The First Time, Again
Dear reader,
There are people who change the temperature of a room simply by being in it. People you have known for what feels like a lifetime after only a few minutes of conversation. Viltė is one of those people.
She called me while I was studying for my mathematics exam. I had my notes spread across the table, numbers blurring at the edges, the particular low-grade panic of a deadline settling in. And then—her voice. Warm, unhurried, certain in the way that only people who have survived their own uncertainties can be. She asked me to write something for the journal. And then, almost in passing, she said, "You'll be fine with that maths. You know how to do this." I did not study much after that call. I kept turning her words over instead. The way she said it—not as encouragement performed for my benefit, but as a simple fact. As if she had already seen the outcome and was simply reporting it back to me. I don't think she knows what that does to a person. I'm not sure she ever fully understands what it means, to those of us around her, to be seen like that.
Small Hands, Big Feeling
My tasks are small. I know this. I am the intern—the one doing the little things that need doing, the quiet work that holds the bigger work together. And yet. I sit with her sketchbooks and turn the pages slowly, the way you handle something that matters. I look at her childhood photographs and see the long, unbroken thread between the girl in those images and the woman building something real right now. I see pieces of myself in there too—not in the details, but in something harder to name. In the looking. In the wanting.
The world she has built is not the polished world. It is the real one. The one where the beautiful and the difficult exist in the same room, at the same table, at the same time. And being allowed inside it—even in a small way, even for now—makes me feel, inexplicably, enormous.
Paris, For the First Time
I have been to Paris before. I know this, technically. And yet. Something tells me I have never actually been. Not like this. Not with Ve Sav luggage beside me, a showroom waiting on the other end, and Viltė's voice somewhere in my chest reminding me that I know how to do this.
I think Paris will look different now. I think I will walk its streets with different eyes—not a tourist's eyes, not even a visitor's—but the eyes of someone who is, in some small and real way, part of something. The heavy bags at check-in will mean something. The long airport queues will mean something. Even the cold soup before departure, eaten quickly at the edge of a busy table, will mean something.
Because I understand now—from turning those sketchbook pages, from watching how she works, from one phone call on an evening I was supposed to be doing mathematics—that this is what Ve Sav is really about. Not the showroom. Not the arrival. The thread that connects the childhood photograph to the Paris showroom. The invisible, unglamorous, beautiful work of becoming. I am going to Paris for the first time. I can feel it already.
Bringing the Collection to Paris
Every culture carries something the world has not yet tasted. Not because it was hidden—but because no one has brought it to the table yet.
Lithuania is small. Its streets are quiet, its name unfamiliar in many mouths. But smallness is not absence. Inside it lives something specific and unhurried—a way of making, of thinking, of being—that belongs to the world just as much as it belongs to us.
We are not going to Paris to become something else. We are going to tear off a piece of what we know and offer it. The way you offer bread—not as a performance, not as a statement, but simply because it is good, and sharing what is good is the most human thing there is.
This is a small piece of Lithuania. Carried carefully. Set down gently on a table that belongs to everyone.
Come taste.
Sounds Connecting Us
There are things that are difficult to say out loud. Not because they are secrets—but because language sometimes arrives too late, after the feeling has already passed. Music gets there first.
Viltė and I did not sit down and plan this playlist. It grew the way real things grow—slowly, through shared silences, half-finished sentences, and songs sent at odd hours with no explanation needed. A track that felt like a Tuesday morning in the studio. Another that sounded exactly like the feeling of almost getting something right. We did not have to explain any of it to each other. That is how you know the connection is real.
This playlist is not curated. It is confessed. We are sharing it because some things are too good to keep between two people. Because music, more than almost anything, reminds us that what we feel privately has already been felt by someone else—somewhere, in a different language, in a different life. And that is its own kind of belonging.
You will know which songs are yours.
Talk soon,
Eligija
VE SAV Off Schedule
Hello, it's me again. Ve.
Reading Eligija's words while sitting here in Paris makes me smile. There is something special about watching someone experience a place differently simply because they arrive carrying different things. Not just suitcases, but responsibilities, confidence, and the quiet understanding that they belong.
This trip has been another first for both of us. I am learning to be off schedule, like all of us, I believe. I'm learning to give more responsibilities to the people around me who support me in order to stay sane.
One of those people is my beautiful intern, who helps me with all the business side of things. She is still at school, but she is definitely wiser than most people her age. She also writes beautifully without using AI, which is quite stunning, so I asked her to write the sections above. I hope you read them through her heart.
I am finishing this section in a Paris café. The air conditioning is set to 16 degrees, but it's impossible for the café to reach that temperature when it's 40 degrees outside.
I'll tell you all the stories from this trip once we're home and everything has had time to sink in. But for now, I want to tell you what my evenings looked like before we left.
City Garden
I've been cooking with local produce—rhubarb and strawberries. I made a quick trip to the farm to celebrate my dear mum's birthday, and my grandad gave me rhubarb that has been growing there for years. He says he remembers that plant growing in the same spot from when he was a child.
I made a rhubarb, strawberry, and fresh cardamom jam. I love having it for breakfast after a soft-boiled egg, spread over the last piece of sourdough with goat's cheese. I spoon the jam on top, and somehow it becomes my kind of morning dessert.
My mum helped me build raised garden beds and plant vegetables and greens. Hidden within the city, I now have a small garden in Antakalnis—a sanctuary of my own. Ours.
With such incredible neighbours and a wonderful community around us, I believe this garden will become everyone's. I already have far too much rocket, so if you'd like to come and pick some for your salad, don't hesitate to message me. I'd be more than happy to welcome you into our garden. Most evenings you'll find me there, watering the plants and trying to figure out how to grow beautiful tomatoes for the first time.
It connects the dots between the farm and the city, and the city and the farm. A living expression of the idea that wherever you go, you can always find traces of the countryside within the urban landscape.
Maybe that is what this journal has really been about. Not Paris. Not the showroom. Not even the garden.
First times.
The more I think about it, the more everything seems connected. A childhood photograph. A sketchbook. A showroom in Paris. A raised garden bed in Antakalnis. A suitcase that is a little too heavy. A jar of rhubarb and strawberry jam. Someone believing in you before you quite believe in yourself.
Eligija is going to Paris for the first time, even though she has been there before. I am learning how to let go for the first time. Learning to trust someone else with my words. Learning that tomatoes are much harder to grow than they look.
None of these things arrived fully formed. They all began as first times. We spend so much of our lives thinking we have to arrive somewhere before we begin. But perhaps we begin again much more often than we notice. Maybe every collection, every friendship, every city, and every tiny garden starts the same way—with someone quietly saying, "I've never done this before." And doing it anyway. Maybe that is what Ve Sav has always been about. Not perfection, but beginnings.
Find the farm in the city. Find your first time, again.
Talk soon,
Ve