There is a particular kind of quiet at the end of a year.
It has very little to do with silence.
The world remains noisy.
Trains continue to arrive.
Coffee machines continue their important work.
Someone, somewhere, is still answering an email that could have waited until January.
Life has never shown much respect for calendars.
Still, the final days of a year feel different.
Perhaps it is because we have decided they should.
We draw an invisible line through time and stand beside it, looking in both directions.
Behind us, twelve months suddenly become a single thing.
A year.
This is unfair to the year.
It contained mornings we have forgotten completely.
Conversations that changed something.
Journeys that seemed important and turned out not to be.
Small decisions that looked meaningless and quietly rearranged everything that followed.
Reducing all of this to a year feels almost impolite.
Yet we do it.
We look back.
I have spent a surprising amount of time this year looking at cities.
Maps.
Photographs.
Railway stations.
People sitting in cafés.
Doors.
Apparently, I have developed strong opinions about doors.
This was not a goal.
Most useful things rarely begin as goals.
They begin as questions.
Why does one city feel different from another?
What does a person do when nobody believes they are making an important decision?
How much history can a photograph carry before it becomes heavier than the paper?
I do not have answers to most of these questions.
This is encouraging.
Answers tend to close notebooks.
Questions fill them.
Tonight, the room is quiet.
There are notebooks on the desk.
Some organised.
Others operating under a more liberal interpretation of the word.
A map is still open.
A cup of coffee has gone cold.
I should probably move it.
I probably will not.
Nothing is finished.
For once, this does not bother me.
There is a strange pressure to end a year with conclusions.
To understand what happened.
To explain what was learned.
To arrive at midnight carrying a neatly edited version of the previous twelve months.
I have never seen anyone manage this convincingly.
Perhaps a year does not need an ending.
Perhaps it only needs a place to stop.
A quiet room.
An open notebook.
A few questions worth carrying across the line.
The rest can wait.
January has always looked suspiciously confident from a distance.
We will see what it knows.
— D. Vaen