Is it safer to understand things than to feel them? Has knowing ever actually protected me, and if it hasn't, why I do still reach for it first? About loving something that can't love you back, and about what knowing does and doesn't do.

You can see the shape of a life, or you can live in it. Written on the descent into Da Nang.

We imagine that history happens to places. But history is just the accumulation of presence. Of nights like this one. Of people who came for ordinary reasons and left traces they never intended to leave.

We are creatures of nested time. Your circadian rhythms follow the sun. You move through seasons no calendar marks. Beneath all this, deep time—evolution, continents drifting—there is pattern, recursion; and recognising this anchors us.