late twenties.

Somewhere along the way, I turned 27 this year.

At twenty-three you can still pretend you’re experimenting; the world nods along when you change jobs, cities, or hairstyles overnight. By twenty-eight the questions sharpen: Are you serious about this career? Are you settling down? The same uncertainties that once felt adventurous start to feel like deadlines. Friends scatter into marriages, mortgages, and migrations, and you realise the group chat can’t hold everyone’s lives together. It isn’t bad exactly—just heavier, a little lonelier, and far less forgiving of drift.

Life never simplifies on schedule. At twenty-something or seventy-something, it refuses to be a straight line. It spills into early mornings that smell of coffee and regret, into late nights full of texts we’ll never send.

We collect people like unfinished sentences:some arrive with thunder, stay for a paragraph, and disappear mid-comma.

Others walk quietly beside us for years, and we only realize their weight when the sidewalk ends.

We chase plans: careers, travel, the “right” partner.

But under every plan runs a quiet current of chance—the stranger who teaches us a new word,the city that feels like déjà vu,the heartbreak that rearranges our inner furniture.