It happened.
I missed a day.
Sometimes you just gotta suck it up and take the mulligan. That’s life during a daily project. And quite honestly, after the month I’ve had, I’m shocked it didn’t come earlier. But we just got back from a week of travel, and my recovery day just blazed by all without a poem.
It was nice honestly.
The poetry isn’t the tough part of this project, strangely enough. I’m not sure if you can tell, but coming up with things to say isn’t a problem for me. I really enjoy distilling an idea or thought or experience into a poem or something that roughly resembles a poem.
The hard part is the logistics around getting the postcard shared online. On the first day, I pulled a “postcard posting routine” out of my butt, and have stuck to it ever since. It was easy to stick to because 2026 did not start with my normal amount of travel, so I was able to create a sharing format quite easily even though photoshopping my handwriting to the bottom of an Instagram post is a pain.
But then, finally, I had a week, this week, where I actually went somewhere for a number of days. My routine fell apart. Turns out, without a flatbed scanner, it’s impossible to share the post the way I was doing it, so I just had to figure out a system where I could post it with my phone. It was frustrating.
With each 365 Project, I crush myself with my own expectations. I lock myself in a prison of my own design. No one expected me to do a project where I write poems on postcards made from my photography, and yet, I treat a project like this as duty, and sometimes, even war. It’s not. It’s a project where I sent postcards to people. It’s supposed to be fun.
The Missing Day is a good reminder that life happens, and that none of this is condemnable by death. I make a postcard and I sent it to YOU. Postcards are arguably, unnecessary in themselves, and by building a year around them, I’m doing something extra in order to bring something nice to life even though this form of communication is now obsolete.
It’s easy to let the day slip by in the morass of life, so the whole reason I find myself continuing to do daily projects is to slow down time. I want each day to matter, otherwise, I just get busy and they go away. Most of the time, I manage to sit down and think about something deep enough to write a poem about it. Other days, well, they just move so fast that they slip through my fingers.
Seeya tomorrow.