I Am Going to Miss This

Look around! Your life is happening.

I am going to miss the breakfasts we cook atop a little gaslit stove¹, whites sweating and yolks breaking beneath milk-mustard shelves that remind me of an old film, the vegetables from the farm down south we receive every Monday and the specific brand of bread we buy that toasts to a perfect crunch. I am going to miss the family of foliage that started from a single leaf, colorful pots bursting with green, vines traversing life around white, sapphire, and teal walls, bottles filled with roots that look like a million flying phoenixes. I am going to miss the solar pride that nestles like a nut in my heart, rich with nourishment and satisfying to the core, whenever I find myself in a group of friends speaking another language, singing along to songs I did not grow up with but that generate a kind of contact nostalgia, sharing snow-cold beers with candied rims, biting into pillowcases of corn and fried circles of flour, pork skin, and barbacoa, the cheese fighting back at every bite, sprouted in the feeling: this is home, too.

I am going to miss being in the drama of today, concerned with this specific breed of uncertainty, wondering what it is I should do in this part of my life: finish the book, find a new job, finick over the idea of making content, doing this or being that. I am going to miss not knowing whether or not we should move, whether or not moving is a good idea, because it will seem silly—joyful, even—to consider that we were so concerned with knowing: knowing what is right, knowing what to do, knowing where to go. I am going to miss being here, wherever here is, wherever here was, before the here changed, before we decided what was right, what to do, and where to go.

I am going to miss the shirts I wore every day. The simple green one that Mijael told me highlights the dew of my skin, the soft, purple sweater that feels as if I am disappearing into a cloud when I toss it around my arms, the blue one and its fuzzy decal of a small Korean dog. I am going to miss the color of my hair, the shape of my body, and the face I see in the mirror.

I am going to miss the songs I listen to every day, the automatic and overplayed playlist Alexa resumes at default, the bell of the trash truck that arrives when it wants to and the silk hum of a Sunday when the traffic outside dissipates to the songs of birds, branches, and a temperate breeze that sometimes reminds us this city was first a valley. I am going to miss the rain, the way this mazed metropolis seems to grow from a generous downpour like a freshly fertilized grove of trees when the damp recedes to light, when the blue comes out and warmth reigns uninterrupted.

I am going to miss Everything, the great everything that constitutes now, and yet, I do not always remember to study it in detail. I am still learning how to be inside of Everything before it rushes past us, becomes back then, last year, when we lived in Mexico, when she was here or he was here or they lived down the street—the glossy, colorful past. The interiors we lived in, the dishes we chipped, the things we thought about, talked about, and danced towards like birds, chirping, chattering, singing the same song no matter how specific this time feels, no matter how crazy this generation is, no matter what day it is on the calendar.

The everything I am going to miss includes being myself—thirty, in Mexico, too full from drinking three lattes and splurging on a set of inari sushi from the Japanese market down the street—being, in all its infinity. I am going to look back at this screenshot of a psyche when I am older, by a month or a year or ten, and think: Wow, there I was, living.

It is so easy to get excited about the future that the cliche human habit becomes living for it, as opposed to living for ourselves here, in the now—which, despite having become a marketing cliche of its own—is all that we have. So we learn to meditate, to journal, to find gratitude in what happened today, because noticing is not guaranteed, rather, it is a muscle, a skill, an art of living, even and especially when the living feels tough.

All of this is not to say that thinking about the future is a fatal flaw. In fact, we need to be able to construct future visions to feel hope in the present, the fuel for all of the things that living requires. And lately, thinking about the future has been a powerful practice for paying attention to the present.

–

When Mijael and I travelled to Japan in March, I fell in love with the country all over again: Tokyo, Kyoto, the mountains, the sea. As we stumbled around the metro and indulged in glimpses of another life, another neighborhood, another city, I imagined the two of us growing something greater than a glimpse, moving to Japan in our fifties or sixties or seventies, learning the language, visiting the countryside, adopting new customs like rice and fish for breakfast, traveling to nearby countries for the holidays—Vietnam, Singapore, China—and sitting at a park for an hour, watching the world go by as the two of us grow older. San Francisco, New York, Japan, Mexico, there are many places that I imagine us being in, many backgrounds that emerge, pixel by pixel, thought by thought, when I consider the chapters of our lives that we have yet to live. When I imagine these chapters, they are usually saturated with precious details—light, color, and joy—as opposed to the mundane to-do’s of planning, or the fear and angst of doubt.

I think about the light in Japan, the bright, wide, pastel blue painting the canvas of our lives. The soft, aerial chime of Japanese and mild hum of well-designed public infrastructure joining the soundtrack of us. A wooden table on the floor, much like the one we have now, but with foods of a different habit: sembei, sake, onigiri. Brands from the store we will come to know like the ones we’ve come to know here. Favorite cafés and overhyped restaurants. The likes and dislikes of a city, of a country, of a culture.

These precious details remind me of the chapter I am living in right now, too: all of the details I have come to take for granted because they are all around me, and for some reason, it always feels as though what is around us will always be there, like words in a book we have intended to read for years, when, in reality, what is around us is always changing, and it is impossible to turn back the page. How many pages did we pass up reading, thinking it was more important to get to the end?

Perhaps it is a generational curse: The tendency to forget where we are, to lose the art of noticing. We grew up in an environment that trained us to focus on what is ahead: school, then university, then job, then career, with a magnificent yield of production, achievement, and creative realization somewhere, ideally everywhere and always, in the in-between. We wake up to screens that display a million alternate realities. We see our peers and idols living here, doing that, entering another period of realization, abundance, creation, generation, invention, reinvention—the word “next” seems synonymous with today’s young people. I do not think I know a single friend of mine who has thought: I will live here for the rest of my life; I will do this for the rest of my life. On the contrary, we are always thinking about what is next.

I suppose all I am trying to say is that every little detail is precious, if only for the fact that it is never ours to keep. At some point, we will find ourselves with different details—different smells, faces, items, plants, things to worry about and things that disappear the worrying—and, at some point, we will each find ourselves with no details at all.

It feels a little bit silly to be writing this, like: oH maH GAwd! EvERayTHANG is SOO prECiOUs—especially in the context of current events. However, I feel as though it is the human condition to continue to need to say this, to want to say this, because it is impossible to live in the art of noticing, in the rich joy of the details of our lives, without interruption. It is impossible to live in the electric gratitude of what we have, who we know, and all that is around us as a constant. However, we can feel that electricity more often and more clearly the more we remind ourselves that it exists, that it is the current of life itself, and if there is anything that can help us live with joy—despite everything going wrong, going weird, or going different than we expected—it is our ability to tap into our lives right now, to notice and to feel, and we all deserve that.

So I am here, saying it again: This, too, is a precious chapter of our lives. I hope we live inside of it before we remember it. ☷

Thanks for reading Sleepover! In the spirit of accessibility, this newsletter will always be offered for free. Please consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support the things I create—with and beyond this project.

---

With love,

Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane

Join the party on: Instagram 🪩 TikTok 🪩 YouTube 🪩 Bluesky 🪩 X 🪩 Website

Through intentional content delivered to your inbox, Sleepover contemplates how to live with more joy, presence and compassion. Every other Thursday. ☼ ☷

1. By “we,” I mean Mijael