By Francesc Borrull · December 29, 2025

The year did not end with any particular gesture. No final entry, no sense of arrival. Just a quiet evening, a screen dimmed a little earlier than usual, and the vague awareness that the calendar was running out of pages. I found myself rereading something I had written months earlier, not in search of correction or improvement, but simply to remember what frame of mind had produced it. That felt telling. Less a conclusion than a pause. Less an ending than a deepening silence around the work.

If I had to describe what 2025 felt like from the inside, it would not be acceleration or expansion. It would be slowness. Persistence. The steady return to the same questions, approached from slightly different angles, as if the year itself were less interested in novelty than in resonance.

Writing, throughout it all, remained the constant—not as output, not as performance, but as practice. Returning to the page became less about producing something new and more about keeping a rhythm alive. Some weeks the sentences came easily, others they resisted, but the act of showing up carried its own quiet authority. The cadence mattered more than the count. What held was not productivity, but continuity: the sense that writing was less an event than a way of moving through time.

Looking back, certain questions kept returning, even when I wasn’t inviting them. Music, for one, kept insisting on its presence—not simply as subject matter, but as a way of thinking. Listening closely, attending to phrasing, noticing how form carries meaning before words ever arrive. Writing about music often felt like writing about time itself: how it stretches, how it resolves, how it refuses to hurry.

Alongside that ran a more outward-facing line of inquiry—reflections on economics, education, and the broader systems that quietly shape our lives. These pieces were less about argument than about attention: noticing where abstractions touch lived experience, where policy becomes personal, where numbers fail to account for human cost. Even when the topics shifted, the impulse was the same—to slow the conversation down enough to hear what usually gets drowned out.

And then there was fiction. Not as escape, but as a different kind of precision. Writing stories required a deeper patience, a willingness to sit with ambiguity without trying to resolve it too quickly. Fiction asked for something other than explanation: presence, restraint, trust in what remains unsaid.

Some changes did occur this year, though none of them announced themselves loudly. My relationship to writing shifted, almost imperceptibly, from urgency toward clarity. The pressure to prove something—to justify the time, the effort, the attention—began to loosen its grip. Standards sharpened even as expectations softened. I became more willing to let a piece take the time it needed, and more comfortable leaving certain things unfinished until they were ready to speak.

The publication of my first collection of short stories, Not The End, belonged to this quieter transformation. It did not feel like a culmination so much as a confirmation: a recognition that the work had been happening all along, whether or not it had yet taken the shape of a book. Holding it in my hands felt less like crossing a finish line than like stepping into a room I had already been inhabiting for years.

Of course, much remains unresolved. Questions I thought I had settled returned in different forms. Projects continue to take shape slowly, resisting schedules and neat outlines. Doubts persist—not the paralyzing kind, but the productive ones, the kind that keep the work honest. There are sentences still searching for their context, ideas still waiting for the right vessel. I’ve learned to accept that this is not a flaw in the process, but the process itself.

Looking ahead, I find myself less interested in plans than in posture. In staying attentive. In listening for what the work asks rather than deciding in advance what it should become. There is another fiction project unfolding quietly in the background, but it does not need announcing. It will take the time it takes. For now, it is enough to remain open to the rhythm that has carried me this far.

If there is gratitude to be expressed at the close of this year, it is not for outcomes, but for the practice itself—and for those who read not in search of conclusions, but in companionship with the questions. The year ends much as it began: without ceremony, but not without meaning. The page remains. The cadence continues.

© Francesc Borrull, 2025