29/12/2025
I got lost on Yule’s night.
Not in a dramatic way — just the quiet kind of lost that happens in very old cities, where streets don’t really care about your plans. My phone stopped being useful somewhere along the way, so I did what people used to do before Google Maps took over: I walked and trusted I’d recognise something eventually.
That’s how I ended up on that street.
It was decorated for Christmas, all warm lights and careful beauty, and completely empty. The sort of empty that makes you lower your voice without realising it. The only person there was a woman a few steps ahead of me. I could hear her heels on the pavement — clear, measured, unhurried.
I slowed down. No one wants to be followed at night, especially in a place that feels half-asleep. I let her go on, keeping my distance, just another tourist pretending not to exist.
She reached the corner — and that’s when the street changed its mind.
A group of young people came around it, laughing, loud in the way only people with energy to spare can be. They filled the space immediately, as if the street had been waiting for them. The woman kept walking toward them, and with every step she seemed older somehow. Not frail — just heavier, as if time itself had started pressing down.
The young ones, meanwhile, only grew louder. More solid. More real.
Then both she and the young man at the front stopped at exactly the same place. Nothing marked it. No line, no sign — just a point where movement ended.
She didn’t turn. She didn’t step back. She simply wasn’t there anymore.
I took a step into an alley without thinking. When the group passed, they didn’t notice me at all. I counted them — twelve in total. Men, women, a couple of children, and at the very end a toddler, stubbornly keeping up like this was perfectly normal.
When they were gone, the street emptied again. Lights, silence, no trace of either side.
That’s when it clicked.
December had just left. Quietly. And the twelve months were already on their way in — young, noisy, not yet aware of what they’ll be asked to carry.
And for reasons I still can’t quite explain, the night didn’t feel so cold after that.
