A Clean Slate

A Clean Slate

It’s been one of those weeks where life seems drained of color. Everything looks dull, as if someone forgot to turn up the saturation.

The sky looks flat, and the light is muted. Even California, which is usually bright, seems faded. It’s the kind of light that makes everything feel paused, as if the world is waiting for something unnamed.

I was in my office, which is also my bedroom, on the third floor of our house, working on my laptop as the day slid toward a holiday break that hadn’t quite arrived yet. That strange in-between time where emails slow down but nothing is officially over, where you’re still working even though your body is already drifting somewhere else.

Coffee was going cold beside me. Gray light coming in through the windows. A familiar name on my screen. A fresh beginning. Another clean slate.

And suddenly I wasn’t really there anymore.

I was somewhere else—in a chapter of my life that ended quietly, without ceremony or goodbye. It was the kind of ending you’re supposed to be “fine” about, so you gather yourself and go on, even as part of you stands in the doorway, wondering what happened.

There are versions of us that never get acknowledged.

We move on. We build new things. We step into new rooms. But some stories don’t get the dignity of being named. They just fold into us and live there, unfinished, like a sentence that trails off without a period.

Seeing that headline cracked something open.

Not anger — recognition.

It’s strange, watching the world hand someone a new beginning while your own ending was never marked. Some people get to reinvent themselves loudly, with announcements, applause, and clean narratives. The rest of us do it quietly, upstairs at home, with the clouds pressed low against the windows and the coffee cooling beside us.

Women are especially good at this — absorbing endings and continuing forward without ceremony. We take what’s left of a chapter, tuck it away somewhere private, and keep going as if that’s the same thing as closure.

I realized I never really mourned that chapter. I archived it. I optimized it away. I turned it into something manageable. But grief doesn’t disappear just because you keep moving. It waits. It lingers. It shows up in moments like this, when you least expect it.

So I sat there, staring out at the washed-out sky, holding a mug I’d already forgotten to drink, thinking about all the versions of myself that never got a closing scene — all the hopes and plans that didn’t quite make it into the next chapter.

I had to remind myself of Tawakal — not in a grand or dramatic way, but in the small, steady way it lives inside everyday life. Trusting what unfolds. Letting go of the parts you can’t control. Believing that what leaves your life is not random, even when it doesn’t make sense yet.

It isn’t easy. It feels like loosening your grip when you’d rather hold on. But there is a quiet kind of faith in not forcing what’s already slipping away.

And still, life went on.

A message came in. My cursor blinked. The clouds stayed stubbornly gray.

Not all clean slates are gifts. Some are just resets without reckoning. And sometimes the real work happens in the quiet aftermath — where no one is watching, where nothing is announced, but you are still becoming someone new.

Tonight I’ll go downstairs and make noodles for my boys, the kind they always ask for. We’ll eat. We’ll talk about small things. The house will feel warmer than the sky outside.

Tomorrow will arrive, even if the saturation doesn’t.

And somehow, even without a clean slate, something new keeps growing.