I say this to a toothbrush.

This is where we are.

Not metaphorically. Not yet.

An actual toothbrush.

It is standing beside mine with the composure of something that has not recently had its entire understanding of geography rearranged. Quiet. Upright. Completely unbothered. Bristles slightly splayed from use. Handle leaning in the same familiar direction it has been leaning for days.

It looks comfortable.

I resent this.

“Stop looking at me like that.”

It continues being a toothbrush.

Rude.

There should be some etiquette for objects belonging to people who are no longer in the room.

Surely there should be.

A handbook.

A small laminated card handed to all personal belongings upon temporary abandonment:

IN THE EVENT OF ABSENCE:

please do not retain the shape of ordinary life.

please do not smell familiar.

please do not remain exactly where you were left.

please refrain from looking devastatingly domestic.

please, for the love of god, have some decorum.

The toothbrush has received no such instructions.

So it stands there while I wash my hands.

And I stare at it.

And it stares at me.

Well, obviously it does not stare at me. It does not have eyes. This is precisely the sort of factual interference I do not require at present.

It stares.

It knows.

It knows that only hours ago, its existence meant absolutely nothing to me.

That is perhaps the first cruelty.

Yesterday, it was bathroom clutter.

Today, it is evidence.

the meme format:

me: i am a rational adult with a developed prefrontal cortex.
toothbrush: 🧍
me: don’t fucking start.

I keep thinking there should have been a more dramatic transition.

A sound.

A crack.

Something celestial.

Surely when one version of your life ends and another begins, there should be a noise loud enough to mark the border.

There wasn’t.

There was an airport.

There were bags.

There were people doing what people do at airports: checking passports, rearranging luggage, looking at screens, moving through barriers with the bureaucratic obedience of people temporarily belonging to departure boards.

And there was one last hug.

I don’t know what makes a hug the last hug.

It is an ordinary hug until retrospect names it.

That is the frightening thing about lasts.

They rarely introduce themselves.

No trumpet.

No warning.

No little Victorian gentleman appearing from behind a curtain to announce:

Nothing.

You simply hold someone.

And then you don’t.

I walked away.

That sentence is three words long and I hate every single one of them.

I walked away.

One step.

Then another.

The mechanics of walking are offensively simple. Heel. Sole. Toe. Transfer weight. Repeat.

Nobody tells you that sometimes walking forward feels anatomically identical to being torn backwards.

I kept looking behind me.

I don’t remember deciding to.

My neck simply refused the philosophy of departure.

My feet understood that we were leaving.

My body did not.

So I walked towards the exit while looking back at the exact point from which I was supposed to detach myself, and there was something obscene about how everyone else continued moving.

How dare the airport remain operational?

How dare somebody buy coffee?

How dare a suitcase wheel squeak?

How dare a child complain?

How dare a fluorescent sign continue glowing?

There are moments when your private grief develops the ego of a god. It looks around at the functioning world and thinks:

you cannot possibly be serious.

Something enormous is happening here.

Why is no one stopping?

But no one stopped.

Of course no one stopped.

The clock continued.

That bastard.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

I have been thinking about time all evening.

Not Time, capital T, the grand philosophical concept people write books about while looking very serious beside windows.

I mean stupid, practical time.

8:17.

9:42.

11:40

The tiny bureaucratic measurements we invented because apparently existence required administration.

A minute is sixty seconds regardless of what happens inside it.

This seems poorly designed.

A minute waiting for someone to call is not the same size as a minute with their head beside yours.

A minute before goodbye and a minute after goodbye cannot possibly contain equal quantities of time.

I reject the premise.

Someone check the maths.

And yet the clock insists.

Sixty.

Sixty.

Sixty.

The audacity.

Somewhere across an ocean, another clock is insisting on something else.

There are hours between us now.

Not metaphorical hours.

Actual ones.

A numerical disagreement between two skies.

My night does not correspond with another person’s night anymore.

My dinner belongs beside someone else’s afternoon.

My midnight trespasses into somebody else’s evening.

We have returned to arithmetic.

And I know arithmetic.

I have known arithmetic for years.

That is perhaps why I am confused by how normal everything feels.

Because here is the thing I cannot reconcile:

I am devastated.

And I am okay.

Both sentences are true.

I keep waiting for one of them to expose the other as a liar.

Neither does.

I open the bedroom door.

The smell reaches me first.

Familiarity has a smell.

Nobody fucking warns you about that.

Memory, apparently dissatisfied with owning sight and sound, has colonised the nose too.

It hits before thought has time to put its shoes on.

For half a second, there is no airport.

No distance.

No departure.

No geography.

There is simply recognition.

Then the brain arrives.

Late, as usual, carrying paperwork.

Ah, yes. About that.

And suddenly the room is full of rain.

Not outside.

Inside my head.

It rains behind my eyes and somehow escapes through them.

Very inconvenient.

I stand there and think:

Oh.

So this is happening.

Then five minutes later, perhaps ten, perhaps two, I am calm again.

This frightens me more than the crying.

Why am I calm?

Shouldn’t I be inconsolable?

Shouldn’t there be violins?

Shouldn’t I be horizontal on the floor?

Shouldn’t someone be peeling me away from a window while I whisper dramatically about the cruelty of oceans?

Why do I want food?

Why am I thinking about cleaning?

Why am I annoyed by the state of my room?

Why do I have a headache?

Why am I sleepy?

Why does my body have the fucking nerve to request dinner during an existential crisis?

And then comes the ugliest question:

am I not missing them enough?

There it is.

The little prosecutor living in the brain.

Always overdressed.

Always carrying files.

Exhibit A: you have not cried for seventeen consecutive minutes.

Exhibit B: you briefly considered noodles.

Exhibit C: you laughed at something on your phone.

Conclusion: perhaps your grief is fraudulent.

Objection.

Idiotic.

Still, I entertain it.

Because human beings are apparently incapable of experiencing an emotion without immediately conducting an internal performance review.

Am I sad correctly?

Am I grieving correctly?

Am I missing correctly?

Have I reached the appropriate quota of tears?

Would a person in sufficient pain be thinking about laundry?

There is a peculiar vanity to grief. We imagine that if the feeling is important enough, it must make us spectacular.

But perhaps the deepest feelings are not always spectacular.

Perhaps some of them are domestic.

Perhaps devastation sometimes brushes its teeth.

Perhaps heartbreak gets hungry.

Perhaps grief remembers to plug in the phone.

Perhaps longing changes into pyjamas and checks whether the front door is locked.

Perhaps you can be shattered and still notice that the bin needs taking out.

The body, unlike poetry, is relentlessly practical.

It says:

Yes, yes, terrible.

Water?

Food?

Sleep?

And there is something almost offensive about this insistence on survival.

But perhaps there is something tender about it too.

current status:

emotionally: ██████████ catastrophic

physically: headache

spiritually: arguing with toiletries

practically: kind of hungry actually

I think the word causing all this trouble is normal.

Normal.

What a suspicious little word.

Six letters pretending to be objective.

Normal according to whom?

Normal according to what?

Normal is usually treated as a location. A place to which we return.

Things will go back to normal.

I just want to feel normal.

This isn’t normal.

As though normal is a house with a fixed address.

As though Google Maps could take us there.

Maybe normal isn’t a place.

Maybe it is repetition.

Maybe normal is simply whatever the nervous system has stopped questioning.

Wake up.

Reach for the phone.

Wait.

Call.

Speak.

Laugh.

Disconnect.

Continue.

For years, closeness had architecture but no physical dimensions.

It existed through language.

Through routines.

Through knowing.

Through a voice carried electronically from one place to another.

Through the strange miracle of being able to know someone’s facial expression without seeing their face.

Through sentences begun by one person and finished by another.

Through recognising silence.

Through knowing the difference between tired silence and angry silence and distracted silence and I am listening but I have nothing to add silence.

Human beings like to privilege touch when they talk about intimacy.

Perhaps because touch photographs well.

Hands intertwined.

Heads on shoulders.

Bodies leaning into bodies.

But there are forms of intimacy that leave no visible evidence.

Knowing how somebody’s day went from the first syllable of hello.

Recognising a mood from punctuation.

Understanding that “okay” and “okayyy” are completely different countries.

Learning the geography of another person’s mind without ever sharing a room.

Knowing what story is coming before they tell it.

Knowing which version they will exaggerate.

Knowing exactly when they are pretending not to care.

Knowing when to speak.

Knowing when not to.

Knowing.

Knowing.

Knowing.

Maybe that was normal.

Then, briefly, normal acquired a body.

And this is the part I cannot explain without sounding like I am lying.

Nothing changed.

Everything changed.

Both sentences, again, are true.

Nothing happened that should have transformed the universe.

There were no orchestras.

No revelation descended from the ceiling.

No divine voice announced:

Congratulations. You have unlocked Physical Proximity.

Life was painfully, beautifully mundane.

Rooms.

Roads.

Food.

Waiting.

Walking.

Complaining.

Laughing.

Sleepiness.

Plans changing.

Things misplaced.

Conversations half-finished.

Small irritations.

Ordinary tenderness.

The boring infrastructure of being alive.

And that was the extraordinary thing.

It wasn’t extraordinary.

I had expected physical closeness to feel like entering some new dimension.

Instead it felt like remembering a place I had somehow never visited.

How can something be new and familiar simultaneously?

How can a body say of course to something it has never experienced?

There should have been awkwardness in the translation.

A relationship that had existed through screens becoming three-dimensional should have required calibration.

Surely.

Adjust brightness.

Connect Bluetooth.

Accept cookies.

Allow location while using app.

Something.

Instead:

Oh.

There you are.

That was all.

There you are.

As though the body had been expecting the missing information all along.

There is a specific violence in discovering that something extraordinary feels normal.

Because once the extraordinary becomes normal, losing it does not feel like losing a miracle.

It feels like losing Tuesday.

And we are not taught how to grieve Tuesdays.

We know how to mourn grand things.

Deaths.

Endings.

Catastrophes.

We have language prepared for rupture.

But what vocabulary exists for the temporary removal of ordinary closeness?

What is the word for:

I know you exist.

I know I can reach you.

I know nothing between us has ended.

I know the distance is survivable because it has been survived before.

I know all of this.

And still, I would like you in this room.

Not forever.

Not philosophically.

Not in a grand declaration about destiny.

Just now.

Here.

At this exact coordinate.

I want your existence to overlap with mine geographically.

That’s it.

That is the entire tragedy.

Two people can be perfectly fine and terribly far apart.

Nobody has done anything wrong.

No love has been withdrawn.

No promise has been broken.

There is no villain.

And god, isn’t that inconvenient?

Pain is easier when there is someone to prosecute.

But whom do you blame for longitude?

What accusation can you level against an ocean?

What exactly is my case against aviation?

Your Honour, I object to the curvature of the Earth.

Sustained, hopefully.

Flatten it immediately.

The toothbrush remains on the sink.

I return to it later.

Still there.

Of course.

I wonder whether objects become sentimental because they remember people or because we force them to.

A toothbrush has no memory.

A pillow has no loyalty.

A shirt does not miss the body that stretched its fabric.

A mug does not wonder why one particular hand has stopped reaching for it.

Rooms are innocent.

Objects are innocent.

We are the criminals.

We smuggle memory into them.

We make witnesses of things that never agreed to testify.

This toothbrush did not ask to become an archive.

And yet here I am interrogating it.

Where were you yesterday morning?

Did they hold you?

Were they standing here?

Was I beside them?

Did we know?

Did we understand that ordinary was happening?

Why didn’t you tell me to look harder?

Why didn’t I memorise everything?

And this is another trick of absence: it convinces you that presence was insufficiently observed.

Suddenly you want forensic detail.

What exact angle did the light enter the room?

What did the air smell like?

What was said at 3:14 p.m. three days ago?

Which hand reached first?

What song was playing?

Were we happy at that precise second?

Did I know I was happy?

Did I document it?

Did I waste any of it being annoyed?

Oh god, was I annoyed?

I probably was.

How wonderful.

How completely fucking wonderful that I was comfortable enough to be annoyed.

There is intimacy in irritation too.

Nobody writes sonnets about it.

Maybe they should.

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to the person who left a wet towel somewhere inexplicable?

Romance has been marketed to us as perpetual awareness.

Look at them.

Cherish them.

Every second is precious.

But nobody can live like that.

To constantly recognise happiness while inhabiting it would be exhausting.

Sometimes love must become background noise so life can happen in front of it.

Maybe that is what normal actually means.

Not insignificant.

Safe enough to stop staring at.

The chair does not marvel at the floor for holding it.

The lungs do not applaud every breath.

The hand does not throw a celebration every time another hand reaches for it.

It simply closes.

Perhaps that is the highest compliment the body can give:

I stopped being surprised by you.

Not bored.

Not indifferent.

Certain.

And now uncertainty hasn’t returned.

That’s the strange part.

Distance has.

Uncertainty hasn’t.

I think that is why I am calm.

Maybe.

I don’t know.

Ask me again in twenty minutes.

This essay may become outdated while I am writing it.

I reserve the right to sob halfway through the next paragraph.

But right now, beneath the ache, there is something profoundly still.

Grounded.

Almost peaceful.

And I keep poking at that peace because apparently I cannot leave a good thing alone.

Why are you here?

I ask it.

Shouldn’t you have left too?

Peace shrugs.

Maybe grief and peace are not opposites.

Maybe I have misunderstood them.

We treat emotions like countries with guarded borders.

If you are grieving, you cannot be peaceful.

If you are happy, you cannot be lonely.

If you are certain, you cannot be afraid.

If you miss someone, you must be miserable.

But perhaps emotions are less like countries and more like roommates.

They coexist badly.

They leave dishes everywhere.

They borrow each other’s clothes.

Grief is crying in the kitchen while gratitude makes tea.

Longing is lying dramatically across the sofa while certainty is trying to watch television.

Peace is asleep upstairs.

Love owns the lease.

Nobody knows who invited anxiety.

This seems more accurate.

I can miss someone and feel held by the fact of them.

I can ache and still be okay.

I can wish geography were different without wishing my life were different.

I can cry because something beautiful ended for now and smile because it happened at all.

These are not contradictions requiring resolution.

They are simply several truths arriving at once.

Maybe adulthood is partly learning to stop making emotions fight to the death for the privilege of being called the real one.

Maybe I do not need to decide whether I am devastated or grateful.

I am both.

Maybe I don’t need to decide whether the room feels empty or familiar.

It is both.

Maybe I don’t need to decide whether this is normal.

Maybe normal has always contained absence.

I heard a familiar voice tonight.

Only briefly.

Minutes.

There was exhaustion in it.

Life had already resumed elsewhere.

Responsibilities waiting.

Deadlines.

Work that requires concentration and thought and the terrifying seriousness of building a future while still trying to remain a person inside it.

And somehow there was tenderness in the brevity.

Not because anything extraordinary was said.

Nothing cinematic happened.

Again.

This is becoming a theme.

But sometimes being remembered in the middle of somebody else’s exhaustion feels like being handed something fragile.

A few minutes.

Here.

I saved these for you.

And afterward I sat there thinking about how strange love is when stripped of spectacle.

It becomes attention.

That’s all.

Attention.

A small allocation of finite human consciousness.

I thought of you.

I called.

I remembered.

I noticed.

I saved this story.

I sent this picture.

I saw this and knew you would laugh.

I am tired but I wanted your voice first.

Perhaps intimacy has always been a practice of remembering someone while the rest of the world is demanding to be remembered too.

And perhaps that is why I feel peaceful.

Because absence is not erasure.

I keep confusing the two.

The body has gone elsewhere.

The relationship between two minds has not evaporated from the air.

It has simply returned to its previous medium.

Which should feel familiar.

Which does feel familiar.

Which is precisely what hurts.

We have gone back to normal.

But normal has been contaminated by another normal.

There.

That is it.

That is the problem.

I now have two normals.

Normal One:

distance.

Calls.

Messages.

Different clocks.

The intimacy of language.

A face mediated by glass.

Waiting.

Knowing without touching.

Normal Two:

a toothbrush beside mine.

A body occupying unnecessary amounts of bed.

A voice with no speaker.

A laugh arriving directly into a room.

A hand requiring no technology.

A person simply being there, so routinely there that occasionally I forgot to be astonished.

For a brief period, Normal Two overlaid Normal One so perfectly that I mistook it for permanence.

Not consciously.

I knew dates.

I knew tickets existed.

I knew departures were scheduled.

I knew.

But knowledge is terribly weak compared with habit.

The calendar knew there would be an ending.

My body apparently did not read the calendar.

So now the mind says:

We have done this before.

And the body says:

Yes, but I know too much now.

Maybe this is what absence really is.

Not emptiness.

Knowledge.

You cannot miss what you have never known in quite the same way.

Before, touch was imagined.

Now it has evidence.

Before, closeness was theoretical.

Now the body has data.

Terrible, beautiful data.

The precise temperature of another hand.

The weight of an arm.

The sound of laughter without compression.

The difference between hearing a voice through a phone and hearing it vibrate through the air you are also breathing.

The stupid domestic sight of two toothbrushes.

How does one return to ignorance after that?

You don’t.

Perhaps you aren’t supposed to.

Perhaps love is partly the accumulation of things you can no longer unknow.

I keep returning to that airport.

One last hug.

One step.

Look back.

Another step.

Look back.

Another.

Look back.

There is something almost mythological about looking back.

Orpheus looked back.

Lot’s wife looked back.

Literature is absolutely obsessed with warning people not to fucking turn around.

Apparently humanity has been doing badly at departures for thousands of years.

But I understand them now.

Of course you look back.

What absurd instruction is don’t look back?

As though the eyes would agree to such bureaucracy.

As though love has ever been famous for following directions.

I looked back because some primitive part of me believed looking could hold a person in place.

One more second.

One more image.

One more.

One more.

The distance between us increased in metres before it increased in miles.

That feels important.

People imagine separation dramatically: countries, oceans, continents.

But separation begins much smaller.

Ten centimetres.

The space created when arms release.

One metre.

Two.

Five.

The distance from a person to an exit.

Then a wall.

Then security.

Then runways.

Then sky.

Then ocean.

Then clocks.

We talk about thousands of miles because the number is impressive.

But I think the first five metres are worse.

Those are the metres you participate in.

After that, machinery takes over.

Tonight I am trying not to measure anything.

Not the hours.

Not the distance.

Not how long until something changes again.

Not how many tears qualify as enough.

Not how long grief is allowed to sit at my table.

I don’t want to put a deadline on missing.

Maybe tomorrow feels worse.

Maybe tomorrow feels easier.

Maybe I wake up and instinctively reach toward an absence and discover this whole thing again from the beginning.

Maybe I wake up hungry and cheerful and then feel guilty for it.

Maybe in an hour I cry so violently the toothbrush files a restraining order.

I don’t know.

There is something liberating about refusing prediction.

Right now is enough.

Right now:

I am tired.

My head hurts.

I want food.

I want sleep.

I want to clean.

I want the room to remain exactly as it is.

I want to change everything in it.

I want the smell to disappear because it hurts.

I want the smell never to disappear because it hurts.

There.

Another contradiction.

Keep it.

I am collecting them.

Perhaps this is what I want these pages to be.

Not answers.

Evidence.

An archive of emotional weather taken at unreasonable hours.

13 August:
heavy ache with intermittent calm.
visibility poor.
memory high.
chance of crying: unpredictable.
toothbrush hostile.

Tomorrow’s forecast unavailable.

I don’t want to write retrospectively from the comfortable intelligence of healing.

Healing is a terrible editor.

It cleans everything.

It gives events arcs.

It turns chaos into lessons.

It says, Looking back, I realise…

No.

I don’t realise.

That is the point.

I am inside it.

I want to write from inside the weather before I know where the storm moves.

I want the sentences to contradict each other because I contradict myself.

I want a paragraph to be philosophical and the next to say bro what the fuck because that is a more honest representation of consciousness than pretending the brain maintains one literary register while falling apart.

It doesn’t.

One second:

Perhaps human attachment constitutes an existential resistance to the spatial limitations of embodiment.

Next second:

why is your fucking toothbrush still here.

Both thoughts came from the same skull.

Both deserve publication.

There is another thought I am almost frightened to write because putting it into language makes it real.

I feel lucky.

Fuck.

There.

I said it.

Lucky.

Tonight.

Of all nights.

Maybe that is the source of the peace.

There are people whose absence leaves uncertainty.

People who leave rooms and take reassurance with them.

People whose silence becomes a question.

This does not feel like a question.

It feels like distance.

Painful, ridiculous, geographically inconvenient distance.

But distance.

Not doubt.

And perhaps those are profoundly different species of loneliness.

One says:

Where are you?

The other says:

I know exactly where you are. I just wish it were here.

I am living in the second sentence.

There is grief inside it.

But there is safety too.

And I think I have spent several hours mistaking safety for insufficient love.

How ridiculous.

Maybe I am not crying every second because my nervous system does not believe it has lost anything.

It knows.

Somewhere beneath the theatrics and the airport and the smell and the fucking toothbrush, it knows.

Nothing has vanished.

Something has moved.

Those are not the same thing.

A presence can change location without changing meaning.

Maybe that is why I can breathe.

Still.

I miss the physicality.

There is no philosophical trick that makes that disappear.

I refuse to intellectualise myself out of wanting what I want.

I want warmth.

I want sound without static.

I want a voice that doesn’t depend on Wi-Fi.

I want to say something stupid and hear the response from three feet away rather than thousands of miles.

I want the deeply unimpressive miracle of proximity.

I want there you are.

There is no shame in that.

For all our technology, human beings remain embarrassingly mammalian.

We want warmth.

We want familiar smells.

We want bodies nearby.

We want to reach and find.

Perhaps civilisation is just several thousand years of pretending we are more sophisticated than creatures who calm down when someone familiar is close.

And perhaps love keeps exposing the lie.

The toothbrush is still there.

Obviously.

I look at it once more before leaving the bathroom.

It seems less hostile now.

Maybe we have reached an understanding.

Or maybe I am tired.

I consider moving it.

I don’t.

Not tonight.

Tonight it can remain exactly where it was left.

Not as a shrine.

God, no.

That sounds far too dramatic for an object designed to remove plaque.

Just as evidence of an ordinary thing.

An ordinary thing that became extraordinary only because the context changed around it.

Maybe that is what memory does.

Maybe that is what love does too.

It does not always create new things.

Sometimes it simply changes the meaning of existing ones.

A road.

A room.

A song.

A seat.

A stupid toothbrush.

And suddenly the world is covered in footnotes.

This mattered because.

This mattered because.

This mattered because.

Perhaps eventually I will stop reading every footnote.

Perhaps one day I will walk into this room and it will simply be a room again.

Perhaps the smell will fade without asking permission.

Perhaps the toothbrush will be moved.

Perhaps another ordinary will establish itself.

I don’t know.

I am not there yet.

I am here.

Present tense.

Raw data.

No conclusion.

No lesson.

No inspirational final paragraph about how distance makes the heart grow whatever the fuck people say it grows.

I don’t want wisdom tonight.

I want accuracy.

And the accurate thing is this:

I am devastated.

I am peaceful.

I am grateful.

I am aching.

I am hungry.

I have a headache.

I am loved.

I miss.

I know.

I don’t know.

I want to sleep.

I want to preserve this exact second forever.

I want tomorrow to come quickly.

I want time to stop.

Apparently the human heart can hold an unreasonable number of incompatible files open simultaneously.

No wonder the system overheats.

Maybe that is normal.

There is that word again.

Normal.

I still don’t trust it.

But perhaps normal isn’t the life we return to after something important happens.

Perhaps normal is simply the shape life takes while important things are happening continuously, quietly, without announcing themselves.

Perhaps normal was distance.

Perhaps normal was proximity.

Perhaps both were.

Perhaps neither was.

Perhaps normal is not a place at all.

Perhaps it is recognition.

The moment the body looks at something it has never known before and, impossibly, says:

oh.

you.

of course.

And maybe absence is the inverse.

The body looks at everything it has always known—

the room,

the sink,

the evening,

the clock,

the toothbrush—

and says:

wait.

something is different.

Nothing is different.

Everything is different.

There it is again.

I think I will stop trying to choose.

It is late now.

Somewhere else, it is not as late.

I find this irritating.

The clocks have resumed their disagreement.

The room is quiet.

The toothbrush remains upright.

My head still hurts.

I should eat something.

I should probably sleep.

Tomorrow there will be messages and responsibilities and cups of tea and stupid videos and things requiring passwords and decisions about what to wear and all the relentless administrative nonsense of being alive.

Life will continue committing the small indecency of continuing.

And I will continue with it.

Not because tonight meant less than I thought.

Because it meant exactly as much.

There are people we miss because their absence creates emptiness.

And there are people we miss because their presence taught the emptiness their shape.

I think that is what I am sitting inside tonight.

A shape.

Not a void.

There is a difference.

I haven’t worked out what it is yet.

Maybe that belongs to Part II.

For now, I wash my hands.

I turn off the light.

I take one last look at the sink.

“Goodnight,” I almost say.

Then I realise I am about to say goodnight to a fucking toothbrush.

Absolutely not.

I have standards.

I walk out.

And for once,

I don’t move it.

People say I love you as though it is the final destination of language. As though every road bends towards it, every poem is secretly trying to arrive there, every song eventually whispers it in the chorus. We treat it like the highest currency affection can afford. Three words. Eight letters. A confession. A promise. Sometimes even a plea.

And yet, I have always believed there is a sentence infinitely softer. Infinitely heavier. One that doesn’t announce itself with fireworks but arrives quietly, carrying years inside its pockets.

“I remember you.”

Not I remember your name.

Not I remember meeting you.

Just…

I remember you.

Because love can exist in the present tense. Memory exists in every tense at once.

To remember someone is to carry evidence that they mattered long after the moment itself expired.

Love is a feeling.

Memory is proof.

There is something profoundly intimate about being remembered. Not in the grand, cinematic ways. Not because someone remembers your birthday after Facebook reminds them. Not because they know your favourite colour because you told them yesterday.

No.

I mean they remember the way you always peel oranges in one long strip because you once said it feels wrong to break the skin.

They remember that you always leave one sip of tea in the mug.

They remember you look out of train windows instead of talking because landscapes make you quieter than people ever could.

They remember you apologise to dogs before stepping around them.

They remember that whenever you’re overwhelmed, your voice doesn’t get louder.

It gets smaller.

They remember the story behind the scar on your knee that even you had forgotten existed until they pointed at it and asked, “That happened when you fell off your bicycle, didn’t it?”

And suddenly you’re standing in front of someone who has been collecting you.

Not observing.

Collecting.

As though your existence has become a museum they visit often enough to know where every painting hangs.

That kind of remembering makes me think perhaps we are all just archives disguised as people.

We walk around carrying libraries of one another.

Some people are only footnotes.

Some become entire shelves.

Some become books we never stop rereading.

There is an old phrase that says, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

I wonder if absence simply sharpens memory.

Because when people leave, they become details.

The exact laugh.

The chipped nail polish.

The hoodie that smelled like rain and fabric softener.

The tiny pause before they said your name.

The way they always looked for the moon before looking at the stars.

Memory is cruel like that.

It preserves what time insists on stealing.

It presses moments between pages the way people preserve flowers inside old novels. The petals dry. The colour fades. But somehow they become more precious because they survived.

Perhaps that is what remembering is.

Emotional taxidermy.

Keeping something alive after life has already moved on.

We often mistake love for intensity.

For racing hearts.

For grand declarations.

For airport reunions and handwritten letters and flowers and candlelit dinners and all the spectacular things cinema has convinced us romance should resemble.

But I think romance has always been embarrassingly ordinary.

It lives in someone buying the strawberry yoghurt because you once casually mentioned it’s always sold out.

It lives in charging someone else’s phone because you noticed it was on twelve percent before they did.

It lives in remembering that loud restaurants make them anxious.

That coriander tastes like soap to them.

That they pretend not to be cold until their hands start disappearing into their sleeves.

Love notices.

Memory refuses to forget what it noticed.

That is the difference.

There is a phrase I adore: to know someone by heart.

How strange that we use the heart as the organ of memory.

Not the brain.

Not the mind.

The heart.

As though real remembrance has never been intellectual.

Only emotional.

Maybe that is why forgetting someone hurts so much.

Not because they’re gone.

But because one day you realise you’ve forgotten the exact pitch of their laugh.

The way they pronounced Wednesday.

The rhythm of their footsteps in the hallway.

Their handwriting.

Their perfume.

The way they always stole fries after insisting they weren’t hungry.

And grief, perhaps, is simply the fear that memory has started packing its bags.

I think that’s why people revisit photographs.

Not to see faces.

To hear echoes.

A photograph isn’t an image.

It’s a key.

It unlocks rooms we forgot existed inside ourselves.

There is a peculiar tenderness in hearing someone say, “I saw this and immediately thought of you.”

Imagine what that sentence actually means.

Out of the billions of things in this world…

One tiny object…

One song…

One yellow umbrella…

One badly drawn cat…

One line in a book…

One cinnamon bun…

One random cloud…

One ridiculously shaped potato…

Managed to travel through the entire architecture of another person’s brain and arrive at you.

You became someone’s association.

Their instinct.

Their first thought.

How extraordinary is that?

How impossibly miraculous that another consciousness has quietly rearranged itself around your existence.

There is a Japanese idea called mono no aware—the gentle sadness that everything beautiful is temporary.

I wonder if remembering is our rebellion against impermanence.

Our way of arguing with time.

Saying,

“You may take the moment.

You may take the season.

You may take the city.

You may even take the person.

But you don’t get to take what they became inside me.”

Because memory is stubborn.

It survives moving houses.

Deleting chats.

Changing phone numbers.

Burning letters.

Growing older.

It hides in muscle memory.

In scents.

In songs.

In recipes.

In streets we accidentally avoid.

In coffee orders we no longer drink because they taste too much like someone.

The Greeks had different words for love.

Eros.

Philia.

Agape.

I sometimes think we deserved another.

A word for the kind of love that only reveals itself through remembrance.

The kind that quietly memorises instead of loudly confesses.

The kind that says,

“You once told me your grandmother hummed while cooking.”

“You always read the last page before buying a novel.”

“You fake confidence whenever you’re scared.”

“You blink rapidly when you’re trying not to cry.”

Not because these facts are useful.

But because you are.

Perhaps that’s what intimacy has always been.

Not knowing someone’s favourite colour.

Knowing why it became their favourite.

Not knowing their coffee order.

Knowing the story attached to it.

Not knowing they hate the rain.

Knowing which afternoon taught them to.

The deepest forms of love are autobiographical.

They remember chapters even the author forgot writing.

There is another phrase that has always fascinated me.

“To be seen.”

People spend their whole lives wanting to be seen.

But maybe what they actually mean is this:

“Please remember me accurately.”

Not as the loud version.

Or the happy version.

Or the successful version.

Remember the version who couldn’t finish their sentence because they started crying halfway through.

Remember the one who laughed until they snorted.

Remember the one who was trying so hard.

Remember the one who wasn’t easy to love but desperately wanted to be.

Remember the entire constellation.

Not just the brightest star.

I think forgetting is one of the quietest tragedies we experience.

Not dramatic enough to announce itself.

Just gradual.

Like colours fading in sunlight.

Like ink disappearing from old journals.

Like favourite jumpers becoming threadbare.

You don’t notice it happening until one day someone asks,

“What did their voice sound like?”

And you can’t answer.

That silence is devastating.

Maybe that is why I journal.

Why I underline books.

Why I hoard ticket stubs and receipts and dried flowers and screenshots and boarding passes and grocery lists with someone’s handwriting on them.

Not because I fear the future.

Because I don’t trust memory to win every battle against time.

Writing has always been my way of telling life,

“Not this one.

You don’t get to erase this one.”

Maybe that is why readers fall in love with books.

Books remember.

Long after people don’t.

Long after cities change names.

Long after houses are demolished.

Long after voices disappear.

Ink keeps saying,

“I remember.”

Again.

And again.

And again.

So yes, I love you is beautiful.

It is warm.

It is brave.

It is necessary.

But if one day, decades from now, someone looked at me with gentleness worn smooth by time and quietly said,

“I still remember you.”

Not because they had to.

Not because photographs reminded them.

Not because social media did.

But because somewhere inside them, I had continued existing without asking permission…

I think that would undo me.

Because love can happen in an instant.

People fall in love over conversations, sunsets, songs, shared umbrellas, missed trains, and borrowed books.

But remembrance…

Remembrance is earned.

It survives boredom.

Distance.

Silence.

Ordinary Tuesdays.

Growing older.

Changing.

It chooses someone over and over without ever announcing the decision.

And maybe that is why I believe I remember you is the most romantic sentence in any language.

Because it doesn’t merely say,

“I loved you.”

It says,

“Time tried to take you from me.

It failed.”
Time tried to take you from me.

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It failed.

Because perhaps that is all memory has ever been.

Our quietest rebellion.

Our softest act of defiance against entropy.

Against endings.

Against the terrifying arithmetic of time that insists everything must eventually become less.

Less vivid.

Less audible.

Less familiar.

Until one day it expects us to mistake forgetting for healing.

But I don’t think healing has ever required forgetting.

I think we’ve simply confused moving forward with leaving things behind.

The sea moves forward.

It never abandons the rivers that made it.

Perhaps we are oceans too.

Carrying every river that has ever emptied itself into us.

Some people think memories are photographs.

Frozen.

Still.

I disagree.

Memories breathe.

They evolve every time we revisit them.

Like constellations that rearrange themselves depending on which part of the sky we’re standing beneath.

The conversation you had at nineteen means something entirely different when you’re twenty-nine.

The goodbye that once felt unbearable later becomes gratitude wearing a different coat.

Even pain grows older.

It exchanges its sharp edges for quieter ones.

It no longer screams.

It hums.

There is something beautifully unfair about the fact that human beings remember emotionally before they remember logically.

You smell petrichor and suddenly you’re seven again.

Someone laughs a certain way and you’re sitting beside an old friend you haven’t spoken to in years.

A melody crawls out of a café speaker and, without asking permission, an entire version of yourself walks back into the room.

Memory doesn’t knock.

It owns a spare key.

Scientists tell us that memories are electrical pathways, neurons firing, proteins strengthening synapses.

How heartbreakingly insufficient that explanation feels.

Because if memory were only biology, why does someone’s handwriting still feel warmer than a text message?

Why can an old jumper still smell like a person months after they’ve left?

Why does a city become haunted simply because someone once smiled at you there?

No.

Memory is more than storage.

It is architecture.

We do not remember people.

We build cathedrals around them.

Brick by brick.

Story by story.

Until they echo differently depending on where we stand.

I have always found it strange that we ask people, “Do you miss them?”

As though missing is a yes-or-no question.

Missing is weather.

Some days it is a drizzle.

Some days it is a thunderstorm.

Some days it is sunlight that somehow still reminds you of rain.

It arrives uninvited, rearranges the furniture inside your chest, drinks the last cup of tea, opens every window, and leaves without explaining itself.

How could anyone answer that with a simple yes?

Maybe that is why Marcel Proust wrote so obsessively about remembrance.

Not because he wanted to revisit the past.

But because the past keeps revisiting us.

There is no such thing as leaving yesterday untouched.

Yesterday has fingerprints.

It reaches into the present and gently alters how we hold today’s hand.

Sometimes I wonder whether we ever truly know someone while they are standing in front of us.

Or whether people become clearest only after memory has sanded away everything unnecessary.

We remember the essence.

Not the chronology.

Nobody says,

“I remember the seventeenth of October at precisely 3:42 p.m.”

They say,

“I remember how safe I felt.”

“I remember laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe.”

“I remember believing life could only become bigger from there.”

Feelings survive details.

Maybe that is why diaries matter.

Why marginalia exists.

Why lovers leave notes inside books.

Why grandparents tell the same stories every Christmas.

We are not preserving information.

We are preserving emotion.

Trying desperately to bottle something that was never liquid to begin with.

Language itself understands this.

We say someone stays with us.

Not physically.

Emotionally.

We say someone left a mark.

As though love were capable of engraving itself into bone.

We speak of people crossing our minds, holding a place in our hearts, occupying our thoughts, living rent-free.

Even our idioms confess that memory behaves like geography.

People become places.

Some are train stations.

Brief.

Necessary.

Forgotten by the next journey.

Others become home.

You carry the address long after the house no longer exists.

Perhaps that is why I love books so irrationally.

Every novel is someone remembering.

A narrator remembering childhood.

A character remembering first love.

An author remembering an emotion they couldn’t survive without translating into ink.

Reading is simply borrowing another person’s memory until it begins resembling your own.

Maybe that’s why certain fictional characters feel more familiar than real people.

Someone remembered them so completely that now we do too.

And isn’t that astonishing?

That words can outlive voices.

That ink can outlive pulse.

That remembrance can become inheritance.

I think about old couples sometimes.

The kind who no longer finish each other’s sentences because they’ve already memorised the silence between them.

The husband who still buys two coffees before remembering she’s been gone for years.

The wife who still folds the left sleeve of his jumper first because that’s how he liked it.

People call those habits.

I call them love refusing to learn the language of absence.

Because perhaps that is what devotion becomes if you let it age.

Not louder.

Quieter.

Less like fireworks.

More like muscle memory.

You stop choosing them consciously.

Your body remembers before your mind does.

Your hands remember where theirs fit.

Your feet remember the pace they walked.

Your heart remembers a rhythm no metronome could ever teach it.

And maybe that is why I have never believed that forgetting is the opposite of loving.

Indifference is.

Forgetfulness is merely time doing what time has always done.

But remembering…

Remembering is intentional.

It is the decision to let another human being continue existing inside the architecture of your soul, even after the world has stopped asking you to.

So perhaps the greatest privilege we can ever offer another person is not our forever.

Forever is an impossible promise.

Perhaps the greatest gift is much smaller.

Much quieter.

To pay attention so completely that years later we can still say,

“I remember the way you looked at sunsets as though the sky owed you an explanation.”

“I remember how every bookstore became slower because of you.”

“I remember that your laughter always arrived a second before your smile.”

“I remember the version of you that even you have forgotten.”

Because there is a peculiar kind of immortality hidden inside remembrance.

Not the immortality of statues.

Or names carved into stone.

But the kind that survives in ordinary people.

In recipes passed down without measurements.

In phrases borrowed from our mothers.

In songs our fathers hummed absent-mindedly.

In the way we unconsciously tilt our head because someone we loved used to.

Maybe we never really disappear.

Maybe we simply become someone else’s way of doing things.

Someone else’s favourite sentence.

Someone else’s inexplicable softness toward yellow flowers.

Someone else’s habit of looking at the moon before checking the time.

And if that is true…

Then perhaps the most extraordinary thing one person can ever say to another isn’t I love you.

It is something far gentler.

Far rarer.

A sentence that asks for nothing in return.

One that simply reaches across the impossible distance between yesterday and today, smiles, and whispers—

“I remember.”

If someone ever tells you they remember you, believe them. They are telling you that, somehow, you survived time.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that does not come from being alone.

It comes from being capable.

It settles quietly into the lives of people who have learned, often much too early, how to carry their own burdens. It lives in the spaces between “I’m fine” and “I’ll manage.” It grows in the soil of competence and responsibility, watered by years of solving problems before they become emergencies and swallowing worries before they become visible. From the outside, such people appear sturdy. They are the oak trees in family photographs, the lighthouses in friendships, the dependable protagonists who always seem to know what chapter comes next. Yet even oak trees creak during storms. Even lighthouses are battered by waves. Even the most self-sufficient hearts grow tired of being their own shelter. We speak often about strength as though it were a fortress, all stone walls and iron gates, but I have begun to suspect that real strength is something far softer. Perhaps it is less like a fortress and more like a garden: resilient not because it is impenetrable, but because it continues to bloom despite seasons of frost.

I have spent much of my life admiring independence the way sailors admire the moon: from a distance, with reverence. Independence seemed noble. It seemed elegant. It seemed like a language spoken by people who had mastered themselves. But lately I have found myself wondering whether we have misunderstood it altogether. We treat independence as the absence of need, when perhaps it is simply the confidence that need does not diminish us. Somewhere along the way, many of us inherited the strange belief that if we are strong enough, wise enough, mature enough, we should be able to soothe every fear alone. We should be able to sit with uncertainty without trembling. We should be able to carry grief without leaning. We should be able to weather every storm with nothing but our own two hands. Yet nature itself argues against this philosophy. Rivers need banks. Birds travel in formations. Trees beneath the earth intertwine their roots, quietly exchanging nutrients through fungal networks scientists call the “wood wide web.” Even forests understand what humans often forget: survival is rarely a solitary achievement.

Perhaps that is why the smallest acts of care move us so profoundly. They arrive without fanfare, without fireworks, without orchestras swelling dramatically in the background. They arrive disguised as ordinary moments. A message. A phone call. A gentle check-in. A whispered prayer. A few words spoken with sincerity. They are so small that they almost escape notice, and yet they possess the curious power to alter the emotional weather of an entire day. Like a single candle in a dark room, they do not banish the darkness completely, but they change our relationship with it. Shadows become less threatening. Corners soften. The room remains the same, yet everything feels different.

Anxiety, after all, is an accomplished architect. Given enough time, it can construct entire cathedrals from a single uncertainty. It lays one brick of worry upon another until suddenly we are standing beneath vaulted ceilings of imagined catastrophes. It takes a delayed response and turns it into abandonment. It takes silence and dresses it in tragedy. It takes uncertainty and teaches it how to wear the mask of certainty. If hope whispers, anxiety delivers monologues. If reality writes a sentence, anxiety writes an epic. It is a novelist of worst-case scenarios, endlessly productive and rarely accurate. And when we are frightened, what we often need is not someone to demolish the cathedral. We simply need someone to walk inside it with us, take our hand, and remind us that echoes are not evidence.

I think this is where love is most often misunderstood.

We are taught to recognise love in its loudest forms. In declarations. In anniversaries. In grand gestures worthy of cinema screens and bestselling novels. We are taught to search for fireworks while overlooking the match that lit the first candle. Yet when I think about the people who have made me feel most loved throughout my life, my memories rarely arrive dressed in spectacle. Instead, they arrive carrying ordinary things. A voice lingering on the phone a little longer than necessary. Someone remembering a passing comment from months ago. A text asking whether I made it home safely. Someone noticing a change in my tone before I have the courage to acknowledge it myself.

Perhaps love is less a thunderstorm and more a steady rainfall.

Not dramatic enough to make headlines, but persistent enough to change landscapes.I think this is why kindness feels so sacred. Not because it solves problems, but because it changes the temperature of suffering. Imagine winter. Imagine standing alone in a snowstorm. Now imagine someone placing a blanket around your shoulders. The snow still falls. The wind still blows. The road ahead remains uncertain. Yet the experience has changed entirely because you are no longer facing it without warmth. Kindness is rarely the removal of pain; more often it is the provision of warmth within it. We celebrate people who fix things, but the older I become, the more I admire people who stay. The people who sit beside hospital beds. The people who answer late-night calls. The people who remember details others overlook. The people who offer reassurance not because they possess special wisdom, but because they understand the profound human need to be accompanied.

Literature has always known this. Long before psychologists developed theories about emotional regulation and attachment, poets were writing about the healing power of presence. When I think of companionship, I think of Samwise Gamgee carrying not the Ring, but Frodo himself. I think of Anne Shirley and Diana Barry pledging eternal friendship beside a brook. I think of the countless letters exchanged between writers throughout history, letters filled not with solutions but solidarity. Virginia Woolf once described friendship as an inexplicable delight. C.S. Lewis called it the moment one person says to another, “What? You too?” Emily Dickinson, who understood solitude perhaps better than most, still filled her poems with correspondence, connection, and longing. Again and again, literature returns to the same conclusion: human beings survive because they are witnessed.

There is something deeply holy about being witnessed.

Not observed.

Not monitored.

Witnessed.

To be witnessed is to have someone acknowledge both your strength and your vulnerability without treating either as a contradiction. It is to be seen carrying a heavy load and have someone quietly say, “That looks heavy.” It is to have someone notice the tremor beneath your composure. To recognise the brave face and care for the frightened heart behind it. Witnessing is an act of love because it refuses to simplify people. It understands that courage and fear often occupy the same room.

The Ancient Greeks divided love into different forms: eros, philia, agape, storge. Different languages for the same human longing to connect, nurture, and belong. Yet all of them seem to share a common thread. Love, at its core, is attention. It is the deliberate act of saying, “You matter enough for me to notice.” In a distracted world, that may be one of the rarest gifts we can offer.

To make another person feel loved is not always to solve their problems. More often, it is to remind them that their existence has weight. That their joys deserve celebration and their fears deserve tenderness. That they are not merely passing through the lives of others unnoticed. We underestimate how transformative it can be to make someone feel significant. Entire books have been written about self-worth, belonging, and attachment, yet sometimes the feeling arrives through the smallest of gestures. A remembered birthday. A saved seat. A prayer spoken in private. A simple, sincere “I was thinking of you.”I have become increasingly fascinated by what psychologists call micro-affirmations. Tiny acts of recognition so small they are almost invisible. A remembered preference. A thoughtful question. A reassuring word. A prayer offered on your behalf. A voice that remains calm when yours begins to shake. These moments seem insignificant in isolation. They are droplets of water. But over time, droplets become rivers. Rivers carve valleys. Valleys reshape landscapes. The heart is no different. We are transformed not only by grand declarations, but by repeated reminders that we matter. The truth is that most lives are not changed by one spectacular act of love. They are changed by thousands of ordinary ones.

And perhaps that is the miracle.

Not the dramatic miracle of mountains moving or seas parting, but the quiet miracle of one person choosing to be gentle in a world that often rewards hardness. The miracle of someone lending steadiness when another person feels unsteady. The miracle of someone becoming a lantern.

I love that image: a lantern.

Not a spotlight.

Not a sun.

A lantern.

A lantern does not overwhelm darkness. It simply creates enough light for the next few steps. It says, “You do not need to see the entire path tonight. You only need to see where to place your foot next.” How many times have we survived because someone became a lantern for us? A teacher who believed in us before we believed in ourselves. A friend who answered the phone. A stranger who offered unexpected kindness. A loved one who carried hope for us when ours temporarily ran out. We remember these people not because they changed the course of history, but because they changed the course of an evening, a difficult week, a fragile moment. Yet sometimes that is enough. Sometimes saving a single moment saves far more than we realise.

The world often praises independence while overlooking interdependence. It applauds the lone hero and forgets the hands that steadied them. Yet if nature, literature, psychology, and faith all teach us anything, it is this: we belong to one another. Not in a possessive sense, but in the way stars belong to a constellation. Each star shines independently, yet together they form something meaningful. Each note exists individually, yet together they become music. Each thread is fragile alone, yet woven together they create fabric strong enough to endure.

Perhaps the independent heart spends years learning this lesson. It learns that accepting comfort is not surrender. That reassurance is not weakness. That needing people occasionally does not erase competence. That allowing yourself to be cared for is not the opposite of strength. It is one of its most beautiful expressions.

And so I find myself thinking less about resilience and more about tenderness. Less about carrying everything alone and more about the people who quietly help us carry things together. The people whose words arrive like cups of tea on rainy afternoons. The people whose presence feels like finding a bookmark in a beloved novel exactly where you left off. The people who remind us, gently and repeatedly, that fear does not have to be faced in solitude.

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In a world obsessed with grand gestures, perhaps the most extraordinary thing we can do is offer small kindnesses consistently. To become lanterns for one another. To hold hope on behalf of those who cannot find it. To whisper courage into anxious corners. To remain when it would be easier to leave. To choose gentleness again and again and again.

Because sometimes a heart is not looking for answers.

Sometimes it is simply looking for light.

i turn to my side, then slowly onto my back, and something shifts.

it isn’t loud. it isn’t even clear. but suddenly, i’m not here anymore.

i can smell it first.

old paper. second grade textbooks. that slightly dusty, sun-warmed smell of pages that have been turned too many times by small hands. and just like that, i’m sitting there again, staring at a chapter that felt far too big for me at the time. how to make a blog. i didn’t even know what a blog truly was, but i remember thinking…this must be important. this must be something older me will understand.

and now i do.

but somehow, that doesn’t feel like a victory.

i can see the room too. that storeroom that doubled as my classroom. the place where i was both teacher and student, where i created entire worlds just to fill the silence of being a single child. i remember how seriously i took it. how i would speak out loud, correct myself, nod as if someone else was answering.

it wasn’t lonely then. it was… full.

full of imagination. full of voices i created so i didn’t have to sit in the quiet too long.

and then, like a flicker, another memory walks in.

the girl.

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she lived in that rented room nearby with her family. she borrowed books from me…books my grandpa gave her so easily, so warmly, as if stories were meant to be shared, not kept. i remember deciding she would be my best friend. not asking. just… deciding.

but she left.

a few days later, just like that. with my books. with that small, invisible thread i had tied between us.

and i never saw her again.

i don’t even know why that memory surfaces now, of all times. why her face, blurred by time, feels so close tonight. maybe because some parts of us never really learned how to say goodbye.

the sky in my memory is always twilight.

that soft, almost-gold fading into blue. the kind of light that makes everything feel possible and a little sad at the same time. i was vibrant then. loud in my own way. full of energy that didn’t always know where to go.

but there was sadness too.

buried deep. quiet. unnamed.

and yet…with amma, i felt powerful. like nothing could really touch me.

i remember dinners. laughter. the sound of plates. the simple ritual of being together. and every night, before sleep, i’d high-five my grandpa like it sealed the day. like it meant something sacred had been completed.

and saturdays.

god, saturdays felt infinite.

five episodes of inuyasha back to back, as if that was the only purpose life had. as if nothing beyond that screen mattered. time moved differently then. slower. kinder.

even the air felt different.

Share arushi’s brain dump café

the water tasted heavier, somehow. like it carried more weight, more presence. everything did. everything was sharper, closer, more real.

and now, lying here in 2026, that entire world feels so near that i could almost reach out and step into it.

almost.

but i won’t.

because i know something now that that child didn’t.

memories like these aren’t just soft.

they come with tides.

with currents that pull too hard. with sharks hiding beneath the calm. with pirates that steal from the very treasure you’re trying to protect.

they don’t just give…you pay for them.

and tonight, i choose not to.

i stay here.

in this bed. in this year. in this version of me that knows better than to chase something that only exists in fragments.

i bite my lip. close my eyes.

and let the past pass through me…

without following it.

and then, sometimes, it only takes a few words to shift something deep within you.

it’s strange how language works like that. how a simple sentence, spoken casually, can settle into your chest and stay there. “i miss you.” “i’m coming home to you.” they’re not grand declarations, not poetic or rehearsed, and yet they carry a weight that feels almost disproportionate to their simplicity. maybe it’s because they don’t try too hard. maybe it’s because they arrive unannounced, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary moment.

what fascinates me is how those words don’t just land, they transform. the same face you were just critical of softens. the same tiredness feels a little lighter. something shifts internally, like a quiet reassurance that you are held in someone’s thoughts, even from a distance you can’t quite measure. it’s not about validation in the superficial sense. it’s about being remembered, chosen, returned to.

and suddenly, the day feels different.

it makes me wonder how much of what we carry is altered by the smallest exchanges. how often we underestimate the power of saying something simple, something honest, something unguarded. because sometimes, it isn’t the long conversations or the big gestures that stay with you. it’s the brief, almost passing words that echo the longest.

the ones that make you pause, smile to yourself, and feel, just for a moment, entirely at home.

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maybe that’s why i keep thinking about them. wondering what they’re doing right now. are they busy, are they laughing somewhere, are they asleep, are they staring at their own ceiling thinking about something completely different. i’m not naive enough to pretend people don’t have their own lives. of course they do. everyone is carrying their own quiet battles, their own responsibilities, their own routines that have nothing to do with me. i know i cannot expect someone to orbit around my world at all times. that would be unfair and honestly a little ridiculous.

but knowing that doesn’t stop the small ache of them not being here in this exact moment. it is such a simple thing and yet it feels annoyingly big. not some grand heartbreak story, just the dull weight of absence. the kind that makes you stare at your phone waiting for a call you never actually asked for. the kind that makes you think about all the time you wish you could spend with someone before life gets busy or weird or complicated or suddenly very short.

and here i am in my room with my little portable heater humming like it knows i’m having a dramatic moment. i have been sitting here long enough to realise i desperately need to pee but apparently sadness has decided we are not moving today. so i’m just sitting here like a stubborn statue thinking about life, people, distance and timing. honestly i don’t even know what i’m doing. maybe feeling things for no good reason is also just part of being human. or maybe i’m just really committed to ignoring my bladder tonight.

it started with chai. such a small ordinary thing that lives in kitchens and mornings and half awake conversations. my gran wanted chai and my mom wanted chai too and somehow that small request landed softly in my hands. i went ahead because i thought i could do it. not with loud confidence or drama, just a quiet belief that i could make a decent cup. my mom loves my chai. my friends do too. that felt like enough.

three people, three cups, three very different relationships with the same drink. my mom does not take sugar at all. my grandma likes a little sugar and a lot of warmth. i like my tea balanced in my own way with enough milk and enough sugar to feel complete. proper tea, as i call it. i made it with brown sugar that day, a small experiment, a small change. everything tasted slightly unfamiliar but not wrong. my mom was fine with it. my gran drank it too, even added extra water later, adjusting it quietly to her liking.

in the morning it seemed done and dusted. just tea. just another day.

but in the evening when i went back to the kitchen to make chai again, my gran spoke. gently. without sharpness. she said the tea was fine, only that it was a little strong for her. maybe a little less tea next time. nothing more. nothing cruel. nothing meant to hurt.

for five seconds my chest felt too tight, like something small had cracked open inside. it surprised me how fast it happened and how intense it felt. she was not rude. she did not tell me to change. she simply shared how it felt to her. still, my heart reacted before my mind could step in.

why do such small comments sting so deeply sometimes?! why does something said with love still manage to bruise?!

i did not react badly. i nodded. i smiled. i moved on. but the feeling stayed longer than the moment itself.

later it made me think about how used we get to doing things a certain way. how comfort builds habits and habits start to feel like truth. we forget that what works for us does not automatically work for everyone else. taste is such a perfect example of this. the same chai, made with care, can feel perfect to one person and slightly off to another. neither is wrong. neither needs fixing.

we often think understanding means changing ourselves completely for others. sometimes it does. sometimes it does not. sometimes understanding is simply listening and letting the difference exist without turning it into a wound. you do not always have to adjust your recipe. you just have to accept that someone else’s tongue knows something different.

human behaviour is strange that way. we expect sameness where there is none. we forget that everyone carries their own history, their own preferences, their own silent rules for comfort. we take things personally when they are not meant to be personal at all. maybe the tea was just strong. maybe the comment was just honest. maybe not everything is about us.

and yet emotions do not run on logic alone. they show up when they want to. they flare up in kitchens and conversations and cups of tea. the real work begins after that first reaction. do we harden. do we shrink. or do we pause and ask ourselves what is actually being said here.

is it really criticism or is it just difference? is it rejection or just preference?

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chai taught me something that day. not about measurements or strength but about people. about how love and feedback can exist in the same sentence. about how we do not need to fit into everyone else’s cup to belong. and about how sometimes the deepest lessons come disguised as the smallest moments.

also, who knew tea could turn into a full life lesson. should i start charging chai for therapy next time?

this is where everyday moments become small lessons. not dramatic ones, not life altering ones, but steady reminders. people are not recipes. even when you follow all the steps with care, the outcome will land differently for each person.

is it possible to listen without absorbing everything as personal? can we let observations pass through us without reshaping ourselves around them?

by the end of the day, the tea remained what it was. i remained who i was. nothing needed fixing. something simply needed noticing.

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and maybe that is the point. that life keeps offering us these small, ordinary situations to practice understanding. not loudly, not forcefully, but quietly, like chai cooling on the counter, reminding us that difference is not a flaw. it is just part of the room.

in the end, i will still make my tea the way i like it. and when i make it for others, i will remember that taste is personal, not political. understanding does not mean erasing yourself. it just means letting people be who they are without taking it as a verdict on who you are.

sometimes i worry the universe is laughing at me. like it handed me this one person and then sat back with popcorn to watch me turn into the most unserious version of myself. i can be in the middle of something important and suddenly my brain is like hey remember that one tiny moment that should not matter at all. and boom. i’m smiling like someone just handed me a secret. i swear i try to be a serious adult and then love taps me on the shoulder and i lose all professionalism.

there’s something ridiculous about the way love creeps in. it doesn’t show up wearing fireworks or neon signs. it slips in during the small things. like the way a face on a screen can make the whole room feel warmer. or how one stupid joke can unclench every muscle in my body. i hate how soft i am about it and at the same time i love how soft it makes me feel. it’s embarrassing and beautiful and somehow perfect.

i think the rawest thing about this kind of love is how it doesn’t ask if i’m ready. it just arrives and rearranges me. it makes me admit things i didn’t plan to say. it makes me laugh at moments that should not be funny. it makes me hold memories like they’re treasure. sometimes i rewind them in my head and i catch myself giggling out loud and honestly who gave love the right to be this powerful. it should come with a warning label.

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but the magic is in how ordinary it is. how love lives in the routine. how it hides in the quiet. how it keeps growing even when life gets messy. there are days when i feel tired down to my bones and then i remember i am loved. really loved. and something inside me uncloses. love becomes this soft little engine that keeps me going. it is raw but gentle. loud but safe. silly but honest.

and the funniest part is that after all this time it still surprises me. every single day. like love wakes up new. like my heart has a mind of its own and insists on falling again for the same person. i don’t understand it and maybe i don’t need to. maybe the whole point is that love is not supposed to fit neatly into anything. it spills out. it shakes me awake. it makes me feel like a girl with stars stuck in her hair.

i don’t know how to explain this in the language people usually use for love. i only know what it feels like in mine. it feels like tripping over a memory and laughing before i hit the ground. it feels like a joke between me and the universe. it feels like someone turned my heart into a small sun and didn’t ask for permission. it feels like home but funnier. softer. brighter. mine in a way that no one else will ever understand.

“you found your way here, so take what you need and pass it on if you feel it. this space grows by touch, not by force.”

there are nights when the house feels alive in a way you wish it didn’t. every room sighs with a kind of old exhaustion, the kind that settles into the corners and waits for someone to notice. i sit in the living room with the television murmuring to itself, pretending it is enough noise to drown the tension, even though we both know it isn’t.

some people say silence is peaceful. they have never lived inside a silence that feels like held breath.

and somehow i am here, sitting in the living room, pretending to watch a television that whispers instead of speaks. i feel like a purifier someone forgot to plug out. i sit still and try to pull the negativity toward myself so it does not drown anyone else. it is ridiculous and heroic at the same time, which is how most family roles are assigned anyway.

from the corridor, footsteps stir the air. someone is cooking again, not because anyone is hungry, but because someone else demanded it. it is a script played out so often that the walls could recite the lines. he speaks sharply. pots clatter. the night folds into itself. and somehow the choreography continues without anyone ever calling it out.

there is a strange humour in watching the same patterns repeat themselves, year after year, like a sitcom with no laugh track. the demands, the noise, the chaos trying to wear a familiar face. it would almost be funny if it wasn’t so heavy. maybe it is still a little funny. trauma has a warped sense of timing like that.

i sit there feeling ridiculous and necessary at the same time. as if my presence alone might absorb a little of the tension, the way air purifiers swallow dust. i know it is an illusion, but illusions are soft to hold. they make the room feel less sharp.

every now and then someone glances my way, not because they want help but because they do not want me to hurt. it is a small gesture. light as a feather, heavy as a universe. it lands on the heart in an odd way, a mix of warmth and ache. a reminder that even in messy homes, care still finds strange doorways to slip through.

and for a moment, i sit there with eyes stinging, not from pain but from recognition. this is what it is to be human inside chaos. you feel everything, even the things no one says. you carry the weight even when you pretend you do not.

sadness is strange. it arrives with wet eyes and warm hands. it tells me i am helpless, yet somehow necessary. it tells me i cannot fix anything, yet my presence still matters. maybe i am a small light. maybe i am a distraction. maybe i am just a witness to trauma that recycles itself like old songs you do not want to hear but know all the words to.

and still, in the middle of this tired choreography, there is a thin strip of tenderness. a girl who sits in the living room absorbing misery like humidity. a family that is somehow still surviving the chaos it refuses to name.

tonight i am choosing to write. not to solve anything, not to expose anyone, not to analyse the patterns until they break apart. i write because the act itself is a release. because the page can take what the heart cannot hold forever.

thanks for reading arushi’s brain dump café! welcome to my corner of the internet. steal a line. share a feeling. send it to someone who might understand the noise in these words.

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maybe this is how you survive a house full of tired echoes.

you sit quietly.

you breathe through it.

you turn the heaviness into words that no one has to be afraid of.

words that pull the weight out of my chest and place it gently onto a page where it can sit without hurting anyone.

if peace won’t come, at least the sentence will.

and at the center of many families there is that one person. the one who demands more than he gives. the one who never learned that care is something you offer, not something you command. the one who believes that age alone grants him importance, even when he has done nothing to earn it.

there are houses where the loudest voice belongs to the person who has done the least growing. a grown man throwing words like stones. a grown man expecting the world to move around him. a grown man who is old enough to know better but somehow never learned how to be better.

the rest of the family bends around him in silence. the mother who excuses him. the women who feed him. the walls that have memorised his footsteps. the quiet sighs that rise from rooms where someone is always picking up after someone else.

there is a strange comedy in watching an adult behave exactly like he did as a teenager. the same tantrums. the same selfishness. the same belief that care is his birthright. sometimes you cannot help but laugh. not because it is funny, but because the alternative is to scream into a pillow and scare the neighbours.

what no one tells you is that every family has its own choreography. a routine learned over decades. the giver gives. the taker takes. the house breathes around the imbalance and tries not to collapse. there is guilt sitting at the dinner table. there is exhaustion in the sink. there is history in every unspoken sentence.

and then there is the child who grows up watching all of it. the one who finally looks around and thinks, wait, is this really how we are supposed to live. the one who sees the cycle clearly and refuses to pretend it is normal. the one who does not hate anyone, but also does not wish to carry their weight forever.

sometimes love is quiet rebellion. sometimes love is stepping away. sometimes love is choosing not to inherit the damage that shaped the generation before you.

and sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is simply say:

i see what this is. i am not repeating it.

families may be planets, but even planets change their orbit. even gravity loses its power when someone decides to walk in a different direction.

and if you ever find yourself laughing at the absurdity of it all, that is not cruelty. that is survival. that is your soul telling you that life is strange and painful and ridiculous and that you are allowed to find your own peace in the middle of it.

after all, not every story ends with healing. some stories end when you finally understand that the chaos was never yours to fix.

reading Didion & Babitz felt a little like watching two women argue inside my head; the part of me that loves control, clarity, and cold observation (hello Joan), and the part of me that wants to live sloppily, deliciously, in the heat of my own life (hi Eve). i didn’t expect a biography to feel this intimate, but somewhere between Anolik’s sharp commentary and the messy glamour of 60s–70s LA, i started realising that these two women aren’t just literary figures. they’re archetypes we all carry inside us. and honestly? i saw pieces of myself in both of them. the girl who watches everything quietly, and the girl who wants to be seen too much.

didion’s writing has always made me feel like she was picking apart my brain with a pair of tweezers, and babitz reminds me of those moments in my life where i loved something simply because it made me feel alive, even if the feeling was fleeting or reckless. reading about their parallels and departures made me think about my own contradictions. like how i can write in the calmest tone while feeling a hurricane behind my ribs. how i choose silence in moments i should have spoken. how i’ve lived certain phases of my life like a didion paragraph (precise & controlled) and others like a babitz essay — messy, sensual, a little doomed but beautiful anyway.

what struck me most was how differently the world treated them despite their talent: didion was “serious,” babitz was “chaotic,” and both labels were partly true, partly invented for the comfort of everyone else. it made me wonder about the labels we’re given without our consent. how many of us spend years performing the version of ourselves that feels easiest for others to digest? how many of us have an inner babitz we hide because the world only rewards the didion mask?

and then there are those moments in the book where anolik digs into the way these women navigated fame, intimacy, and the loneliness that comes with being hyper-aware of your own myth. it reminded me of times i’ve been in a room full of people and still felt like a watcher, not a participant like i was collecting sentences for later rather than living in the moment. (tell me someone else relates to this please).

reading this felt like eavesdropping on two ghosts, one cool and controlled, the other warm and burning.

but then there were times in my life where i acted like babitz would’ve said yes because it felt good, took the long way home because it felt cinematic, kissed someone knowing it wouldn’t last but wanting the memory anyway. and reading this book made me weirdly grateful for both versions of myself. like it’s okay to be disciplined and disastrous. soft and sharp. observant and excessive. maybe we’re all just oscillating between didion and babitz depending on the year, the heartbreak, the city, the loneliness, the weather.

anolik’s writing is fast, gossipy, electric; honestly it reads like someone whispering secrets directly into your ear. which is maybe why i couldn’t stop reading. and now i want to ask everyone who has ever loved a messy woman writer:

who are you more scared of turning into — didion or babitz? and why?

or maybe the better question is:

which one do you wish you were, and which one do you think you actually are?

because i swear this book exposes the parts of yourself you didn’t even know were hiding in the margins.

i felt this weird mix of envy and guilt twisting inside me. like why the hell didn’t i get to feel that kind of soft teenage romance. i’m only twenty five but watching them made me feel both too old and too young at the same time.

it was like staring at a version of my life i never got to live.

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and then the boy in the white t shirt looked at the girl beside him. really looked. the kind of look that’s quick and terrified and hopeful all at once.

he kept glancing at her then away then back again like his heart had its own stupid rhythm. and suddenly my jealousy just… melted. i felt myself shift into something lighter a little girl version of me giggling for no reason.

i stopped being angry at my own past and just watched them like it was a tiny miracle happening right in front of me.

it made me feel gentle. it made me feel human again.

it reminded me that maybe i haven’t missed anything maybe love still has time to arrive in all the ways i never thought it would.

the quiet ache of growing up too fast

he taught me what cruelty looks like in its truest form. not loud but quiet. not chaos but certainty. that cold certainty of someone who knows you are breaking and watches without a blink. someone who hurts you because it keeps them alive.

but here is the part he never calculated. he made something feral in me, yes, but he did not get to shape what i became after the breaking. i get to decide that. i get to decide who i am when the lights come back on.

i could become what he is. it would be easy. anger has teeth and it offers them to me every night. i could spit venom the way he did. i could say things that would tear him apart. i could turn into the reflection he wants me to be.

but i don’t.

i don’t because i refuse to carry his rot in my bones. i refuse to live like him, hollow and heartless. i refuse to let the monster he tried to leave in me grow into something he would recognize.

i choose a different kind of darkness. one that is mine. one that knows how to feel without turning numb. one that knows how to survive without becoming cruel. one that knows how to rage without becoming a disaster.

he made the monster in me

but i decide what it learns to eat.

and i choose to starve it of anything that resembles him.

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The thought wasn’t even mine. It was a sentence someone close to me said years ago. Just one sentence: “You cannot make everyone happy.”

Simple.

Basic.

Almost cliché.

But it came back to me in high-definition, like my brain had been secretly saving it in 4K resolution all these years just to replay it at the most inconvenient moment.

When they said it to me the first time, I remember brushing it off. I was like, well maybe you can’t, but I will. Which is hilarious now. Who the hell did I think I was? Mother Teresa with a planner? A customer service rep for humanity? I was basically auditioning for the role of Universal People-Pleaser. Spoiler: I didn’t get the part, but unfortunately, I’m still doing unpaid rehearsals.

I mean, let’s be real. If people-pleasing were an Olympic sport, I’d have more medals than Michael Phelps. Categories would include:

• The 100m sprint of saying “yes” before I even process the question.

• The weightlifting championship of guilt where I bench-press everyone’s expectations.

• And of course, the all-night mental gymnastics, twisting myself into pretzels wondering if someone is mad at me.

Honestly, if effort alone counted, I’d be shredded by now. But no, all it burns is my energy, my time, my patience, and sometimes my soul. And after all that cardio? People are still unsatisfied. Always. Without fail.

And me? I lie there at night, staring at the ceiling like a dumb philosopher, whispering: maybe I could’ve done more.

The gag is it’s not even about the present. I could survive a little disappointment right now. No, the beast I’m running from is future guilt. That’s what actually keeps me chained.

Because what if, and this is the intrusive thought that eats me alive; what if one day they’re gone? What if I’m standing at their funeral, staring at a photo while people cry around me, and the only thought in my head is: damn, I could’ve tried harder. I could’ve done more. I could’ve made them happy. That’s what terrifies me. That’s what makes me push past my limits now, bending over backwards like a yoga instructor who lost the class syllabus.

So yeah, my present gets hijacked by the ghost of my hypothetical future regret. Cute, right? I’m basically negotiating with a ghost that doesn’t even exist yet. And the ghost always wins.

Here’s the kicker though: some of these people? They weren’t even good to me. Objectively. Like, if you interviewed my therapist (if I had one) and laid out the receipts, the verdict would be: yeah, they hurt you. But then my brain, bless its toxic little heart, goes: but they shaped you too. They played a role in your growth.

So apparently trauma now counts as character development. Great. Love that for me. It’s giving “villain backstory but make it noble.”

And yet, I can’t detach. Even when my logic is screaming, “babe, stop.” Even when my friends say, “they don’t deserve it.” I still find myself showing up, doing things, trying to fix, trying to soften, trying to be the glue. My heart and my guilt have this rigged boxing match, and guilt always has longer arms.

Here’s the funniest contradiction of them all: in theory, I’m the queen of boundaries. Oh, I talk about boundaries. I romanticize them. I put them on vision boards like they’re aesthetic candles. I say things like: “This year, I’m prioritizing myself. No more people-pleasing. Protect your peace.” It sounds so damn sexy when I say it. Pinterest could use it as a font sample.

But the second I actually try to live it? Ha. Joke’s on me. Suddenly, I’m sitting across from someone, throat closing up, chest heavy, palms sweaty like Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” and I cave. I say yes. I do the thing. I go out, I show up, I give. Because disappointing myself always feels easier than disappointing them.

I am fluent in theory. Illiterate in practice. I could write essays about self-care, but hand me a real-life situation and I’m back to being everyone’s unpaid intern.

And the irony? I don’t even want to stop, not really. That’s the dark little twist here. I’ll say I want to. I’ll whine about it. But if I imagine myself actually pulling back, actually stepping away, actually not giving that extra effort — I feel sad. I feel guilty. Like I’m the villain in their story. And listen, I love villains in books, but in real life? I’m not ready to play that role.

So I end up stuck in this limbo. Wanting change but hating change. Knowing better but doing the same old shit. Saying, “I’ll prioritize myself,” but then watching myself prioritize literally everyone else in real time like a bystander in my own car crash.

But here’s where I think the loophole might be. Maybe the answer isn’t to stop caring. Maybe it’s not to swing from “yes girl” to “cold hearted.” Maybe it’s to curate. To make a list, even if it’s just in my head.

Who do I actually want to see happy? Who do I choose to pour into? Who makes my soul lighter when they’re content, not heavier when they’re not? Because let’s be real : I will always care too much. That’s hardwired. I’m not going to wake up tomorrow as an “idgaf” queen. It’s not in my DNA. But if I can redirect that caring energy, maybe I won’t burn out as much.

It’s not about who deserves it, or who earned it, or who guilt-tripped me into it. It’s about who I want smiling next to me. Who I want laughing with me, eating with me, living their best life in my orbit. If I make them happy, it doesn’t feel like people-pleasing. It feels like love.

So no, I can’t make everyone happy. I get it now. That line was right. It always was. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe the win is smaller, softer, more intentional. Not the whole world clapping, but a few people whose joy feels like mine.

And years from now, when I look back, I don’t want to see some desperate clown handing out pieces of herself like free samples at Costco. I want to see someone who cared — maybe too much, maybe messily, maybe stubbornly — but cared in the right places. Someone who didn’t make everyone happy, but made her people happy.

And honestly? That’s enough.

I imagine her sitting at the edge of my bed while I scroll instagram at 2:37am, whispering, “Really? This is how you’re spending your one wild and precious life? Watching a guy cut soap for 45 minutes?” And I’d tell her to shut up, because ghost-me clearly has all the free time in the world.

But the thing is : I don’t think she’d actually be mean. I think ghost-me would be me, just… softer. Wiser, maybe. The version of me who finally stopped treating life like a race and started treating it like a weird little detour. The version of me who learned that you don’t have to turn every single thing into a productivity chart, a dopamine menu, or a fucking Instagram story highlight.

Ghost-me wouldn’t care that I didn’t make it to yoga today. She’d probably smirk, sip her eternal coffee, and say, “Yeah, but you survived today. That counts.”

Ghost Me in a Diner That Doesn’t Exist

I always picture meeting her in a diner. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because diners feel timeless ; the buzzing neon, the sticky booths, the smell of coffee that’s been burning since 1972. It’s the perfect spot for an immortal hangout.

I’d slide into the booth, still catching my breath from running here, because of course alive-me is late, and ghost-me would already be there, casually flipping through a menu she doesn’t need. She’d look up, deadpan (pun intended), and say, “You’re always late. Even to your own afterlife.”

I’d roll my eyes and order yogurt bowl, because if you’re having an existential crisis with your ghost, you deserve all the love. And she’d sip whatever spectral beverage she has (ew); maybe black coffee, maybe some glowing otherworldly latte — and wait for me to spill. Because I always do.

I’d rant about how everyone else seems ahead of me. The jobs, the money, the relationships, the well-curated skincare fridges. I’d tell her how I’m exhausted from trying to keep up, from sprinting like my worth is measured in checkboxes.

And she’d lean back, smirking, and say, “Stop sprinting, idiot. Walk dramatically instead.”

What If She’s Keeping Receipts?

Here’s the scary part: what if my ghost isn’t kind? What if she’s been keeping receipts this whole time? A little ghostly ledger floating around, tallying every dumb decision I’ve ever made.

Another toxic situationship with “friends”? Check.

Another week you didn’t finish that tbr read? Check.

Another night convincing yourself you’re a “night owl” when really you’re just on YouTube watching mukbang videos? Double check.

Maybe she’s sitting there with a pen, sighing like a disappointed accountant.

But then again, maybe that’s just me projecting. Because let’s be real: no one judges me harsher than I judge myself. Ghost-me might be the only version of me that doesn’t.

Ghosts of All the People I’ve Been

The more I think about it, the more I realize I don’t just have one ghost. I have a whole haunted house of them.

There’s twelve-year-old me, still scribbling bad poetry in a notebook covered with stickers. She’d be horrified that I stopped writing poems because I got too busy “being practical.”

There’s sixteen-year-old me, drowning in eyeliner and My Chemical Romance lyrics, who’d probably laugh at how I now drink chamomile tea before bed.

There’s twenty-year-old me, convinced she’d have everything figured out by twenty-five. Spoiler: she’d be rolling on the floor laughing if she saw me now.

All of them are ghosts too — echoes of me, lingering, watching, sometimes disappointed, sometimes proud. And maybe future-ghost-me is just another one of them, waiting her turn.

The Fear of Wasting Time

Here’s the truth: I’m terrified of wasting time.

Every second feels like it should mean something. Like if I don’t use it to learn a skill, finish a book, improve myself, or post something relatable online, then I’ve wasted it. And that pressure turns life into this exhausting hamster wheel.

But ghost-me? She doesn’t care about that. She knows that time is both infinite and irrelevant once you’re floating outside of it. She knows that some of the best moments, the ones you actually remember, are stupidly small.

Like laughing so hard with a friend that water comes out of your nose.

Like the random night you walked home under streetlights and felt like the main character.

Like the comfort of eating cereal while watching reruns of a show you’ve memorized.

That’s the kind of shit ghost-me treasures. The kind of shit I forget to count as “valuable.”

Maybe My Ghost Is Still Me

I think what scares me is the idea that even as a ghost, I’ll still be me. Chaotic, sassy, easily distracted. I’ll still buy books I never finish. I’ll still obsess over little things like what to wear to a party no one will remember. I’ll still be rolling my eyes and laughing at my own jokes.

And maybe that’s not scary at all. Maybe that’s comforting. Because what if the whole point of this life isn’t to transform into some flawless, polished, capital-S Somebody… but just to keep being yourself, even when you’re gone?

Ghost Me on a Walk at Dawn

I think she’d love to remind me of that one morning I walked home after a concert in the UK, still buzzing from the music, shoes half-ruined, eyeliner smudged but feeling invincible. The streets were too quiet, the air too sharp, and every streetlight felt like it was spotlighting me on some secret stage.

Ghost-me would bring it up just to tease me: “You swore that was your cinematic moment, didn’t you? You thought you were in some indie coming-of-age film with Florence Welch narrating in the background.”

And she wouldn’t be wrong. I probably was. But the thing is, that walk lives in my head rent-free, like it’s bookmarked in my memory. And ghost-me knows those little, ordinary-but-not-ordinary scenes are the ones that stick the hardest.

The Obsessions That Make No Sense (But Also Every Sense)

If she’s really keeping track, ghost-me probably has a long scroll titled “Ridiculous Obsessions That Somehow Became Personality Traits.”

Like how I can spend three hours deep-diving videos of people making food I’ll never cook. (Why am I emotionally invested in how someone layers lasagna?) Or how I’ve convinced myself that my cat understands every single rant I give her and honestly, maybe she does. Or how I will, without fail, lose hours curating a playlist for an emotion I don’t even feel yet. (“Songs to cry to in case I ever get dumped, even though I’ve never been dumped.”)

She’d probably laugh her translucent ass off at how I can get unreasonably attached to small things: one pen that feels “right” to write with, the exact brand of mango milkshake, one line in a random book that basically tattoos itself on my brain. She’d roll her eyes but secretly get it, because she’s me.

Ghost Me Knows I Romanticize Stupidity

Here’s the embarrassing part: ghost-me knows how much I romanticize literally everything.

Like, yes, I will stare out of a train window with sad indie music in my headphones and pretend I’m in a breakup montage… despite the fact that I’ve never had an ex. Yes, I will buy a candle called “Stormy Library Nights” and pretend it’s part of my personality. Yes, I will eat instant noodles at 11pm and think, wow, this is poetry. Ghost-me probably watches all of this and thinks, “You could’ve been Shakespeare if you channeled half the drama you put into making cereal at midnight.”

But the truth is, maybe she likes that about me too. Maybe she knows that romanticizing stupidity is just another way of refusing to let the small things be invisible.

A Haunted House of Hobbies

If I asked ghost-me what she remembers the most, she’d probably point out my graveyard of hobbies. Because god, do I collect them.

Knitting phase? Lasted one and a half headband.

Guitar? Tuned, cased, loved, but also gathering dust between bursts of obsession.

Sketchbooks? Plural. Half-filled. Each one a time capsule of when I swore this was the year I’d take art seriously.

Language apps? My Duolingo owl could probably testify against me in ghost court.

But she wouldn’t roast me too hard. Because maybe ghost-me gets it: I never actually needed to “finish” those hobbies. I just needed them to carry me through the season I picked them up.

Ghost Me Isn’t a Critic. She’s a Witness.

That’s the thing I keep circling back to. I’m scared she’ll judge me, that she’ll measure my life in milestones I missed or books I didn’t finish. But maybe that’s not her job.

Maybe ghost-me isn’t keeping score at all. Maybe she’s just… witnessing. Collecting all the scraps of me I thought were too small to matter. The concert walks. The playlists for emotions I don’t have. The mornings where coffee and silence were enough.

Maybe she’s less an auditor and more an archivist.

Final Thought

If I really do get to meet ghost-me one day, I hope she’s not disappointed. I hope she leans across that diner booth, smirks, and says, “You made it messy, but you made it yours.”

And I’ll raise my coffee cup to her, pancakes half-eaten, and say, “Yeah. I guess I did.”

So if I do meet her one day, in that diner that doesn’t exist, I hope she doesn’t give me a report card. I hope she just slides me a scrapbook — messy, chaotic, overstuffed — and says, “Look. You lived.”

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe we don’t need to chase some neat, polished ending. Maybe we’re all just writing fragments, filling notebooks we’ll never finish, obsessing over stupid little things that make the story ours.

If ghost-me can look at all of that and still smirk and say, “You made it yours,” then I’ll call that a good haunting.

You giggled? You nodded? You trauma-bonded with my words? Congrats, you’re contractually obligated to subscribe.

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Rooney books are a must-read before 30 because they’re like a manual for emotional chaos: you’ll cringe, you’ll feel seen, and you’ll start wondering if every slightly awkward conversation you’ve ever had has secretly been Pulitzer-worthy material. They teach you that relationships are political, friendship is intimate as hell, and that sex can be both life-affirming and awkward enough to make you want to evaporate. Basically, if you’re still in your twenties and haven’t read Rooney, you’re missing out on the shared cultural experience of sighing, “ugh, same” every three pages.

And honestly? You don’t read her for plot twists or dragons; you read her because she makes drinking coffee in a dingy kitchen feel like an existential crisis. That’s a gift.

If you read this and thought ‘damn, same,’ go be a hero and share it.

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