Urban life of a cob

[keenanbu]

December.

Two Decembers ago, I was burning down. Not with light, but with a slow, quiet smolder—the kind that leaves ash in your lungs and exhaustion in your bones. I was hollowed out, teetering on the familiar, frightening edge where burnout deepens into something darker. In the middle of a colorless Thursday, the words finally spilled out to my partner, a quiet confession of drowning in plain air.

Within the hour, he was at my door. No grand plan, just a steadfast “come with me.” He drove us out of the city, toward the frozen reservoir—a place we knew in summer green, now waiting under a different sky.

He gave me back the world that afternoon. A tiny village, asleep under a quilt of snow, its wooden houses like quiet, frosted cakes. The countryside held a deep, velvet silence, broken only by the crunch of our boots and the distant sigh of the wind over ice.

There, in the cold, clean air, I remembered how to breathe. Not the shallow, anxious breaths of survival, but deep, intentional draughts of stillness. The vast, sleeping landscape held up a mirror to my cluttered mind and, without a word, gently reframed it. My life didn’t feel smaller out there; it felt part of something vast, quiet, and enduring.

December, that year, did not arrive with noise or sparkle. It came as a silent gift—a hand in the dark, a horizon blushed with light, and the profound mercy of being led back to the world when I had forgotten the way.

[keenanbu]

November.

For years, November was the darkest door of the year—the month where the light withdrew completely, and I felt myself standing closest to the edge of an inner void, the whispers of old demons echoing from below. It was a season of silent struggle, a tightening in the chest as the world grew cold and still.

But last year, I tried to rewire that ancient signal. I wanted to see November not as a hole, but as a quiet, calm space suspended between autumn’s brilliant surrender and winter’s clean, reassuring whiteness. A sacred pause. That's why I was drawn to a small northern town and the haunting image of its flooded belfry. I imagined us standing on a cold shore, looking at that solitary tower rising like a stone memory from the still, dark water—a monument not to faith, but to endurance. A testament to what remains above the surface, even when everything else is submerged.

But we didn't go. The trip slipped into the future, postponed like so many gentle promises. We finally saw it in May, and the bell tower was, indeed, spectacular: a beautiful, lonely sentinel in the middle of a vast, calm and grey reservoir. Yet the town around it felt tired and unkempt, its charm worn thin by neglect. We wandered its sleepy streets for a day, but its shaggy disorder, so picturesque at first, soon felt heavy, and we left with a quiet sigh.

[keenanbu]

October.

It was our first great journey as a couple — though we were three, for he had promised a friend to show her the northernmost city in the land.

There, the cold met us unexpectedly. It was a different kind of cold, raw and sea-born, and it sent me searching for warmth: thick woolen socks, soft gloves, a hat to keep the wind from whispering through my hair.

And there, for the first time, I saw the ocean.

It was magnificent in its vastness — an expanse of silvery-grey, calm in a way that felt almost sacred. On the horizon, water and sky melted together, a seamless world of soft grey. We wandered through thick, dreaming fog, and walked among orange hills dressed in low northern brush, their colors glowing like embers in the muted air.

It was a beginning—chilled, vast, and utterly beautiful.

[keenanbu]

September. This is actually one of the two month in which my partner and I haven't been anywhere interesting nature-wise. So, I decided to paint a place where I want us to go (and actually hope we'll do it in a couple of days). Originally, when I just started to create this calendar, we hadn't gone to a lot of places. So, I was planning to paint real trips for half of the months and imaginary future trips for the other half. But by the time I actually started to actively paint it, we'd already travelled somewhere nice in ten months out of twelve.

[keenanbu]

August.

It was the last day of August—a final, golden gift of summer. The sun hung soft and generous in the sky, and I, tired of waiting for my slow-rising love, stepped alone onto a suburban train headed into the unknown.

According to the map I’d traced so carefully the night before, a quiet reservoir lay waiting beyond a small-town station, complete with a beach meant for sun-soaked dreaming. That was the plan, at least.

But reality rarely follows the lines we draw. There was no path—only the grit and growl of the roadside, the breath of passing cars, the tense shoulders of a walker going nowhere beautiful. So I turned, on impulse, down a narrow lane that led away from the noise, and found myself standing before a still and silver canal.

Before long, he arrived—my partner, now bright-eyed and eager—and together we wandered the water’s edge. We even witnessed a great passenger ship glide through the floodgates, moving with such deliberate, majestic slowness it felt like a ceremony. A farewell.

And there, in the quiet hum of gates closing and water settling, summer drew to a close—not with a grand gesture, but with a whispered promise of moments still worth chasing.

[keenanbu]

July.

In July we went to some kind of a film city, which turned out to be not as spectacular, as I'd hoped, but we still enjoyed a huge deteriorating wooden ship in the middle of a field and then barbecued in the nearest forest for the rest of the day.

P.S. I had serious health problems for the whole July and August which made it impossible for me to sit at my desk and use my computer, that's why I'm only posting July now. Better late than never.

[keenanbu]

June.

In the first month of summer we went back to that reservoir, only by that time it had transformed into a living canvas—water shimmering under the sun’s gaze, thick with the scent of pine and wet earth.

My friend and her boyfriend had just bought a couple of SUPs, so we spent very little time on the shore and went to explore the opposite bank. It turned out to be a wild, whispering place—ancient pines stretched their roots into ivory sand, their shadows pooling like spilled ink. Between them, tiny blue flowers glowed like pieces of fallen sky. We waded just deep enough into the woods to feel the hush of centuries before retreating to our boards, paddling further along the endless green corridor where the forest refused to yield.

By afternoon, we surrendered to the sun. Drowsy and relaxed, we sprawled on our home shore, tracing the slow migration of clouds. The world felt vast and ours, gilded with the rare magic of unhurried hours.

[keenanbu]

May.

In the tender glow of May, my love and I wandered to a town crowned by its towering lighthouse—a silent sentinel watching over the river’s lazy curves. Along the bank, the world softened; the grass grew tall and whispering, cradling secrets in its green embrace. And there, amid the swaying blades, we found a little frog — its eyes gleaming like polished stones, as if the earth itself had offered us a tiny, living jewel. First, I wanted to paint the lighthouse itself, but this piece of the bank seemed to me even more magical, so here it is.

[keenanbu]

April.

A dear friend of mine, born in the heart of April, has a tradition of celebrating with adventures in new cities. This time, fate led us to a reindeer sanctuary, where gentle antlered souls wandered close enough to touch, and we fed them with wonder in our palms.

The sun poured gold over the world that day. The trees, just shaking off winter’s slumber, wore their first delicate shades of green, while the forests were drowned in a sea of blue flowers—as if the sky had spilled onto the earth.

April, in my country, is not just a month. It is spring’s first true sigh, the moment when the world remembers how to bloom.

[keenanbu]

March.

In March we visited my partner's hometown which is even more northern and snowy than my own. We went to the mountains and the view there was spectacular. It was pretty hard going up with all that snow, but extremely fun to go back down - we slided most of the way. When we were back at the foothill, snow was everywhere, even in our undergarments.

I really enjoyed that trip. It was so sunny every day! And I'd been longing for some sunlight for a while by then.

[keenanbu]

February.

I remember that trip real well, because I was on my way to complete burnout, working at a company for a horrible jackass of a team leader, and I also suffered because of the weather - no sun whatsoever since November, lots of slush in the streets making it difficult to walk, endless cold, greyness and darkness...

And then my partner took me to that little village on the shore of a huge reservoir. It was so peacefully quiet and magically covered with thick white snow, that I immediately felt a bit better and remembered how beautiful winter can actually be if it's not in a huge grey metropolis.

[keenanbu]

January.

Ever since my very first romantic relationship I've been dreaming of painting a custom calendar about shared experiencies of my partner and me.

But having ADHD it's quite hard to stick to the same series of pictures, the same ideas, the same materials and more or less the same artistic style.

Nevertheless, this year is the year. I present to you January.

It's not a typical January for our northern place of living, because it's a picture of our first trip together (we went to celebrate the New Year's Eve to a warmer place and started dating on the 1st of January).

I will be posting the rest of this calendar every month.

[keenanbu]

About me.

I'd like to tell a bit about myself.

A long-long time ago I used to have a blog where I posted some notes about my life, sketches, drawings and paintings and occasional stories or fanfics. It seems now that all of that was in some previous life.

A lot of things happened to me since then. Quite dark and painful things.

Now it looks like I'm out of the woods, the hardest part is finally in the past, etc, etc. Although I'm still dealing with consequencies.

Anyway, for the first time in God knows how long I finally have energy to be creative and to share my world with other people.

I am going to post here some sketches, drawings, paintings and photos, as well as thoughts and stories from my life.

For now I'll just tell that I'm an inhabitant of a teeny tiny northern town who moved to a metropolis several years ago and who is still struggling with living in such a huge city.

I work as a programmer. Apart from art I love nature and learning foreign languages (I've learnt 6 so far, all at different levels, but I continue studiyng all of them), playing board games and video games (this is something I'm very new to), playing musical instruments and reading on biology-adjasent topics (I used to study biology at university). Oh, and I'm a volonteer at the city zoo.