Stories
Small kindnesses.
Short first-person notes from between the days — the kind of caring that does not need much room, kept beside the journal and underneath why kindness.
August 5, 2026
A Tuesday on the windowsill
The basil had gone dry again sometime in the early afternoon. I noticed on the way to the kettle. Half a cup of water, the small pot turned a quarter turn so the lean faced the light — the kind of thing that takes less than a minute and somehow reorders the next hour.
I stood there for a moment afterwards, watching the dark patch soak in. I have been thinking about kindness as that — not a gesture, not a sentence, but the act of turning back toward a small living thing you have already noticed once. The basil does not know I am tired. The basil does not know the week ahead. It only registers the water, and then the light, and then it leans back into both.
Some Tuesdays I would like to be that — attentive to the next small object in front of me, without commentary, without a story I am trying to build around it. The kind of caring that does not require the caring one to be in good shape first.
August 10, 2026
The bus driver
He asked how my week was going before I had finished putting the fare in. Not a perfunctory ask — the kind where the person actually waits for the answer. I told him honestly that I did not know yet, that I hadn't decided what shape the days would take.
He said, with the lightest grin, that most weeks started that way and that it was usually fine by Wednesday. Then he asked where I was headed, and I told him the train station, and he said there was a quicker one if I walked two streets north — about ten minutes saved, and a view of the canal on the way.
It was a four-minute exchange. Nothing consequential. The view of the canal was, in fact, completely ordinary. But I have been carrying around the small surprise of being treated as a person on a Tuesday morning commute — the same surprise I think children feel when an adult bends down to their level, of which there must be a name, and which I am not yet sure how to give back.