“Mum, what will I do if I don’t see you anymore?”

She didn’t give me a complicated answer.

She simply told me not to be scared, that she would just be away for a long sleep and she would be with all the people she loved and somehow that was enough to make the nightmare sound less scarier for a fourteen year old.

It wasn’t a profound conversation. She probably didn’t think much of it after that night.

But I did.

Four years later, when I was eighteen, I lost her.

And suddenly, that little conversation from years ago had a meaning I wasn’t ready for.

There is a particular kind of fear that comes with losing the person who made the world feel familiar.

You don’t just lose someone.

You lose your sense of what happens next?

And I remember that uncertainty very clearly.

What do I do now?

Who do I ask?

How does life continue when one of the most important people in mine suddenly isn’t here to tell me how to live it?

I remember one evening when I was struggling with exactly that question. My aunt put on Que Sera, Sera.

And then, instead of giving me another explanation, she started dancing.

She took my hand and twirled me around.

It sounds almost absurd now. I was grieving, confused, trying to understand what my life was supposed to look like, and there I was, being spun around the room.

She told me, in her own way, that the future wasn’t ours to see.

Que sera, sera.

Whatever will be, will be.

And perhaps that was the first time I understood that sometimes you don’t need to know what happens next.

You just need to live today.

At eighteen, I didn’t know how to do that.

Almost a decade later, I’m still learning.

But I think that is what grief eventually teaches you.

Not how to stop missing someone.

Not how to forget and move on.

It teaches you how to live alongside uncertainty.

Because grief is strange that way.

You think it will be one enormous, permanent sadness. You imagine it will sit on your chest every morning and refuse to leave.

But it doesn’t.

It changes.

It becomes quieter.

And then, completely without warning, it returns.

You can be at work, buying groceries, sitting at dinner with friends, laughing about something ridiculous, and suddenly a memory appears with such clarity that for a moment it feels like no time has passed at all.

That is the part about grief nobody really prepares you for.

It doesn’t always announce itself.

Sometimes it just walks into the room.

And then eventually it leaves again.

I used to think that meant I was going backwards.

Now I don’t.

I think it simply means that some people become part of you in a way that time cannot undo.

You carry them.

Not always consciously.

But in the way you speak.

In the things you care about.

In the way you treat people.

In the little decisions you make when nobody is watching.

I’ve found that one of the ways I can honour my mother is by trying to live a life she would have been happy to see.

Not a perfect life. I don’t think that’s possible.

Just a full one.

To laugh more.

To apologise when I know I’ve been unfair.

To check on people.

To show up.

To do some of the things she never got the chance to do.

To say yes sometimes simply because life is happening now.

And perhaps that is the strange thing about losing someone.

You become much more aware of the people who are still here.

A friend who notices when you’re tired.

Someone who checks if you’ve eaten.

Someone who remembers your birthday.

Someone who takes you out for ice cream when you’re having a bad day.

None of these people replace the person you’ve lost.

They aren’t supposed to.

But they remind you that love doesn’t disappear when someone does.

It changes form.

It finds new people.

New homes.

New ways of reaching you.

And maybe that’s what I’ve come to understand after all these years.

You don’t get over it.

You get better at carrying it.

Some days it’s heavy.

Some days you barely notice it.

And some days a song comes on, or the sun hits the room in exactly the right way, and suddenly you remember everything.

You stop for a moment.

And then you keep going.

Because there are still miles to go.

Live the day we’re in.

Love the people who are here.

And let tomorrow remain, as my aunt reminded me that day, something we don’t have to know yet.

I have been thinking about modern dating lately.

Not because I had my heart broken. Thankfully, I didn’t.

But because somewhere between swiping left, matching, ghosting, situationships, “I’m not ready for a relationship,” and “I’m looking for something long-term,” I’ve realised something rather ironic.

We have become incredibly mediocre at meeting people.

Dating today feels like walking into a library where every book has a beautiful cover but no one tells you whether the pages are finished.

One person is looking for marriage.

Another is looking for companionship.

Someone else wants validation.

Someone wants a therapist.

Someone wants a texting partner.

Someone genuinely wants love but panics the moment it starts looking real.

Everyone enters the same room carrying completely different intentions.

And somehow we’re all surprised when someone walks away disappointed.

The strange thing about modern dating isn’t rejection.

Rejection has always existed.

The strange thing is ambiguity.

No one really leaves.

No one really stays.

People orbit each other.

A conversation fades.

A reel gets sent.

A message gets liked.

Days pass.

No one says goodbye.

No one says, “I’m interested.”

No one says, “I’m not.”

We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that silence is kinder than honesty.

It isn’t.

Because silence leaves room for imagination.

And imagination is a dangerous place for a hopeful romantic.

I’ve often wondered whether technology made dating easier or simply gave us more opportunities to misunderstand one another.

One swipe tells us there might always be someone better.

One notification convinces us they’re interested.

One delayed reply convinces us they aren’t.

Somewhere between algorithms and expectations, love became… administrative.

You start evaluating response times instead of conversations.

You wonder whether a double text is too much.

You ask your friends to decode a liked message.

When did finding love become a project plan?

Maybe that’s why so many people are tired.

Not because love disappeared.

But because dating became exhausting.

And yet…

Despite all of this, I don’t think people have stopped wanting love.

I think they’ve stopped trusting the process.

Perhaps the greatest casualty of modern dating isn’t romance.

It’s optimism.

Every ghosted conversation teaches someone to text less.

Every breadcrumb teaches someone to care less.

Every disappointment teaches someone to protect themselves a little more.

Until one day two genuinely kind people meet…

…both pretending to care less than they actually do.

And maybe that’s the biggest paradox of all.

We’re all looking for someone emotionally available while quietly becoming emotionally guarded ourselves.

So perhaps modern dating doesn’t need better algorithms.

It needs a little more courage.

The courage to say,

“I like you.”

The courage to say,

“I don’t think we’re right for each other.”

The courage to ask,

“How was your day?”

The courage to leave when effort isn’t mutual.

And the courage to stay when it is.

Because maybe love was never meant to be complicated.

Maybe we just became experts at making it so.

I had a rough week.

The kind of week where corporate drudgery sucks every tiny bit of energy you have left. By Friday evening, I did not have any fancy weekend plans to rehabilitate myself, I simply wanted to exist, doing absolutely nothing for a while.

That weekend, a friend and I went for a swim.

Except just one lap in, it started pouring. A bright sunny day turned into an extremely rainy one within minutes.

Unfortunately or rather fortunately for us, we had not carried umbrellas, so we were stranded at the clubhouse that housed the swimming pool. It was the kind of rain that makes umbrellas useless and convinces you there’s absolutely no point in trying to outrun it.

And we did not.

We proceeded to sit on the steps of the clubhouse and wait.

I had not carried my phone either which in hindsight, may have been the best thing that happened all day.

With nothing to scroll through and nowhere to be, we started playing the thumb game. Then rock-paper-scissors and then somehow the kids waiting nearby joined in too. Before we knew it, thirty or forty minutes had disappeared into laughter.

Nothing extraordinary happened.

And yet, I don’t remember the last time I felt that happy all week.

It made me wonder why happiness keeps finding me in places where I wasn’t looking for.

It rarely arrives when I expect it to.

Instead, it sneaks in through moments that seem too insignificant to remember.

We spend so much of our lives believing happiness will arrive after something ‘Big’ happens. After the promotion. After that particular purchase.

Yes those moments do make us happy.

However I have noticed that the moments that stay with me are rarely the ones I planned.

They are the walk back to my apartment on an unusually windy evening, when the trees seem to sway with a quiet joy of their own.

They are evenings when friends sit together talking complete nonsense, laughing at stories that won’t matter tomorrow but somehow matter deeply today.

None of these moments would make it onto a highlight reel.

Yet they somehow became the highlights of my life.

I think we have become very good at postponing happiness.

I will be happy after I move.

After I fall in love.

After I buy the thing I’ve been saving for.

As though happiness is a destination patiently waiting for us at the end of a checklist.

But maybe it has been quietly happening all along.

Maybe happiness isn’t something we achieve.

Maybe it’s something we notice and acknowledge.

The older I get, the more suspicious I become of the idea that the biggest moments are automatically the happiest ones.

Some of the biggest moments in my life have been stressful.

Some of the smallest have stayed with me for years.

It’s strange, isn’t it?

That a random rainy afternoon can outshine an entire week.

That a silly game can repair an exhausted mind.

That peace can arrive without asking for permission.

Perhaps that’s why I want to find joy in the most mundane parts of my life.

Not because every day is extraordinary.

But because every ordinary day seems to hide one extraordinary moment.

You just don’t know which one it will be until you are living it.

I first came across the word serendipity when I was a child.

It was tucked somewhere inside a film I can no longer remember, but the word stayed with me long after the credits rolled. The movie described it as “a fortunate accident.” I remember rolling the phrase around in my head, trying to understand how an accident could ever be fortunate? Accidents meant scraped knees or a broken tooth. They weren’t supposed to change your life for the better.

It took me years to understand that they sometimes do.

Or perhaps they aren’t accidents at all.

Maybe serendipity is simply what we call the quiet chain reaction of ordinary choices.

Half a decade back, I moved to a city where I knew almost no one. No family. No childhood friends waiting around the corner. Just unfamiliar roads and the strange loneliness that comes with beginning again. If you had asked me then what would define those years, I would have guessed my career, or the apartment I rented, or the places I explored.

Instead, it was the people.

Not the people I had carefully planned to meet, but the ones who arrived almost by accident.

A delayed evening because of relentless rain. A trip that happened because I said yes at the last minute. A flatmate who walked into my home as a stranger and quietly became family. Conversations that began because someone happened to sit beside me. Friendships that existed because two completely unrelated decisions crossed paths at exactly the right moment.

Looking back, none of these moments felt significant while I was living them.

Only in hindsight do they begin to connect, like dominoes standing in a line that I never knew I was setting up.

One choice nudges another. One introduction leads to another city, another opportunity, another version of yourself. You start tracing your life backwards and realize that the person you are today can often be mapped to moments that once seemed entirely ordinary.

Sometimes I wonder how many versions of my life existed alongside this one.

The version where I didn’t move.

The version where I chose a different apartment, walked down a different street, declined a conversation because I was tired.

It reminds me of the multiverse stories we love watching—the idea that countless versions of us exist, each born from a single decision made differently. Perhaps those universes don’t exist anywhere except our imagination, but they reveal something deeply human. Every choice quietly closes hundreds of doors while opening one we cannot yet see.

And we only understand its significance years later.

I’ve also learned that serendipity isn’t always gentle.

Not every person who enters your life is meant to stay. Some leave just as unexpectedly as they arrived. Some bring joy, others heartbreak. Some teach you who you want to become, others teach you exactly who you don’t. Yet even those temporary people become permanent in a strange way. They shape your instincts, your boundaries, your hopes and your fears. They alter the choices you make.

Perhaps that’s another form of serendipity too.

I used to think life was something we carefully designed, one deliberate decision after another. The older I get, the more it feels like a collaboration between intention and coincidence. We choose the first domino. Life decides where the rest of them fall.

Maybe that’s why I find the idea of serendipity so comforting

It reminds me that life doesn’t always announce its turning points. Sometimes they disguise themselves as inconveniences, detours, delayed trains, awkward introductions, unexpected roommates, or conversations you almost didn’t have.

Only years later do you look back and realize that what felt like an ordinary day had quietly become the day everything changed.

And perhaps that’s what a fortunate accident really is.

Not just fascinated—convinced by it.

Every book I read, every movie I watched, every song I replayed seemed to suggest that somewhere out there was a person who would complete the story. Jane Austen promised wit and longing. Shakespeare promised grand declarations. Bollywood promised impossible coincidences. Hollywood promised airport confessions.

Somewhere along the way, I started believing that romantic love wasn’t just a kind of love.

It was the love.

The one that mattered the most.

The one that made life feel complete.

And if you didn’t have it yet, perhaps your story hadn’t really begun.

I believed that for a very long time.

Until I started paying attention.

Because somewhere between chasing promotions, catching flights home, celebrating birthdays, grieving losses, and simply growing up, I realised something.

Love had been quietly showing up in my life all along.

It looked like my father driving across town just because he knew I was craving a particular meal.

It looked like friends calling me at ridiculous hours simply to ask,

“Are you okay?”

It looked like a colleague saving my favourite desk at work because they knew I liked sitting there.

It looked like childhood friendships surviving different countries, different time zones and completely different lives.

None of those moments would make it into a romantic comedy.

Yet they are, perhaps, the purest expressions of love I’ve ever known.

Somewhere along the way, I realised that maybe we have made one kind of love far too important.

Romantic love is beautiful.

I still hope to experience it one day.

But I no longer believe it is the only thing capable of making a life feel full.

There is something deeply freeing about understanding that your life isn’t on pause while you’re waiting for one person to arrive.

Your life is already happening.

You are already deeply loved.

Perhaps not in the way movies taught us to expect.

But in dozens of quieter ways we often fail to notice.

Maybe the greatest mistake we’ve made isn’t believing in love.

It’s believing that love only counts when it arrives wearing romance.

I’m slowly learning that it doesn’t.