I didn’t finish my third book this month

I’ve missed typing into the void, where I am somehow getting visitors from China of all places. Ni hao, I guess. It’s the last day of the first month of 2026. This morning, I headed to the cemetery with my brothers to pay our parents a visit. My mother has been dead for 18 years now. Has it really been that long? It seems like only yesterday when she would be sitting in her place at the dining table, her tea cup with a compartment for the bag always present. Now I sit alone, sometimes across my brother. Have I mentioned we’ve switched to brown rice? I haven’t bought bacon since April of last year. (I still eat it. We just don’t stock it at home anymore.) I’ve been filling in my 2025 highlights, so weekends have been spent reading journal entries and looking over monthly schedules. Who did I meet up with? What did I eat? Where did I go?

I always say this at the beginning of the year. I promise myself that I’ll document more often. And I always fall off the habit. I only wrote here 2 times last year. But the good thing is, I’ve been writing elsewhere every day (more or less). (Another) promise I made back in September. An unwritten contract between myself and my words. Because while I have been reading, I know that if I am ever to write that book in my head, I need to keep writing.

2025 was a bit slow going with reading. I simply let my phone take over all of my free time. First thing in the morning and last thing before bed was my TikTok fyp on autoscroll. Terrible, I know. But this month, I’ve set up an old DIY traveler’s notebook to hold a few refills. One where I try to doodle something as often as I can remember. One where I just stick tags of shit I shop (haha). And another that holds memories of each month. I finished April 2025 today. I remembered spring in Tokyo, where we visited so many quaint towns. My favorites were Kamakura, Daikanyama, Nakameguro, and Shimokitazawa. As for the ones I saved paper bits for from all of my trips since 2024, who knows when I’ll start those. But yes, reading. I’m still reading.

I finished two books this month. Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid and Heart the Lover by Lily King. Malibu Rising reminded me a little bit about me and my brothers (even if our parents are not celebrities, haha). When Nina says she misses her mother, I knew exactly what she meant. I try not to think about it often but when I do, it still hurts my heart a little, knowing my mother—and now my father, too—won’t ever be at any of my milestones. If I get married (I won’t), I won’t have parents to walk me down the aisle. I won’t ever know if my mom would’ve loved Can This Love Be Translated? or if my dad would’ve watched Roja or whatever it was that replaced Ang Probinsiyano. So even if I sit in traffic for practically 3 hours only to stand over my parents’ graves for 30 minutes or so, I do it. So I can tell them about the things—big and small—that are going on in my life. It’s the closest thing I’ll get to having them present.

Heart the Lover was heartbreaking in the best possible way. The last time I felt this way about a book was when I read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin). Oh to be able to capture the grief, love, and loss in a few thousand words. What a gift. I think about friendship a lot and how they never stay the same. Sure, you have friends who stay forever but as you each go through your own histories, it also shapes your relationship with each other. Sometimes, we don’t even realize we fall out of touch with friends without really meaning to. Who forgot to reply? Who stopped coming to dinners? And as I’ve grown older, I’ve accepted that this is just how life is. There’s nobody to blame. Everyone is always just trying to get by, trying to make it through the day even. But when it matters, the people who matter will always make their way back to you.

The book I’m currently reading is a bit strange. Well, no, a lot strange. I guess I’ll write about it next month when I finally finish it.