It was a bad year for movies, I can’t even name one. But 2014 was the best year for my career as a yoga teacher as well as my writing. I had never been more confident.

There’s people who say we’re in late-stage capitalism now, in 2025.
I assume meaning the whole thing will be collapsing soon.
Which was true for my yoga career, but not for my writing where my best work was still to come. And not just that: It would be fueled by my love life. As it had always been, ever since I started writing in 2006.

But I did not know any of that, all I knew was that life had never been better than in 2014.

Even my love life had experienced what I assumed was going to be its peak, with someone whom I’d fancied for decades. And I was willing to make work.
Luckily for me, he bailed out. 

By the time November hit I found myself increasingly struggling for what was no longer more than scraps of his attention. That was the moment the man who would become my most important lover, entered my live.

Despite its long duration, what we had would never count as a proper relationship. And yet I find myself falling back on that affair, as proof that my current, now much clearer standards, are not too much to ask.

I even wonder things like:
“If these had been my standards, right from when I was a teen on up;
Would any of the other relationships or flings have happened?!”
My estimate is that one would have happened;
Each and every one of the others, would not;
And one big crush I had said No to because I was not single, would have worked out now. 

All things I am learning analyzing our affair.
The slow process of dissecting what made him the one who gave me exactly what I needed.
Right from our first kiss.

Struggling with 2014’s lover, I swore to never be the first one to kiss again.
And a man dragging it out until the moment of saying our goodbyes was also a No-no. He’d let the clock do his heavy lifting.

But this new man didn’t do any of that.
And he leaned in, sitting next to me. We kissed for one minute, a minute and a half at most.
He complimented me on being a good kisser, and said something about my body which he had touched.

He didn’t make the moment smaller, nor bigger.
Just like our affair, it just was.

Until it wasn’t.

~Lauren
An unexamined life is not worth living

Harteveld 2025*
Are 2200 characters, or less.
The name is inspired by the book Fretz 2025 by Johan Fretz and asterisk by the 2025 movie Thunderbolts*