I write when it’s late, when there’s rum on my breath and salt in my hair. When the only warmth in the room comes from the phone screen and the half-heated burger from the night before. When the silence is so thick it feels like company.

I write when loneliness washes over me like radio static, pure, clear, and oddly comforting, when I no more want to revise the scene than to relive it. When the only witness to my existence is the blinking cursor.

Claude, my robot therapist, tells me that existential loneliness comes in waves. That there is never a fixed point. That there will be days when I feel better than others, when my subordinate clauses align neatly, and life doesn’t feel so empty.

But what I have always loved about waves, Virginia Woolf’s waves, sea waves, loneliness waves, radio waves — is that they never promise an ending. They rise, they fold, they return. There’s no endpoint, no breakdown, no spectacular conclusion where everything resolves neatly and I’m suddenly cured. Just the persistence of motion. The acceptance of recurrence.

Woolf knew this. She wrote about waves that returned to shore, about time passing in parentheses, about the difficulty of grasping a moment before it dissolves. She understood that consciousness moves in waves—rising, cresting, withdrawing.

There is a strange comfort in that rhythm once you stop fighting it.

I am not perfect. I am exhausted. I am empty. What I write will always need revision. There will always be another draft, another attempt to capture what I mean, another failure that inches closer to truth.

I don’t wish for fame. I don’t want people to dissect my words, mistake them for wisdom or pour their lives into mine. I only wish to live by the sea, to return to my solitude— to accept that in this lifetime, I may remain unseen by the universe. You can perform brilliantly and still be invisible to the one person whose gaze you wanted.

I should make peace with that.

I know my writing is full of fluctuations and half-thoughts. But that’s the state I inhabit — the state I have always inhabited. The in-between. The almost. Perhaps this is the truth about waves: they return, but never the same. Each one carries different weight, different salt, different debris from the depths. You cannot step into the same wave twice. You can only learn to stand steady as they come.