Mid-year always feels like a strange kind of silence.
Not quiet, exactly. More like noise that has lost its urgency.
June arrives and people start talking about reflection. Not in the poetic sense. More like accounting. What was achieved. What failed. What still needs to be fixed before December makes everything final.
I think I used to believe that time had checkpoints. That January mattered more than February. That June was just a halfway marker. That December was the verdict.
But this year doesn’t feel like that.
Or maybe it does, and I am just not sure which exam I am sitting for.
2026 has been… loud.
Not in a dramatic way. Not in a cinematic way. Just full.
School assignments layered over business decisions. Meetings that run longer than expected. Messages that arrive at the wrong time but still need answers. Scripts that refuse to behave until the last revision. Students preparing, performing, competing, collapsing, recovering, and performing again.
Somewhere in all of that, they did well.
International science drama competition. Singapore Youth Festival. Physical theatre festival. Another competition I can’t remember the exact name of because they start blending into each other after a while.
They got second place.
Two Best Performer awards.
There were photos. Smiles. That brief stillness after results are announced, where everyone is trying to decide whether to cry or laugh first.
And I remember thinking: this is a good year.
That was the sentence in my head.
This is a good year.
But then I paused.
Because I couldn’t tell if the year was good… or if the results were good.
There is a difference, I think. I just don’t know how to explain it yet.
If the students had not done well, would 2026 feel different?
If the awards had not come, would I have called this year difficult instead of meaningful?
If everything had stayed the same, but the outcomes changed, would the shape of time itself change?
It’s a strange thought.
That we don’t experience years.
We grade them.
Good year.
Bad year.
Productive year.
Wasted year.
As if time is a student sitting quietly in the back of the classroom waiting to be marked.
But time doesn’t behave.
It refuses feedback.
It doesn’t improve next term.
And then, somewhere in the middle of this thinking, something else arrives.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just… a gap.
A missing shape.
Papa the cat.
He doesn’t belong in this paragraph. That’s what makes him accurate.
He went missing in 2024.
I still remember calling him that. Papa. Like he had authority over the house. Like he knew more than he actually did. Like he would always come back because that was the rule we agreed on without saying it out loud. I still remember how he would go out of the house and climbed all the way to level one of the flat that we are living in. And he would actually climb back up. All ten floors at 4 plus in the morning. To remind us to have our pre-dawn meals during the fasting month. Then one day, he just didn’t turn up anymore.
He didn’t come back.
At first, I told myself it was temporary. That he was exploring. That he was delayed. That cats do this.
Then it became less logical and more emotional.
Then it became something I didn’t know how to place anywhere in the day.
Even now, in 2026, I still think about it in passing.
Not every day.
But enough that I notice the pattern of it.
A sudden image. A thought that arrives without permission. A small correction in my breathing.
I don’t think I am “over it.”
That phrase feels too clean. Too finished. Like there is a stage where grief is completed and stamped and archived.
I don’t think that exists.
What exists instead is distance.
And even that is not consistent.
Two days ago, I thought about him again.
For no reason that I can explain.
Just a moment. A pause in the middle of something else. And suddenly he was there again, as if he had been waiting behind whatever I was looking at.
And I felt it again.
That disappointment I felt towards myself. The kind that keeps circling the “what if.” What if I hadn’t let him out that day? A disappointment with nowhere useful to go.
Not sharp anymore. Not breaking anything.
Just present.
I think that’s what confuses me most.
That time passes, but does not necessarily heal in the way people imply.
It rearranges things, yes.
It teaches you how to continue functioning around certain absences.
But it does not remove them.
And I wonder if that is what people mean when they say “move on.”
Because I don’t know what moving on is supposed to look like.
Is it forgetting?
Is it remembering without pain?
Is it simply being able to talk about it without pausing?
If that is the definition, then I am not sure I have moved anywhere.
And that thought makes me uneasy, because I am also told—constantly—that I should.
Move forward.
Keep going.
There is still time.
That phrase.
There is still time.
I say it to others too.
I think I mean it.
But I also wonder what it hides.
Because time is not neutral.
It doesn’t repair everything it passes through.
Some things remain unfinished inside it.
Some things do not get resolved. They just get carried.
And maybe that is what I am trying to understand this year.
Not success.
Not productivity.
Not whether 2026 is good or bad.
But whether carrying is the only real option we have.
Because I am carrying a year that looks successful from the outside.
And also carrying a missing cat.
And also carrying the memory of moments I cannot return to.
And also carrying the strange guilt of still being functional inside all of that.
There is a kind of absurdity in it.
I can reply to emails.
I can direct a rehearsal.
I can attend meetings.
I can celebrate student achievements.
I can plan the next project.
And then, without warning, I can also remember an empty space in my house where something used to move.
Both things exist in the same body.
There is no schedule separating them.
No calendar warning.
No clean transition.
I used to think adulthood was about control.
Now I think it might just be about coexistence.
Between what is working and what is not resolved.
Between what is celebrated and what is still quietly missing.
Between what we show and what returns when no one is looking.
Maybe that is why mid-year reflections feel strange.
Because they assume clarity.
They assume we can look at six months and decide what it meant.
But meaning doesn’t arrive that neatly.
Sometimes it arrives as a student award ceremony.
Sometimes it arrives as a missing cat you still think about two years later.
Sometimes it arrives as a question you cannot finish writing.
I don’t know how to end this properly.
I keep trying to find a sentence that makes sense of it all.
Something about growth.
Something about gratitude.
Something about lessons learned.
But none of them feel honest enough.
So I think I will stop trying to resolve it.
There is still time, yes.
But not in the comforting way people say it.
More like this:
There is still time to continue living inside unanswered things.
There is still time to not be finished.
There is still time to carry what has not been resolved.
And maybe that is all this year is.
Not a success.
Not a failure.
Just something continuing.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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