be written. These are not reasons, perhaps, but they are presences. They insist without arguing.

The year stands at the threshold now, shoes on, keys in hand. I watch it go with a feeling I cannot name — part relief, part mourning, part indifference sharpened into attention. What comes next is unwritten. Whether that is mercy or threat depends on how one looks at the blank page.

I close the window. The night remains. So does the possibility that tomorrow will ask again, and that I will answer — not with certainty, but with another step into the room, another breath taken without promise, without refusal.