Temporary Universes
We are strange as human beings.
We build our own universes — small ones — inside little communities, surrounded by just a few people.
They become everything: our safety, our happiness, our routines, our gossip feeders, our anchors.
That is a universe.
And we move through life building more and more of them.
There is the universe of work — colleagues, inside jokes, coffee breaks, small rituals that only make sense there.
There is the universe of friends.
The universe of home — neighbours you recognise but don’t really know, the supermarket where you already know which aisle is cheaper, where everything is.
There is the street with restaurants.
Your favourite restaurant.
Your café.
Your bar.
The person you keep seeing at the gym.
The corner shop that feels familiar.
Each of these things matters deeply — but only for a certain period of your life.
Until it doesn’t.
Until we move on.
Until we leave.
Until a new job happens.
A breakup.
A move to another country.
Moving in with someone we love.
And suddenly, we are building another universe somewhere else.
Still, we carry the old ones with us.
We keep them in our hearts and in our minds, as if they were once everything.
As if we were everything to them too.
We dream nostalgically about those periods.
About who we were back then.
About the people we loved.
About how life felt.
And we ask ourselves:
Do we miss that version of ourselves?
Or do we miss the whole picture?
Or is it the picture itself that created that version of us?
We hold these universes with deep feeling.
And somehow, we believe they are frozen in time.
That because they were once important, we can lock them somewhere inside us — untouched, waiting.
Until the day we try to touch them again.
And we realise — painfully — that the world has moved on.
And we can’t catch it anymore.
Even the most honest friendships.
The deepest connections.
The smallest daily rituals.
They move.
They evolve.
They continue without us.
And life teaches us — without asking — that nothing stays the same.
We will never again be the person we are right now.
With these exact feelings.
These exact people.
These exact dreams.
You will still be you.
But nothing will ever be the same.
As someone who has moved a lot, I had to learn this again and again.
Most of the time with a heavy heart.
I tried to keep things in place.
To nurture them.
To protect them.
To believe they would still be there when I returned.
And then I returned —
only to realise that someone else had built their universe there.
We don’t own places.
We don’t own friendships.
We don’t own people.
We can only live them.
Cherish them.
Be grateful that they happened.
But nothing stays.
Our ego tells us we were the centre of that universe.
Just to later realise — we were never the centre.
We were only passing through.
Stardust.
Moments in time.
And maybe we shouldn’t wish for anything to remain still.
As much as we want to hold these moments, they need to move — to make space for new people, new stories, new lives.
Nothing remains the same.
And nothing ever should.
Life is movement.
Life is beautiful.
And life is painful too.
The abundance of feelings — gaining and losing — can be overwhelming.
They come together. Always.
And it is our responsibility to feel both.
To honour both.
To keep old versions of ourselves gently — in memory.
And to let them go — in order to become.
I once thought I had something special —
only to realise it was special because it was temporary.
Trying to hold onto friendships, places, people —
it’s an illusion.
Even the strongest connections change.
Time reshapes everything.
And maybe this is not something to fight.
Maybe it is something to bow to.
To accept with tenderness.
We are lucky to live at all.
So be thankful for the good moments —
and for the painful ones too.
They are all a gift.
A gift of life.
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