Modern Love

Love & Other Emotional Crimes

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  • The Art of Not Running (Even When You Really, Really Want To)

    Yesterday, I was seriously considering a full reset. A new phone, a new number, and preferably, a one-way ticket to somewhere tropical for three months of pretending none of this exists.

    I thought about deactivating all my accounts, getting rid of everything in my apartment that reminded me of last year (including you, the Ingwerer bottle I’ve somehow turned into décor), cutting my hair, and finally throwing out that jacket that spent a little too long in his apartment and still somehow smells like his closet.

    I even daydreamed about disappearing somewhere remote enough that I wouldn’t run into a single one of his clones. Because they’re everywhere, including my dreams. 

    I wanted to stop dreaming, actually, so he wouldn’t show up there either. And when that failed, I did what every modern woman does in moments of delusional empowerment: I considered getting on dating apps. You know, distract myself with those thrilling conversations; “Where are you from?” and “Why did you move here?” Riveting.

    I was hyperventilating at the idea that no matter where I’d go or what I’d do, I wasn’t going to be able to escape or run. Because I tried that. I have been trying that for months. It was easy at first, with time it only got harder as things kept intensifying.

    But underneath all that noise and running and blocking and deleting, there’s this love. This irrational, uninvited, unexplainable love that refuses to leave. It isn’t logical, and honestly, I don’t want it to be. Because how can it be?

    Then yesterday, on my way to work, just when I was thinking of more ways to run, I found a single piece of confetti from Fasnacht (nearly three years old) hiding in the pocket of the jacket I wore that night. If I remember correctly, I put it there on purpose. Because that night, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see him again. I wasn’t ready then, but I wanted to remember, because somehow, I already knew he was special. And just like that, that tiny piece of confetti softened me. It made me stop running.

    Later that evening, I put on a random episode of The Big Bang Theory. Howard gave Bernadette a star necklace.

    I used to wear a star necklace. I remembered the girl who found hers in a mall in Bulgaria, texted him a photo, and said, “Look what I found! I finally found one!” I hadn’t worn it in months because it reminded me of him. But I also remembered I loved star necklaces long before I ever loved him. So I put it on again.

    This morning, I woke up with love in my heart, not for him, but for life. For the first time in a while, I didn’t want to run. I just wanted to stay. Because when I run, I feel negative, joyless, and disconnected. When I stay, when I accept that this thing, whatever it is, exists beyond my control, I feel peace.

    Maybe I’ve been the one giving meaning to the reminders, seeing them as signs to flee instead of moments to feel. Maybe they’re not there to haunt me, maybe they’re just reminders of something that mattered. Something that doesn’t have to be erased to stop hurting.

    Because every time I run, the reminders multiply, until they finally soften me again. It’s a cycle I know too well, even if I don’t understand it. And maybe I don’t need to. Maybe acceptance isn’t understanding. Maybe it’s just saying it is what it is, and I’m okay with it. 

  • One Minute to Another

    One minute you’re riding your skateboard with friends at 2 a.m., feeling like the main character of a coming-of-age movie, and the next, you’re staring at the moon, wondering what kind of simulation we signed up for that gave us the perfect sun–moon dynamic. The divine masculine and feminine. God and the Universe. Yin and yang. Or, as I like to call it, cosmic couples therapy.

    One minute you’re finally back on the hiking trail after months of injury, diving into a cold mountain lake like a reborn sea creature, and the next, you’re sitting on a hill, with hip pain from the walk uphill and lower back pain from your newly discovered herniated disc, realizing you’re not as indestructible as you thought just because you’re “young.”

    One minute you’re dozing off in the car, half-delirious from three hours of sleep, and the next, you’re wide awake, staring out the window thinking, none of this looks real. The trees. The sky. The fact that we all just… exist. It’s almost suspicious.

    I think I live for moments like that. The oxymorons. The sudden switches. The whiplash between “I am having 3D fun” and “life is a miracle, there is harmony, balance and mirroring in every situation, is this even real?”

    Because maybe that’s the beauty of being human: one minute you’re vibing with the universe, and the next, you’re just vibing with gravity.

  • On Running (but not like that)

    I’ve always loved running. Not the actual 5K-with-perfect-hair kind of running (although, yes, that too), but the escapist kind. Mentally. Emotionally. Spiritually. The Olympic-level sport of “nope-ing” out of whatever I don’t want to deal with. Ever since I was a kid, I could always find an exit sign. And honestly? It was more fun that way.

    Now my Instagram, right on cue, because algorithm telepathy is real, is feeding me endless posts about “the only way out is through.”

    Cool. Cute. Inspirational. Also: rude.

    You can tell that to the part of me that’s currently hyperventilating at the mere idea of not running. The part that knows there’s nowhere to go but still wants to book a one-way ticket to Hawaii under a fake name.

    I’ve tried every escape I was allowed to try. Life itself blocked the rest. I’ve literally done the emotional equivalent of pushing every emergency exit door and pulling every fire alarm. Still here. Still me. Still not escaped.

    But facing what I need to face? That feels like losing control. Like shedding all the parts of me I’ve been clinging to like old band t-shirts that don’t fit anymore but still “spark joy.” I’m not ready. And yet I know life will keep throwing bricks of truth at my head until I stop ducking.

    So, yeah, apparently I do have a choice: delay it or face it. Am I thrilled to discover that disappearing for three years to travel the world like some kind of Eat-Pray-Ghost is not an actual option? Absolutely not.

    So cheers to whoever came up with “the only way out is through.” I know it wasn’t just one person. It’s clearly the universal tagline of everyone who’s ever had a shred of self-awareness and realized they can’t out-jog their own life.

  • Grief: The Skateboard, the Shopping Cart, and the Almost-Said “I Love Yous”

    Grief is weird. One minute you’re ugly-crying over your dog who just crossed the rainbow bridge, the next you’re staring at a €20 voucher wondering if it’s a sign from the universe to impulse-buy another skateboard. (Spoiler: it was only enough for a massage gun. Bank account saved. For now.)

    We lost our sweet doggo – the happiest little soul – and even though I knew it was coming, apparently nobody is ever ready. I still think he’s going to come bounding around the corner. But grief doesn’t just arrive with tears. It also arrives with random bursts of “YOLO.” Like ignoring your doctor’s orders and hopping on your board with a busted hip because apparently the Kübler-Ross stages of grief now include skateboarding.

    And then there’s the other kind of impulsivity. The kind where you suddenly want to call your parents and say “I love you” like some soft-focus movie montage. But the words stick in your throat as if you’re trying to confess a crime instead of basic human affection. We literally talk every day. They know I love them. Why is it so hard to say it out loud?

    It got me thinking: why do I only use “sweetie,” “dear,” and “honey” when I’m being condescending? Why do I find people who are emotionally constipated with words of affirmation so irresistible? (Probably because we’re both sitting there thinking “feelings are cringe” while simultaneously bursting with them.)

    I thought I’d grown out of that. But then I remembered: it took me nine months with one person to choke out “I love you as a person.” Not “I’m in love with you.” Not “I love-love you.” Just “I love you as a person.” It wasn’t even romantic. It was pure, universal, unconditional love. It was also about as emotionally risky as streaking through a board meeting.

    So here I am. One special dog’s unexpected passing away triggered a full-scale existential audit: an almost-skateboard purchase, an almost-confession to my family, and a Spotify wormhole that made me feel like I was watching the last five years of my life as a movie.

    And maybe that’s the weirdest part about grief: it’s not just sadness. It’s a mirror. It shows you the shopping carts you fill to patch the hole in your heart, the words you almost say, and the love are learning how to give without drowning the other person in it but somehow still feel.

  • The Milk Moustache Dilemma

    Drinking a glass of cold, full-fat milk right after eating milk chocolate logically sounds pointless. But it feels like a necessity, like the milkier it is, the better. I never understood the reluctance adults seem to have toward milk, as if drinking it past the age of 12 is somehow an act of rebellion. Somewhere along the line, most adults traded in milk moustaches for coffee cups, lattes, and matcha. But who decided joy was supposed to come with a caffeine kick?

    At some point, some people bought into the idea that adulthood should taste bitter. Black coffee at 7 a.m., red wine at 7 p.m. as if seriousness could be sipped. Maybe milk feels embarrassing because it’s too pure, too playful, too “unserious.” Maybe it isn’t the milk itself most adults avoid, but the vulnerability of being seen enjoying something so simple.

    Or maybe milk is just a personality test: if you’re still happily drinking it at 40, chances are you’ve kept a childlike innocence intact. If you’ve sworn it off, maybe you’ve accidentally mistaken taking life seriously for being a grown-up and your playful side has already jumped out the nearest window. 

    So the question isn’t whether milk is childish. It’s whether we’ve mistaken self-denial for sophistication. Maybe adulthood isn’t giving things up at all. Maybe it’s letting yourself keep them, enjoying all the simple options life has to offer, even if it leaves you with a moustache.

  • Infinite Mirrors

    The universe is basically a very dramatic mirror. What you see depends entirely on the angle you’re holding your life at, the filter on your mood, and whether you’ve slept enough. History repeats itself – especially if you haven’t done your homework – and sometimes the echoes are so literal they feel like bad rewrites of a play you thought you’d left backstage.

    Case study: dogs.

    My grandparents had a husky. I named her Happy because, if you’re going to rescue something, you might as well give it optimism as a name. She arrived like an accident of fate, not a purchase. Later we had a tan hunting dog who refused to leave us that we had no other choice but to take him in. One Christmas, Happy nearly died. I was a teen, and in that small, ridiculous human way, I used my Christmas wish on her healing. Months of illness turned to recovery, and she got a third chance at life; rescued off the street, loved, and then loved again.

    Fast-forward years. Another husky rescue; Alex. He already had a name. Another tan hunting dog that successfully got himself adopted because he refused to leave. Alex got attacked. Untreated wounds became infection; he fell ill. It stopped being coincidence and started to look like a pattern; a repeating riff on a melody I recognized but had no sheet music for.

    At my parents’ place, another rescue who found us by herself, injured a leg during the same patch I was limping. This March, apparently, was Injury Season. Or perhaps it’s simply that the world hums in patterns, and sometimes the hum reaches everyone within earshot.

    Look at the weather. Stormy weeks mirror stormy moods. Clear nights feel like reconciliations with life. Stars pop on like tiny agreement notices, saying, Yes. You are still part of this. Nature mirrors our bodies, our feelings, our odd little crises. We borrow metaphors from it because evolution handed us the original instruction manual: watch a river and you’ll understand flow; watch a tree and you’ll learn rootedness.

    We are connected: not in a platitudey, inspirational-poster way, but in a slow, undeniable choreography of cause and echo. If you stop for even a minute, and you start noticing, you’ll find more mirrors than you have in your bathroom cabinet.

    Sometimes the reflections are gentle: a breeze on a balcony that makes you remember lying on your childhood roof naming cloud animals (fox! swan! very questionable whale). Sometimes they are cinematic: you feel like you’re watching your life from a balcony above it: a passive observer in a movie you wrote but forgot your lines for. Those dreamlike moments are not glitches. They’re the universe handing you a high-def still of the pattern: pause, study, understand.

    There are people who minimize mirrors in their life (metaphorically and literally, some of them hate selfies). I get it. Maybe mirrors are inconvenient if you’re not ready to adjust your hair or your narrative. But pretending mirrors aren’t there doesn’t stop the reflection. It just postpones the conversation.

    So what if we accepted that we come from invisible roots above and below that tie us to the soil, the stars, and everything in between? What if the planet is one enormous organism and we’re polite bacteria? (Philosophy aside: I like the imagery.) If we stop treating daily life like a to-do list and start reading it like a novel, there’s more meaning than we usually allow ourselves to see between the lines.

    The point isn’t mystical showboating. It’s noticing: the feather on your path; the way a dog’s eye holds you and remembers you months later; the way your limp matches other people’s (and your parents’ dog’s that lives 1’500km away) ; the way a chance conversation solves a problem you didn’t know you had. These are small miracles disguised as coincidences.

    So maybe the work is simple and impossible at the same time: observe more, judge less, and loosen your grip on the wheel. Float a little. Let life look back at you. If dreams have been whispering the script all along, perhaps reality is only waiting for you to show up and read it.

    And if you’re still unsure. Try the dog test. Rescue one, watch how history and heartbeat rearrange themselves, and then tell me the universe isn’t excellent at mirrors.

  • Labels and More Labels

    Twin flames. Soulmates. Lightworkers. Starseeds. DFs, DMs… The internet has turned into a spiritual alphabet soup. The deeper you dig, the more labels you find. It’s basically like googling a headache and suddenly discovering you’ve got a brain tumor.

    Humans have this relentless need to label everything. Introvert, extrovert, ambivert, and now ortrovert? Healers, psychics, mediums… At some point, it starts sounding less like self-discovery and more like an HR department from another galaxy.

    But here’s the kicker: some connections don’t need labels. They’re just it. I’m me, you’re you, we already have names. Do we really need to slap on a nametag too? At the end of the day, we’re all just particles colliding in the same human experiment.

    And then there’s the “one great love” theory. Some say you only get one. Some say two. Either way, it sounds suspiciously like the rules of a board game no one agreed to play. The truth? Great love isn’t always fireworks and epic ballads. Sometimes it’s subtle. A smile you didn’t expect. Healing you didn’t know you needed. Or finally knowing what you want in life after a five-year detour through chaos, heartbreak, and questionable decisions.

    So maybe the point isn’t the labels at all. We don’t call ourselves surfers after one wave, or hikers after one trail. Our hobbies don’t define us, so why should our labels? Especially when some people collect them like medieval kings collected titles “Duke of This, Lord of That, Keeper of the Gridlines, and Occasional Reiki Practitioner.”

    Maybe the real trick is to embody who we are, let it evolve, and not take any of it too seriously. To stop over-analyzing and start floating; like we’re drifting in a river, letting the current take us.

    Because at the end of the day, labels may try to tell us what we are. But only we get to decide who. And in the end, no label ever defined us better than this: human, just trying to figure it out. 

  • Everything I Judged; I Found Myself Doing

    They say you either die a hero, or live long enough to become the person you once judged.

    Case in point: I once joked, “only psychos don’t blow out birthday candles.” Fast forward to this year: there I was, staring at a cake, realizing how utterly pointless it felt to blow air on dessert for the sake of tradition. Psychotic, apparently, by my own definition.

    Then there was his “boarding the plane last” strategy. I rolled my eyes, called it selfish, and swore I’d never. Spoiler: I did. And I loved it. Nothing says character growth like casually strutting onto a plane at the last possible second, middle seat and all, like you own the airline.

    Late replies? Same story. “Time isn’t linear”? Don’t get me started. Last year, his brain broke mine. Now, puzzle pieces are clicking into place like I’m living inside a cosmic IKEA manual. The universe basically handed me an age-gap reality check: I wasn’t too young for him: except, yeah, I kind of was.

    Back then, I thought self-awareness and journaling about my triggers meant I had mastered life. Meanwhile, he had this maddening “I don’t make other people’s problems my problems” approach that I labeled selfish. Turns out, that was boundaries. And boundaries, as it turns out, are what keep you from becoming a human vacuum cleaner for everyone else’s emotions.

    I made everything so dramatic. Like I was starring in a one-woman play called The Tragedy of My Twenties. Everything was dire. Urgent. Until life – and him – handed me the one lesson I never wanted: patience, (and other things.) 

    Now, I look back and laugh at my immaturity. I mean, your early 20s are basically a crash course in taking yourself way too seriously. He even wrote “for the rest of your (adult) life” on my birthday card, and I got offended. As if adulthood was optional. As if growing up was somehow his fault.

    The truth? My old self didn’t go willingly. She was dragged out of me kicking and screaming, and I had no choice but to let her go. And thank God she left, because the version of me writing this now wouldn’t trade places with her for anything.

    If I knew then what I know now, I’d treat him differently. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the cosmic joke is that you can’t know until you know.

    And when you finally know, you can only laugh.

  • The “Tsch Tsch” of Enlightenment


    Last year, I mocked a billboard for grilled meats. “Tsch tsch,” it read, trying to seduce me with the sound of sizzling. As if I was Gordon Ramsay. As if I had a Weber collection in my non-existent backyard.

    Every time I walked past it, I rolled my eyes like the world’s most judgmental art director: “Really? That’s the best they came up with?”

    And then… this summer, during one of my grilling evenings at the park that I ever so look forward to, just around the time the billboard ads had made a come-back, winking at me… I heard it. Tsch tsch. Suddenly, it wasn’t an ad anymore. It was a cosmic truth. I had been enlightened by a sausage.

    That was the moment I realized: most of life’s great understandings sneak up on us like this. They sit right under our noses – which, ironically, we literally can’t see without a mirror – until one day, something clicks.

    Until then, life hides its answers in plain sight, just out of reach. And no matter how many people point at it, explain it, or warn you about it, you won’t see it until your moment arrives.

    So I began to wonder; how much of life do we silently judge in others, dismissing what hasn’t yet clicked for us? And how much compassion could we hold if we remembered that everyone’s “click” has its own timing?

    And maybe that’s the point: we all learn differently in our own different timings. Some people can just take advice. I, apparently, need to be charred in the fires of direct experience.

    So maybe the secret isn’t to roll our eyes at other people’s “not-yet-clicked” moments, or judge situations through our own limited perspective; the one that might only make sense to us later. Maybe it’s not to form such strong opinions in the first place, since half the things we swear by today will sound either naïve or too harsh tomorrow. Maybe the secret is to accept that enlightenment can sound like sizzling meat, look like a bad breakup, or arrive disguised as a metaphor we never asked for.


    Maybe the real wisdom is this: life isn’t a straight line of lessons. It’s a series of sizzling sounds, waiting for us to finally hear them.

    After all, one person’s “Tsch tsch” is another person’s “Ah-ha.”

  • When the Unexpected Shows Up

    Vacations are supposed to be a break from reality. Sun, sea, slow mornings, coffee at the beach whilst the dogs go on their morning walk. But sometimes, reality doesn’t get the memo.

    Take Alex, our sweet, beach-loving dog. He usually runs straight for the sand like he’s auditioning for Baywatch. This time? After his attack, he’s limping, in pain, and suddenly the beach – his favorite place – doesn’t interest him anymore. And because he’s not going, neither are we, and neither are the other doggos (sorry sweeties, it’s not fair to him.) 

    It’s funny how one event, one accident, can shift the entire shape of an experience. The vacation stopped being about me unwinding and started being about him healing. And oddly enough, I don’t resent it. Not even a little.

    Because maybe that’s the real truth: when things are going great, life always sneaks in with a test. An interruption. A flare-up. Something to remind us that bliss isn’t about nothing going wrong; it’s about how we adapt when it does.

    Instead of the beach, there are quiet mornings. Instead of salty swims, gentle cuddles with Alex. Instead of our plan, life’s plan. And honestly? It wasn’t worse. Just… different.

    So maybe vacations, like relationships, aren’t about chasing the perfect picture. Maybe they’re about holding space for the unexpected, and still finding joy in what remains.

    Because sometimes the universe cancels your beach day. And sometimes it replaces it with healing love in Alex’s resting spots in the garden.