I’ll walk around with a bandaged hand, covering the gaping wound you left behind, and the moment I feel myself forget, I’ll release it. Not for long, never in public. In a closed room, for a minute, maybe two, a ritual, a ceremony, an act of devotion no one else will ever get to witness. I won’t leap to turn down the radio when a song we listened to together comes on; I’ll let it play, I’ll smile at your favourite lyrics, and sometimes, only a few times, I’ll dance to it on my own and pretend that you’re here with me.

For my final act of love, I’ll immortalise you.

I’ll write about you even though no words could ever do you justice. I’ll romanticise you, remember a version of you I can hold in my mouth long enough that it never begins to rot. I’ll pluck off the thorns and make sure my pages only ever see the version of you I had in my hands at the beginning, and in my head at the end. I’ll put my resentment on the stove and boil it down to something sweeter, something kinder.

For my final act of love, I’ll build you a museum.

I’ll open the wretched gates, the ones I bolted shut the day I left, the ones covered in cobwebs, a testament to the effects of neglect and avoidance. I’ll let the light in and face every ghost that has come to haunt that room, every version of you that still inhabits it, and every version of me that sits in the corners, terrified. I’ll hang the paintings up again and refill the part of the timeline I blurred because I wished for it to be forgotten. I’ll patch up the parts of the walls I punched till I cried and I’ll put flowers in the vases. I’ll place the artefacts in their rightful place, a glass case, preserved, safe from any future acts of aggression.

For my final act of love, I’ll smell the flowers.

I won’t clutch my nose every time I walk by lilies, and in every bud that blooms, I’ll try not to picture the last lily you ever gave me, the one rotted on my bedside table till I was forced to throw it out. I’ll ask my friends to send the pictures from our school dance back to me, the ones I deleted because all they ever reminded me of was what I had and lost. I’ll back them up this time and take every step required to make sure I never lose them again, because the night had been starry and everything, perfect. I’ll rewatch the first movie we ever saw together, and I won’t wince at the sound of your favourite song. I’ll let myself soak in the good before I’m forced to remember the ugly.

For my final act of love, I’ll let go.

Of my resentment, my anger, my guilt. I’ll let go of the apologies I told myself I’d get around to giving you one day, and I’ll loosen my grip on the facts and figures I once thought I needed to analyse to figure out exactly how it fell apart. I know now that sometimes, there are no answers to be found, sometimes the time isn’t right, and sometimes the people aren’t; sometimes questions are meant to remain unanswered. I’ll let go of every mask I wore to fit into every different form we morphed into, and I’ll throw out the costumes we donned. It’s hard to let go of something you work so hard to build, to realise that you can put every brick with meticulous precision and measure every notch out to the fractions of millimetres and the building could still be torn down by the force of an earthquake you never thought could happen. I’ll let go because I know now that I don’t need to forget the colour of the fish just to set it free into the vast ocean.

For my final act of love, I’ll face you.

I’ll finally bury what has wandered that graveyard for years; an undead thing begging for a name, a place, a home, out in the world or down in the ground. I’ll fight every urge to leave the grave unmarked, in the hope that I might one day forget what I buried, because love, no matter its outcome, is never a thing wasted, never a thing of shame. I’ll probably, begrudgingly, be reminded of you in little things for the rest of my life, but I’ll eventually learn to place the pang in my heart under positive memories rather than its counterpart. I’ll patch up the hole you left behind, and if I’m never able to fill it up entirely, I’ll plant lilies along its edges to make sure it never causes me despair.

For my final act of love, I’ll write about you; memory is an unreliable thing, so I’ll put your name down on paper, and I’ll immortalise you with my ink. For my final act of love, I’ll let myself revisit the mountain of memory, one I avoided for so long, convincing myself it was a volcano, volatile and deadly. I’ll see it wholly and entirely, every crack and imperfection I tried to cover up, every misstep I tried so hard to erase. For my final act of love, I’ll remember you forever.

Something in that logic came apart when I stopped thinking about it, the way yarn comes apart when you mindlessly pull too hard or the way truths do when you look the other way. Somewhere between one border and the next, in a language I couldn’t even read road signs in, holding a coffee I didn’t know the name of, sitting beside a stranger who watched me botch the pronunciation of words that were second nature to him and still had the grace to teach me the right way, my fig tree seemed to crumble. I don’t know when it happened; I only know that it did.

Because the fig tree only makes sense if the world stops growing once you’ve picked your fruit. And it doesn’t. The world gets larger the more you see of it because every new corner discovered opens the gate for the possibility of there being another 100 corners yet to be traversed. It keeps unfolding every time you put your hand against a new part of it, revealing another fruit to be picked, another tree to stand under. And no choice can truly be final if there are a million other choices still shrouded in mystery, still unknown. It doesn’t matter if the fig I choose rots the rest of my tree, and it doesn’t matter if that fig, too, ends up rotting in my hands, because I can plant entire orchards and groves in corners of the world that I have yet to see.

And so, I leave seeds behind. In every city I visit, without even meaning to, I leave a piece of myself. One curls up against the window on a train from one city to another, where I sat eating a sandwich, not realising when I’d crossed the border and checked another country off my bucket list. One sits quietly in a museum bookshop while another sits in the centre of a bustling city. One sits in a quaint restaurant, attempting to place an order in a language she doesn’t understand and another lounges by a river, feeding the local ducks. Most of these will rot too. Most of them will age and grey, and I’ll probably never get the chance to see what they could’ve grown into had I nurtured them better. But that’s okay. They won’t feel like small deaths, like rituals to be followed or souls to be mourned; it’ll be simpler. They’ll simply form the soil on which new seeds can be planted.

The tree still stands in my backyard. And some mornings, out of habit, I find myself standing under it again, hands in pockets, looking up at the branches. The fruit will start rotting any day now. And I’ll let it. Because it was never the only one I got. Because beyond that fence that I was always too afraid to hop, in the fear that even a moment’s neglect would mean my tree would rot faster, is a world abundant with orchards, with trees remarkably similar to my own. Far beyond this fence, there is more fruit to be found, more soil to be tilled, more people to be met and more lands to be filled, in a language I don’t speak yet, in the hands of someone who won’t pronounce my full name right, in a world as much my own as it is a stranger. And maybe that’s the whole of it, not the choosing but rather the willingness to keep planting.

Most of my memories of you are not entirely mine, they aren’t strengthened by the weight of lived experience, or clouded by specific details like the colour of the walls or the smell of your perfume. They’re instead half built from photographs, second-hand stories, and the way your name sounds when my dad says it, quiet and precarious, almost as if he’s handling something fragile he can’t afford to break. But I hold on to them anyway. I try to pretend butterscotch is my preferred flavour of cake even if it makes me sick because it was your favourite and I yearn for proof that some piece of you was passed down to me. I preserve every blurry photo of us together because it’s the only tangible evidence I can present to prove that we ever existed in the same room, breathing the same air, in the same version of the world at the same time.

I wonder about you the way I do about countries I’ve never visited. I know the broad strokes and the facts I ought to know like how you made the painting that hangs in our living room, how you were loved and revered, how you were funny and had an undying love for watches. Any piece of you that I carry is filtered down through my father, souvenirs from a place I’ll never visit, parts of you I’ll never know the way a native knows his country, the way a tourist could never truly comprehend, only admire. I’ll always be a tourist where my dad was your native, I’ll never have a full picture of life in the country you built but I’ll enjoy the flowery portraits my dad will allow me to have, like your favourite songs and the way you jumped with joy when my dad got his first job.

I love you in the abstract and truly unconditional way you can only love something before you study it, before you place it under a microscope and spend days, months, years, discovering everything it tried to hide. I love the idea of you and the pieces of you that I carry without truly knowing their origin, the version of you that’s been passed down to me, the version that lives on in ways both big and small in the people who survived you, the people I get the chance to love first-hand. But love without knowledge is a house with no furniture; it stands and keeps out the rain but you can’t quite live in it. I wish I could’ve known you, and selfishly even more that you could’ve known me; this version of me, one that would finally have been brave enough to sit across from you and ask questions, and stay for the answer. I wish I could’ve discovered the door in my house that led to you before I got too big to fit through it.

There’s a cruel asymmetry to the few years we did get to share. You knew me in whatever way a grandfather knows a child too young to remember, to understand, but I never got to return the favour. I never got to see you clearly, all I got was a blur. I will never know what your laugh sounded like from across a room, or what advice you would’ve given to someone when they got their heart shattered, or whether we would’ve understood each other instantly or over years of consistent effort. I’ll never know the minute details, the street names and weekly markets you only discover when you live in one place long enough to learn its movements. Maybe, I’ll never recover a full memory of you and maybe I’ll always be stuck with pieces from entirely different puzzles, trying to connect them to each other anyway. Maybe I’ll spend the rest of my years stuck between the opposing tugs of turning into a person you will never get to meet and trying to grow closer to a person I never got to know. Maybe, in a world where memory is all the home we get, ours will always be a fragile glass box. And maybe this is all that remains when memory fails; not knowledge or certainty but this quiet insistence that someone mattered to you anyway.

And in his fall, he became a cautionary tale, a warning etched into history; to want but never too much. But in that fall lay a brief moment of flight, and in that cautionary tale lay a forgotten story of ambition, of desire, of love, in all its innate humanness. Forgotten is the story of the brief moment when the body forgot the language it learnt from the ground, when the sky no longer seemed like a distance stretching vast, but rather an invitation, a force pulling him closer and closer. It didn’t last, it couldn’t, perhaps it was never meant to. But for that suspended instant, the world loosened its grip and something within him answered.

This isn’t a principle reserved for myth and stories larger than life. to try and fail is stitched into the very fibre of humanity, in the fragile architecture of wanting. It exists in the way a hand reaches before it knows it will be held, in the way a voice trembles toward truth, in the way hope rises, despite everything that has taught it not to, despite knowing that it will likely fall back down. A gallery of failure or a museum of trying? A museum that treats failure not as a stain but as a record, as something to be displayed rather than to be hidden, discarded. One that isn’t filled with victories polished to perfection, but with half-finished canvases, burnt edges, abandoned drafts, each one whispering, “someone was here, someone began, someone tried.” This museum archives and enshrines the artefacts of effort over documents of failure. It tells the tale of the sun shining on wax wings and every lesson learnt from an effort unsuccessful.

There are lives built entirely around avoidance; careful, measured, untouched by the sharp edges of failure. I know this because that was once my own. They are safe lives, perhaps. But they are also quiet ones, unmarked by the evidence of having reached but also entirely unmarked by that of having tried. Because a life devoid of failure might look pleasant. On the surface, never failing sounds wonderful. No rejection, no heartbreak, no sinking feeling after putting your all into something only to come up empty. But a closed mouth never gets fed, and to never fail is never to try at all, never to succeed at all. And what is my life if not a mapped world of places with small ruins and broken homes? What is my life if not a sequence of events covered with claw marks I left behind? What is my life if not a puzzle formed by every piece of me I left at every trial, be it failure or success?

So Icarus laughed as he fell. The same way I smiled when I said goodbye, the same way acceptance eventually dawns upon us after every bout of grief. Because the fall did not erase the flight, it confirmed it. His melted wings don’t mock him; they testify for him, in the same way that my collection of unfinished paintings, torn-up letters, and rotten flowers do. My museum of trying no longer mourns its contents; it honours them. It is, at its core, evidence. a record that I once reached some place beyond what was certain, beyond what was safe. Because what is failure if not proof that you tried? What is a broken heart if not proof that you tried to love, and what is a broken dream if not proof that you tried to achieve? What are Icarus’ melted wax wings if not proof that he once flew, close enough to the sun to feel its warmth, close enough to everything he’d wanted to still be scarred by its loss.

It feels like everything must be traded in, and the more the days pass, the more I realise that I would trade most everything I possess now in return for what I once had. All the relationships I’ve forged over the last year, for one hour in my grandmother’s arms, all my favourite songs for one last song in her voice. I’d give all my recent birthdays to experience the joy of my 10th again, and I’d give every moment spent in high school and further to remember how it felt to have my tight-knit group of friends in the 2nd grade. I am nothing in my soul if not reminiscent, a slave to nostalgia, a servant in front of any master that alludes to know of the moments of my life I now draw a blank on. I would fall to the feet of nostalgia and beg for a clear memory of my grandfather, whom I never got to know, of my childhood best friend, whom I lost too young, my grandmother’s hugs, and all the home-cooked meals my family once shared.

What is life, if not a constant act of looking back? of regretting? of holding on too long before you’re forced to let go? of letting go and feeling a boulder on your chest rather than the promised relief? We spend our entire lives creating art, music, and writing, holding on to relics and remains as if they’ll enshrine a past we know we’ll forget, hoping they’ll perfectly preserve the memories we cherish and discard the ones we wish to forget.

In my heart lies a beautiful, blossoming garden of memories, with lilies and tulips planted at each end, with roses of every colour, and four-leafed clovers abound. The garden flowers year-round, a different bud opening its petals each month. In this garden, hidden within the buzzing bees and towering trees, are all my beautiful friends and my kind mother, my cats with their tails perked up and my ever-worrying father. all the material memories I’ve accumulated in the form of receipts and recipes, movie stubs and train tickets, photos and DVDs, lie scattered across the garden, each one occupying enough space for it to be memorialised if not remembered.

On the other end is a graveyard of regrets. Buried here are the moments of doubt and despair I grappled with before they finally gave in under my arms and wilfully submerged into the ground, the memories that evoke no feeling anymore, but when they did, they were unkind. The pain and grief are imprisoned in the ground with the tears that accompanied, and the gravestones are blurred because most of what is buried is better left unnamed, better forgotten than remembered. In this graveyard lie the people that came and left, the ones I pushed and the ones I tried desperately to make stay, the ones that left me feeling hollow and the ones whose broken hearts still remain fresh in my memory.

In between these two areas lies a grey zone, one where the two sects intertwine and overlap, one where the line between what must be memorialised and enshrined tactfully and what must be forgotten and burnt to ashes is a blurred one. This zone is inhabited by ghosts, and ghosts alone keep it alive. Here lie the memories too multifaceted to ever be fully and truly surrendered to one or the other binaries that exist around it. Here lie the people that I never figured out, the ones that came and left like shooting stars flashing momentarily in the middle of a dreary night, too fast to be examined, too bright to be scrutinised. Some people stayed longer, their presence dragged out by words we never verbalised and circumstances that we were too scared to change, too scared that one comment may cause the comfort of the pain to be snatched clean out of my life. This grey zone is seldom revisited; its grounds are covered in a layer of dust and cobwebs litter its ends, while a solemn hum can be heard throughout, one that is eerie enough to make you stay as far as possible.

In my heart lies a nation of its own, one that is fiercely protective of its own surroundings but also one that is on the constant brink of a civil war. This nation is overpopulated and ruinous; it caves in on itself some nights, and others it celebrates its own legacy, loud and colourful. This nation is one that belongs to me, but one that feels foreign each time I visit it. I hold it dear and keep it hidden under an opaque veil at the same time. I adorn it with jewels one day and throw rocks at it the other. This world is haunted and beautiful, it is bloody and mind-bogglingly wondrous, horrifyingly gory and perfect in all its horror, but before anything else, it is mine; mine to show to the world as much as I hide it, mine to foster and destroy, mine to preserve and ruin, and further beautify.

I picture a curator roaming around it, handpicking and compiling the right memories to best eulogise my life. I see her hanging portraits of the people I’ve loved and lost behind glass cases, to be seen, but never again touched. I see her meticulously selecting and fossilising all the souvenirs she deems worthy of the halls of my museum, preserving them as they were in their prime, to be forever remembered in an embellishing light. I see her transcribing conversations that catalysed my life, hanging them as scriptures next to portraits and exhibits in an effort to explain, to make sense of the chaos. I wonder if she ever feels as though she’s running out of space, if she ever thinks I hold onto too much. I wonder if she ever feels the urge to throw some pieces out because what looks like the rarest pearl extracted from the bottom of the ocean to me may simply look like a cheap replica to her.

There are galleries within my museum that I frequent, warm light cascading over memories of friendships and family vacations stitched into my very being with a single thread of pure gold, a vital part of my history. There are hidden alcoves, bathed in haunting dim light, where love and loss are indistinguishable, where the only souvenirs left to display are outbursts woven into torn tapestries and goodbyes carved into shattered stones. There are also rooms that are locked and sealed, the rust covering the hinges of their doors, standing as proof that I have never dared to step foot inside of them. On numerous occasions, I have gently caressed the handles on these doors, hoping that their mere proximity would provide me the strength to open them. But as I put my ear to the door, I hear the wrathful screeches of regrets and promises I never kept, words I never said and chances I never took, and I walk away, leaving it for another day.

Where some rooms feel like home, with familiar faces and traditions unchanged by time, with old family recipes and the games I played with my kindergarten friends, some rooms are haunted by shadows of everything I’ve left behind, and by ghosts of all the versions of myself I have now discarded. The back corners of my museum house a haunting echo, one that carries in its sound waves the dreams that I believed in with such vigour, the people I once revered, and the love I once believed would be forever. In the hallways, a low but constant thrum can be heard, a whispered song embodying the secrets of love, loss, and everything that came in between.

Inside my heart is a museum so expansive that if I were to spit it out all at once, it would destroy everything in its sight. My museum is old, with cobwebs accumulating on its least visited corners and cracks littering every brick, with fraying wallpaper edges and old nails hanging off the walls, a quiet remembrance of the portraits that once felt important enough to hang. My museum is also new, with shining table tops and glistening glass cases, with halls upon halls left completely barren, awaiting future histories, with a patch of concrete at its entrance, still wet, patiently waiting to immortalise whoever chooses to set foot on it. My museum is messy, its infinite walls and unending hallways filled with souvenirs that shouldn’t share the same space, and titles too controversial to ever be displayed so openly. My museum is a simultaneous place of worship, celebration, and mourning.

In my museum is a cavalierly laid out timeline of my entire life, histories both sacred and profane. Each step I take further into my museum is a calculated dance, one that keeps me perfectly suspended between the daunting extremes of holding on and letting go. Each move is perfectly timed and measured to maintain the imperfect perfection of the fragile archive of everything I am, was, and am turning into. Each action is meticulously gauged to make sure I don’t destroy the artefacts that have been so carefully preserved, until I reach the door I entered through. As I shakily make my way to the door, I can almost hear the whispers of my past inviting me for another visit sometime soon. The memories engulf me into something that feels like a tight fit between hugging and choking, reminding me that within the walls of this museum, I will never walk alone, for better or for worse. Time floats around me in the form of sun rays peeking through an open window, serving as a sobering reminder that love is a thing of many forms; it is everything we feel the need to preserve but also everything we muster up the courage to let go. And as I close the door behind me, the memories weigh even heavier on me; some as auspices and some as burdens, but all as carefully carved out pieces of the whole that I will one day make up.

The house that raised me was crowded and always on the edge of an earth-shattering breakdown. It was teeming with the sounds of at least two separate arguments going on at all times or recipe instructions being yelled across the hall. It also bore in it the sound of my dad’s newspaper rustling and the peculiar clatter of my dog’s paws hitting the hardwood floors. It felt like it was always on the verge of collapse and that we were always one word away from the floor giving out beneath us. But, alas, it never did. It was never boring, sometimes suffocating, and always a place of love and love and love.

The house that raised me had chaos brimming at the top of every hallway and every room it inhabited. It was a dark comedy, one that always seemed to crack its jokes at my behest. The house that raised me was an innocent white that slowly morphed into a sinister grey, one that grew darker and darker until I had to manually mix in more white. The house that raised me might have been haunted; I could’ve sworn that ghosts levitated over my bed and spirits inhabited the crevices of the hall and the kitchen. No one who spent even a day in it ever truly died. The house that raised me immortalised them all, memorialised them, as if it were keeping space empty for the next time they’d visit. And visit they did. Because I still don’t have an explanation for why I always feel my grandmother’s hug when I pass by that particular spot in the room that was once hers

The house that raised me was the sun, and I was a mere star in its orbit, and one day, it’ll have another star to raise and love the way it did me. It was the sun, and I have never felt warmth in anyone or anything’s arms like I did in its four walls. The house that raised me loved me in that sweet, innocent way that you only love the very first time, and while it allowed me to fall, it never let me sink. It was the backdrop to every memory I’ve ever had; the karaoke nights with friends, the wild card games with family, even trips away from home often bore a faded hue of the house I missed so dearly.

I hope the ice cream stains I left on its wooden floors are remembered long after those wooden floors are torn apart and replaced, and I hope the wall covered with marks where my dad checked my height remains stained with red permanent marker long after they’ve been scrubbed clean. I hope the walls remain slightly sticky with the wallpaper we once tried and immediately hated, and I hope the floors keep fondly in their crevices, the faint memory of a puppy running around like a madman. I hope the kitchen echoes with my grandmother’s old recipes, and the bathroom with the concerts I put on in the shower. I hope my mom’s perfume lingers in the hall just as my dad’s aftershave does in the foyer. I hope everything remains the same so that when all else changes, the house that raised me can remind me of all the love I’ve been lucky to experience, in every one of its twisted forms.

The house that raised me was the first place I ever called home and the last place I ever imagined I would have to leave. It was a haunted tower and a Narnia-like escape, a dreamland and a thing of nightmares and gore. I cannot help but wonder if it’ll miss me the way I’ll miss it, if its halls will long for me, if it’ll remain mine if I leave my heart behind in one of the drawers. The house that raised me was equal parts horrific and delicate, ruinous and absolutely, mind-bogglingly gorgeous.

There’s a café down the street that we went to every week since our first encounter; it chronicles every facet of our story, so we’ll avoid it. We’ll pivot and go to the one that’s farther away, with the shittier coffee and the uncomfortable chairs, because at least here, food will just be food, coffee will just be coffee, and niceties exchanged will just be old friends catching up. You’ll smile, and I’ll remind you how much you hated your braces, I’ll accidentally drop my bag, and you’ll make fun of the book I always carry. It’ll bear resemblance to an old routine, and for one second and one second only, it’ll be comfortable. But the second will end, and I’ll bring up the weather again, and we’ll go back to being something closer to strangers than anything we ever were before.

You won’t bring up the fact that I never apologised or ask why I didn’t ask you to stay, I won’t ask you why you really left or why we never stayed in touch despite insisting that we would. Instead, we’ll talk about how our cities differ this time of year, of course, I won’t need to tell you much, because my home was once also yours. Maybe we’ll laugh about how drastically different our coffee orders have always been, but we’ll stop before the invisible shield electrocutes us, punishing us for attempting to cross over to a territory neither of us could ever reface the consequences of.

You’ll drop me off right at my door, just like you always did, and I’ll hug you goodbye. And for just a moment, I’ll have to fight for my life against the urge to ask you to stay. I’ll win the battle but not without incurring more than a few injuries, ones that’ll be black and blue till you remain in my memory, even if as a rivulet streaming down a hidden valley. I’ll leave the battleground dejected, with my head bowed, because a large part of me, secretly, wanted to lose.

We’ll promise to keep in touch even though we never will, and we’ll hold on for a little longer than we know better than to, just because this is final, and we both know that only a blue moon could allow us to cross paths again. You’ll remain enshrined in the museum my heart has thoughtfully curated. And in the stories my mind weaves, you’ll always have a role to play, and never one of malice. You were the brightest star my galaxy has ever seen, one whose goodbyes I’ll mourn long after the separate pieces of it have scattered all around me, and to have orbited you for even a brief moment is a tale I’ll spread until my lungs stop working and my ink runs out.

I still do not know how to forgive and forget. I know how to forgive and how to forget as separate entities, so in theory, it shouldn’t be difficult to put them together. But in my experience, they seem to go together about as well as water and oil; where one is a smooth-sailing task, the other beguiles my mind until there is not enough power left to tackle it. I’ve chanted it over every candle I’ve ever lit, as if it were a prayer to an almighty God, as if saying it over and over again would act as a pseudo-hypnosis and compel my mind into following through. I’ve demanded it of myself so many times over that I’m sure there is an entire room inside of my head whose four walls are stained red with it.

I still shiver at the idea of failure even when it exists in minute percentages, and I still don’t know how to focus on good omens instead of bad ones. I still plan exit strategies, and every time I catch a glimpse of love, I find myself preparing for heartbreak. I think the part of my brain that is meant to anticipate good is a muscle that atrophied too early and has since lain dormant. Another skill I haven’t yet tackled is taming my anger. My anger still sits heavy and daunting on my heart, as an active volcano would near an occupied village. It threatens to trample on everything I’ve worked hard to build every time it erupts, and there is hardly ever time for me to hide my loved ones under a stable shelter. Every day, I play a game of hopscotch, trying to avoid the patches of ground that would cause it to erupt.

I’m still scared of the dark. Not in a symbolic way, I just still sprint to my bed and drown myself in my quilt after turning the lights off every night before bed. I still don’t know how to let go; of people, of grudges, of broken promises and missed calls. I hold on to letters and trinkets long after the chapters they once belonged to have been concluded and locked away. I keep flowers on my table long after they’ve withered away, and a portion of my bed is still reserved for the stuffed bear I loved as a child. Old report cards, stickers from every car my family ever owned, polaroids with people I tell myself I hate, price tags from gifts my grandparents didn’t think I’d like but I loved just because I got it from them, bills, movie stubs, train tickets; they all collect dust and decay in my closet, but to throw them out is a ritual too sacrilegious to ever be one I conduct.

I still don’t know how to have complete conversations in French, and I still don’t know how to be relaxed on a plane. I am still afraid of the ocean, and I am slowly coming to the conclusion that I will probably never be trained out of overthinking. Honesty is difficult, but so is lying, and staying up late exhausts me just as much as going to bed early; two phenomena I don’t think I’ll ever understand the science behind. I still cannot fight the urge to whip out a calculator for basic mathematical sums, and I still find myself running towards an imaginary finish line where I finally get all the validation I’ve ever craved. I still need to have self-pep-talks before every call, and initiating conversation is a skill I have yet to master. I need to improve my handwriting. I also need to improve my ability not to sink into myself every time I get an answer wrong. I have to stop trying to outrun my mistakes and learn how to meet them in friendly conversation. I also have to learn how to build a life where regret can live tamely within the house, and not be stuffed under a carpet, out of which it is bound to jump out and debilitate me.

I am not a fully formed person yet, and there are a plethora of things I have yet to learn. A mountain appears in front of my eyes with all the wisdom I have yet to acquire, and every time I think that I’ve conquered it, another appears in front of it. My path is laden with questions whose answers I don’t yet know, and there is showcase after showcase and wall after wall barren in the museum built in my soul, waiting to be inhabited by people I have yet to encounter and lessons I have yet to learn. But isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t there so much joy to be found in a canvas only partially full? Or a book with only one chapter yet traversed, an entire story left to write?

My second life would be spent searching; for a purpose, for validation, but most importantly for you. I’d look for you on buses and trains, I’d sail oceans and cross roads without looking both ways to find you. It would be a life lived purely on the momentary ecstasy of seeing someone who looked eerily like you at the airport. I’d spend hours, days, weeks, months, years in search of everything I’ve felt myself missing. And perhaps when I came up empty at the end, I’d realise that every little thing I picked up on the road to finding something unattainable actually ended up morphing me into something that resembles a whole person. Perhaps this life of meticulous searching and that excruciating feeling of always reaching an ‘almost’ would teach me to allow my next seven lives to devour me rather than to try to manipulate them to bend to my whims and fancies

In my third life, I’d run away; from this city and this house, from my parents’ expectations and my relatives’ judgement. I’d escape the one thing I fear most in this life, my own mind. I’d escape the constant state of war and the labyrinths it weaves itself into, I’d escape the turmoil and the disappointment, and I’d run until it was safe enough to turn back without the fear of it catching up with me again. I wonder if I’d miss it once it was gone, because even with all its monstrosities and all its flaws, it is the only thing that has ever fully been mine. I’d go everywhere I’m not supposed to and ignore every instinct the people around me have ingrained into me. I’d love the wrong people and study the wrong disciplines, I’d live in the wrong cities and wear the wrong clothes. I’d leave a trail of broken promises behind me, and I’d never be compelled to look back. I’d be everything I’ve spent this life being told not to be, and somewhere deep within the entanglement of all my mistakes and all the people I’d let down, all the shattered dreams and broken hopes, I’d find true freedom.

In my fourth life, I’d listen to my parents. I’d ask my dad questions and learn his stories. I’d be honest, and he’d open up, I’d be the daughter he deserved, and he’d be the dad I needed. I’d be less of a burden on my mother’s mind, I’d keep more of what troubles me to myself so that she’d have space to deal with her own problems. I’d be the first to tell her to put her own hopes and dreams before mine, and even though I know she’d never listen, I’d make sure she never had to worry about me. I’d get a degree in engineering or medicine and make my dad proud, I’d move away to a different country and make my mom happy. I’d marry a man I didn’t really love, but my family did, and he’d be a good father, so my own feelings would never make it into the equation. I’d lead an existence unperturbed by anything as stupid as passion, and even though I wouldn’t be happy, I’d make everyone proud, and perhaps that would be enough to get me to my next life.

My fifth life would be my own. I’d live in a little apartment in London and read by the window while it rained. I would learn the exact measurement of milk required for the perfect cup of tea, and I wouldn’t be consumed by the ever-growing need to love and be loved. I’d untangle every web in my mind and have three cats. I’d learn to dance and be fluent in 5 languages. I’d cut my hair off when I wanted to and dye it whatever colour my heart desired. I’d read classics and watch every film that ever won an Oscar. I’d spend my days painting the same landscape, and perhaps some days the colour of the sky in my paintings would be green, and there’d be no one around calling it a mistake to be rectified. Regret would be banished from my soul, and guilt would break from a boulder to tiny shards of rock that, although painful in their own right, would never threaten to trample my heart. I’d be a puzzle slowly coming together, no revelations of missing or broken pieces disturbing my journey to fruition.

In my sixth life, I’d give in. I’d give in to the ire and the resentment; I wouldn’t force myself to be the bigger person, or to forgive and forget. I’d hold grudges and burn bridges, delete contacts and throw away letters. I’d also give in to the sadness and the enormous ocean waves I’d spent the other five fighting. I wouldn’t fight a single urge my weak body and destructive mind had. I would allow the vicious winds of time to sway me into a dance I never wanted to learn, and to a place I never thought to travel to. All the energy I had left over from not fighting my own self would be spent traversing grounds never travelled before. I’d throw out the map and walk beyond where the pathways ended, I’d take the road less travelled by and get lost in the maze it would lead me to. I’d be ruthless and selfish, and I’d never learn the lessons thrown at me. I’d end my sixth life freer, because all the pain of my own anger was dissolved by the relief of not holding it back.

In my seventh life, I wouldn’t be a human at all. I’d be a wild horse grazing in open fields as far from any sign of civilisation as I could get. I’d gallop across the plains and feel my hair swaying in the wind. Or maybe I’d be a cheetah, sprinting across lands, leaping over boulders taller than my own body, leaving everyone and everything I’d ever known behind. I’d run and run until my legs gave out, until my lungs lost their ability to breathe air in and out. I’d die with satisfaction in my heart and a smile on my face because even though I’d spent this life doing nothing but running, I’d felt free, freer than I ever could in this life.

My eighth life would be spent doing nothing. I think the exhaustion from my first seven lives will have caught up to me by this one. The exhaustion of having explored all my unlived lives will be kinder than the exhaustion of regret, but it’ll be exhaustion nonetheless. I’ll spend my days sitting by a window with my cat perched on my lap and all the books I hadn’t gotten a chance to pick up in a pile within arm’s reach. I’d allow my eighth life to pass me by because I would no longer be crushed under the weight of all the things I had yet to do. I’d be content, and the presence of joy in my life would no longer depend on achievements or people. The lack of anything in my life would make me whole, the mere act of doing nothing fulfilling me in ways long lists of tasks never could.

If I had nine lives, I’d spend my final life writing. I’d chronicle the eight lives I’d lived and explain my decisions. I’d write every detail down, even the messy ones, even the ones that left a sour taste in my mouth, the ones that served no purpose but to teach me bitter lessons. I’d write about myself as though I were a character. I’d reminisce and laugh to myself as I wrote. I’d spend my entire life drowning in drafts and edits, dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s, making sure the story flows and the spaces between the lives don’t separate them. Because, however different, they were all of my own making; every mistake, every good decision and every bad one, every idea, every question, everything was made by me. I’d write long paragraphs and elaborate on everything to make sure that my stories find their way to someone who cares. I’d adore the final draft and pick out a pertinent cover, and I’d let go of my ninth life, clutching it tight. I’d put a period at the end of my last sentence and feel the weight lift off my chest as I finally closed my eyes, knowing that the lives I lived were complete and beautiful, but most importantly, that they were mine.

I know that I hold on to everything longer than I should, that I keep mementos way past their expiration date, and hold on to letters and postcards until, and even after, all that’s left of them are unintelligible tatters. I know I write pages upon pages and make sequels of stories long after they’ve ended, and I don’t spit poison out until it pushes me to the brink of destruction, until it destroys me from the inside out, until the only way left for it to exit my system is through violent convulsions. I know that when I find a rose, I tend to wait till it pierces my fingers and makes them bleed, until it withers and dies in my hand before I even think to throw it out. And even when I finally do, I keep a petal, as evidence that the rose once held my hand and even though the experience was brief and volatile, it was real, and it was mine.

For so long, I figured that the only way to glue together the broken pieces of my heart was to take back every word I said, every smile I dispensed. And I spent a long time trying to wager it back, trying to win my own love back, but all that fighting led to was the stark realisation that love doesn’t end when people part ways. Love cracks and moulds itself to fit into our pockets even when our paths diverge, especially when our paths diverge. So, I hope you know that all the love I ever gave you is yours to keep. I’ll never ask for it back, even when the ache creeps up my belly and sours my mouth again, even when it comes back to me disguised as taunts and arguments, even when it hurts too much to think about. Because the love I gave you didn’t know what the future was going to bring, it didn’t know that its once sweet aftertaste would morph into a bitter juice, it didn’t know that the crevices of my heart would long for your presence ages after the last time you physically resided there, it didn’t know anything, it only knew you.

All the love I gave you is yours to keep, not because you deserve it, not because you earned it, but because I once deemed you worthy of it, because I once made the decision give it to you. Because, as it turns out, the love I gave to you never truly had anything to do with you, it was simply a bare reflection, and a mere extension of me. And so, it will come back to me; in different hands, wearing a different mask, but come back to me it will, sure as the tidal patterns of the ocean come back to her in different forms and different places. The love I gave you is yours to keep because no matter what has changed now, what existed then will always exist frozen in time; no matter how far apart we are now, the love we shared will always float in the infinite space that stretches between us. And maybe that is enough. Maybe all we share now, is the sky and maybe that, too, is enough; enough to allow the love to exist, forevermore, in those diminutive moments of dawn and dusk when the sun and moon briefly appear to share the vast sky before bidding each other farewell only to reunite in this shared expanse hours later, the same way we likely will, in perpetuum.

My grandmother seldom said “I love you”; her ‘I love you’s existed in the plates of cut up fruit she’d leave on my study table, in the dinner she’d lay out, in the way she’d oil and comb my hair for hours to make sure it stayed smooth, in the way she stitched up holes in my favourite shirts before I even thought to ask. Her love existed in the fact that her house never ran out of her children and her grandchildren’s favourite fruits.

I wonder if, for the rest of my life, the taste and scent of ripe mangoes will elicit a reaction out of me, if eating a mango will always feel like a religious ceremony of remembrance rather than a mere fruit. Memory is a house that grief invades and alters, the way a parasite would a host. Memories tend to acquire a thin sepia-tinted veil that sours them, I know from experience how difficult it is to enjoy them again. I recently watched Manchester by the Sea, and couldn’t help but notice a very striking presence of the merging of memory and grief. The entire film is littered with flashbacks of memories that the main character shared with his brother who recently passed, these memories that, on their own, are joyous, have now obtained a tinge of malaise; they no longer serve as souvenirs of a time passed but as the final mementos of a person he loved so much that he’ll never get to see again.

All my cherished memories of my grandma are temporarily locked away in a box right now, because I haven’t quite reached the stage of grief where it gets easier to talk about her, it still hurts and boils in the pot until it threatens to fall off the edge, and when it does, it burns every corner of my body and soul and eventually spreads to those around me. For a long time, I thought that refusing to face the grief made me a coward, but I’ve learnt, in slowly dealing with it, that my perception of grief was almost comically far from the truth. Grief isn’t something that one can face and be done with; grief is a shadow that follows you around everywhere you go, and just when you think you’ve escaped it, especially when you think you’ve escaped it, the sun comes up again and the shadow resumes its place next to you.

Every new step I take, everything I do, every birthday I celebrate feels like a betrayal, like I should stop and wait for her to follow, like every day lived without her is a day I’ve done something behind her back. There is a dormant flood inside of me that rises every time I see something that reminds me of her; mangoes and white flowers, her favourite tv show and that one pair of earrings I have that she borrowed all the time, the mini radio she had with her in the hospital and the songs that she’d sing around the house, her favourite colour and her favourite foods, the way the sun shines and the colour of the night sky, plates of cut-up fruit and the colour tea morphs into when you add milk to it. But perhaps one day, I’ll have reached a more mature stage of grief, and perhaps then, mangoes will make me smile. But today is not that day. So, today I bite into the ripest mango of the season, one from the second crate my dad sent over just this morning, and I feel a wave of melancholia, knowing that I’ll never get to share one with my favourite person again, but also knowing that this fruit bears in it the love that I was, and am, lucky enough to share with my father, and his mother.

If I were a star, I don’t think I’d burn long, I’d burn bright and then extinguish, because this rage, however strong, is exhausting. I know that there is good in everyone, and there is a version of myself inside of me that is kind and gentle, but I don’t know how far I have to reach to get a glimpse of her. I’ve never been good with the truth, especially when it’s bitter. I spit it out as one would venom, its acidic taste lingering in my mouth longer than it should, but eventually, even that tinge of bitterness is enough, when built up, to turn me cruel. Or I swallow it, with all its sharp edges protruding in my throat as it makes its way in, finally falling into the large heap of bitter truths collecting in the pit of my stomach, burying that version of me deeper and farther away from my reach.

Little Women is one of my favourite books (and movies) of all time, mostly because, with every re-read and rewatch, a new part of it, that I hadn’t previously paid close attention to, vigorously materialises. My most recent re-read, and subsequent rewatch, led me to hone in on a particular scene between Jo and Marmee in the eighth chapter of the book. It goes something like this;

“It’s my dreadful temper! I try to cure it, I think I have, and then it breaks out worse than ever. Oh mother! What shall I do! What shall I do?”

“Watch and pray, dear; never get tired of trying; and never think it is impossible to conquer your fault.”

“You don’t know; you can’t guess how bad it is! It seems as if I could do anything when I’m in a passion; I get so savage, I could hurt any one and enjoy it.”
“(…) Jo, dear, we all have our temptations, some far greater than yours, and it often takes us all our lives to conquer them. You think your temper is the worst in the world, but mine used to be just like it.”

“Yours, mother? Why you are never angry!”

“I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned how not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another 40 years to do so”

There is something so poignant about Jo’s slow realisation that under the tranquil veil her mother dons in front of her, is a woman working tooth and nail every day to keep her anger at bay. Paying especial attention to this interaction has led me to question the origins of my own rage. I don’t know if my rage is a product of every little thing that has ever broken my heart, if this rage is actually love under the guise of anger, if it is actually the band-aid that holds my slowly shattering heart together. Perhaps this rage is born of grief, grief for everything I have loved and lost, and everything I wanted but never got.

Or perhaps this rage is the rage all women feel, the kind that every woman is born with; we tend to have rage inbuilt, perhaps as a shield to the pain that will inevitably attack our hearts. Or maybe this rage is inherited, maybe it was my father’s before it became mine. I’ve always been told that I am my father’s daughter, and I always believed that they meant the likeness in our eyes, or our curly hair, or the birthmark we share, but maybe this is the thing he passed down to me with most force. But every time I turn to blame him, I’m met with the realisation that perhaps this rage plagues him the same way it does me, that this is his first time trying to deal with it too, that perhaps, sometimes, it scares him, too.

Or maybe there is no explanation for it, no place from which it originated, no event or person to blame for it, perhaps it’s mine and mine alone; my fault, my responsibility. Maybe my cruelty was built within me for reasons unbeknownst to anyone, and all this is just a desperate effort to make sense of something that was never meant to make sense at all.

What I do know for certain is that I am made up entirely of paradoxes, and inside of me reside two girls that exist as polar opposites of one another. The first longs for peace and works tirelessly to achieve it, whether it be with a cup of green tea in the morning, or putting my words to paper when they feel too heavy. But the second seems to work in complete opposition, essentially undoing everything the first does; she’s too angry to hold a cup of tea in her hand without shaking profusely, too outraged to allow her thoughts to be confined within the 25 lines of a journal page, she ruminates in her rage and allows it to grow and rise until the only way to let it out is to scream and destroy.

As I’ve gotten older, and tried harder and harder to quash my anger down until mere specks of it remain, I’ve found that it is not a task I, or anyone, was equipped to accomplish. Rage is an inherent part of being alive, as Francis Weller said, “The sure sign that the soul is awake, is that it is outraged.” Perhaps the key is to mould my rage into something I can make use of, instead of compelling it out of me, or curbing it, or forcing myself to be meek, instead of drowning in it, stuck in an endless loop, time passing me by as I stare at my wounds forever. Because I know now that this rage will be a part of me till the end of my days, even if it shrinks, even if I manage to grow enough around it that it doesn’t really ruin the scenery as much. Because however ugly, this rage is mine, and my pushing it down, belittling it, chastising it, will never make that untrue.

I was always the responsible child, the one that the teachers would seat next to the “naughty” kids so that they could learn from me, the one that my friends’ parents trusted, the one that had a tissue and pocket change handy. I was told I was “wise beyond my years” and that I’d be a great teacher or a loving mother one day. I was 20 when I was 10, and now that I’m almost 20, I’ve never felt less mature. A part of me misses the things I used to hate, like the step ladder in the library to reach the top shelf, I can just reach my arm out now, or the last years of middle school when I couldn’t wait to be a “grown-up,” or the way my parents used to brag about me to their friends in front of me, my face cringing while they sung my praises, now I can’t remember the last time I truly made them proud.

I miss when I thought that this was all there was to the world, my family and me, nothing else mattered. The world’s bigger now, there’s a lot more out there for me to do, to be, to see, a lot more out there for me to miss out on. I get this odd feeling sometimes that I’m missing out on my own life, like it’s a party I wasn’t invited to. Sometimes I see pieces of it in hazy visions, this carefree and lively other life that seems to embody everything that I so desperately want; a quiet mind, a full life, no scary surprises that threaten to trip me up, no ominous anxiety looming around the corridors of my heart, never quite finding its way out. But then I wake up and the colours aren’t as saturated, the music isn’t as loud, and the ever-present fear is back.

I feel so preoccupied with the nostalgia of what was and the regret of what should’ve been that I usually forget about the now. I’m terrified of stopping and looking around my own life, only to realise that I have broken and torn myself apart for nothing. I want to make something of my life, I want to be something, but I am so terrified that this is all I’ll ever be, that I’ll never actually get to the station I want to get to, I’ll just take round trips on the train until I’m exhausted and decide to get back down where I got on.

I’ve spent years and years waiting for my life to begin, waiting to be something, to do something. And now, I have turned into a weak, immature woman who pleads to the sky and hopes that someone or something out there will hear her and intervene because she is not strong enough to do this on her own. I cry in my mother’s arms, only to realise that I’m taller than her now, how can I still not be a whole person? I knew everything I wanted when I was 15, now I can’t even decide on a favourite colour. I stuff grapes in my mouth on new year’s and I look for God everywhere, I get angry easily and I have this inkling that maybe I’m just not a good person, I never step on the cracks on the pavement and I cry during movies that aren’t sad simply because I wish I was doing or making something too.

I’m turning twenty in less than half a year, and I feel like I shouldn’t be allowed to, like I should be disqualified or at least demoted a couple years to sort some things out before I can even think of taking that step. I miss knowing less, and I miss how the world looked at 3 feet tall. For some reason, I still believe. I believe my mom when she says things will only get better from here, and the free astrology app on my phone that says I have a big breakthrough to look forward to. Most of all, though, I still believe in myself. It’s like I’ve spent so long being terrified to look down and find that I’d run out of ink, that I forgot to notice how little of my manuscript is complete. I have a lot to write and a lot to do, and I am going to create a beautiful life for myself. If not for any other reason, I’ll do it purely because of my stubbornness.

My mother lent me a space inside her womb, I never thought it reasonable to expect her to lend me her heart as well, but she did, and does, time and time again. I thought, for a very long time, that love was all about big gestures and heroic sacrifices but my mother is proof that love exists in the tiny threads that hold everything together. Love was my mother touching her lip to every hot soup I had as a child to make sure it wasn’t too hot for me to taste, even though that meant her lip would likely get scalded. Love was the way my mother checked in on me five times a night when I started sleeping in my own room just to make sure the blanket was still covering me, love was my mother giving up her sleep to make sure mine was fulfilled. Love is the delicacy with which my mother braids my hair, the devotion that is infused into every new dish she waits eagerly for me to try. Love was my mother stepping up to be my cheerleader, my knight in shining armour, my super-man, every time I needed it, without my asking. Love was my mother making sure I had everything even if that meant that she had nothing.

My mother always let me have the last piece of cake, she always put extras of whatever we were eating on my plate even if that meant she got less. She lets me sit on the left side of the car even though that’s the side she prefers too, and she always asks me if I’d like another bite of whatever she’s having. My mother’s hands have always been full; of prayers, of love, of fresh laundry. When you’re a child, it’s so difficult to imagine your parents as anything other than your parents. But my mother is a whole person even if she continues to put me first, day after day, and she, too, was once a girl with dreams bigger than the world could possibly fathom, dreams that shattered one by one, either making space for new ones, or getting ready to be passed down to me.

I used to tell my mom how much I disliked my name; how it was too common to ever truly be my own. She’d laugh it off but now I wonder if her heart ever cracked at my blatant disregard for the first thing she and my family ever gave me. I wonder what my mother sees in me that seems worthy enough for her to stake all her hopes upon, and I wonder if she ever feels as though she is destined to bet on losing dogs forever purely because of her undying love for her daughter. I wonder if I lived up to any of her expectations from when I was a child, and I wonder how long it took for her to be able to pretend to be okay with the fact that I, very likely, did not even come close. I am often reminded of this conversation from Lady Bird (2017) between the titular character and her mother;

“Do you like me?”

“I love you.”

“But do you like me.”

“I just want you to be the best version of yourself.”

“Well, what if this is the best version?”

It hasn’t left my mind since the first time I saw it, because, above all else, I have never stopped wondering what my mother thinks of me, not as her daughter, but as a person. Does she like me? If given the choice to un-know me, are there days where her answer would be a hesitant ‘yes’? How am I supposed to face her if I never end up embodying the dreams she’s had for me, and before that, for herself?

I often find my mind tangled up in this desperate, unreasonable plea for another moment in the safety and comfort of my mother’s warm arms. It fills me with guilt to be asking this much of her, when I should be my own person by now, and yet, I walk over to her room in the dark hours of the night, when the world is too quiet to feel this loud, like a little child, wondering if she’d get up and hug me until the noises quiet down. There’s also this unspoken guilt that comes with being her only child, a guilt that insists on making itself visible every single time I let her down, regardless of the degree of my failure. She deserves a daughter worthy of her love and it crushes me to know that, most days, that is not me. My mother and I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once (2023) together when it came out, and I remember watching the scene with Evelyn and Joy in the parking lot, the dialogue between them cutting through the flesh of my heart like a freshly-sharpened knife;

“Maybe it is like you say, maybe there is something out there, (…) something that explains why you still went looking for me through all of this noise and why no matter what, I still want to be here with you, I will always, always want to be here with you”

“(…) You could be anything anywhere, why not go somewhere, where your daughter is more than just… this. Here, all we get are a few specs of time where any of this actually makes any sense”

“Then I will cherish these few specs of time”

With tears streaming down my face, I couldn’t help but wonder if my mom saw it too, saw how much of us was in that scene, if she too felt it cut through her the way I did, if she too had tears rolling down her cheeks, but I never had the courage to turn to her and check. Perhaps in another life, my mother is still a mother, but in her arms lies a daughter who was made to be a daughter, one that is beautiful and kind, respectful and noble. Maybe, in this other life, I’d have the privilege of being the wind that creeps through her open windows just to tell her that I am glad she got what she has always deserved.

My mother was my first love, my first best friend, my first country, my first home. Everything that I am is borrowed or learned from her, and I hope she knows that I would choose her to be my mother in every lifetime. But I hope that, in another lifetime, she doesn’t choose me, that she chooses herself instead. I hope that one day I can be someone that makes it easy for her to be proud. I hope that one day I can make a beautiful oasis for her, out of all the tears she’s ever shed on my account. And if one day, I am even a quarter of the person she is today, I will count myself the luckiest daughter the world has ever seen.

My April was melancholic, it was infused with late nights and grief, bouts of motivation and periods of hopelessness. It was humid, imbued with the occasional rain and the promise of a fulfilling spring. It was pervaded with a sense of waiting for something, like an indie band opening for a world-renowned main act. It was long and tiresome, mournful and eerie. It felt like being shaken out of a deep sleep, like someone forcibly turning me in the right direction, after four months of regression disguised as progression. It was difficult, and most days, exhausting to the point of physical pain. It was the stormiest night of winter, the longest day of an apocalypse. It was rebirth, it was renewal, it was recovery.

Now, May stands at my door, waiting for permission to step in and infect every inch of my being; its warm winds flooding through the kitchen window, its colours enlivening the dull landscape left behind by the remnants of winter, its floral aromas, its sounds of chirping birds and buzzing cicadas, its ability to make me hope, and forgive, despite my better judgement.

May greets me with an air of frivolity, of mirth. She holds her hand out, urging me to reciprocate, but I falter. I falter not because of distrust but because of my undying fear of hoping too much, of wishing too hard, only for the star to fade before I was finished articulating my desire. There is a lot that I hope for this May. I hope it goes slow, slow enough for me to smell every flower and admire every ladybug, slow enough for laughter, for dancing, for baking, and for reading. I hope that May fulfils her ever-present promises of restoration. I hope that May offers auspices where her predecessors only granted melancholia. I hope May plants tulips in my once-barren land and allows tranquillity to occupy the space where the unease and uncertainty currently reside. Above all, I hope that the showers of the last four months really were nourishing the flowers May will offer, that they weren’t showering just for the sake of a deadly flood.

Every time I went to the beach as a child and felt the cold water, coarse with the broken shells and sand it carries, touch the soles of my feet, I felt the urge to go farther, until I reached the horizon, until the shore was a mere line. It felt strangely comforting to feel the ocean embrace my feet, and then my thighs, and then my waist, in her cold current, as though if I were to wade through to the deep end, she would hold my head above water. One of my most vivid memories is that of a rainy beach vacation from when I was 11. I remember sitting in a beachside restaurant enjoying my breakfast while the wailing tides of the ocean crashed against the feeble windows, each thrash eliciting a shriek out of the crowd, “Will this one be the one to crack the window?” The window stayed intact, and eventually, the ocean calmed down, but a piece of my soul remained entrenched there forever. It felt as though the droplets accompanying the waves bore my name, as though they whispered in my ear, demanding I follow them, and thrashed again in anger when I did not.

Watching the ocean feels akin to the feeling that comes with seeing pictures of the Earth taken from outer space. It’s overwhelming to realise how small I am, how negligible my problems are, how it’s almost comical how much importance I place on myself. But just because my problems don’t affect the strength with which the ocean ebbs and flows, or the speed at which planets revolve, does that render the fact that my every minuscule misstep feels earth-shattering, redundant? I recently read The Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel, and it was a quote from that book that, in a lot of ways, led me to write this; “No stars burn forever. You can say “it’s the end of the world” and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not “civilisation,” whatever that is, but the actual planet. Which is not to say that those smaller endings aren’t annihilating.” Looking at the bigger picture never worked for me; no matter how much I tried to focus on the “grand scheme of things,” I was never one to get over errors, no matter how small they were. I honed, I lingered, I regretted, until a piece of me broke and rotted away, until I couldn’t squeeze anything else out of me even if I tried.

Even with all the fear I harbour for her, there is nothing more comforting than the feeling of the ocean’s waves hugging my cold, barren body, almost as if she were an angry parent. And much like an angry parent, I’m filled with a near distaste every time the storm clouds eclipse the coastal view, and an impending storm raises the waves, reminding me of all the ways that the ocean and I are similar, except she still shelters the ability to put forth a calm front on most days. The ocean doesn’t waste sunny days dreading a potential storm, the ocean offers a motherly warmth to her inhabitants, the ocean knows to keep calm when there is no imminent danger. One of my favourite Fleetwood Mac songs is Storms, released in 1979, with a particular lyric I find fitting for this essay, “So I try to say goodbye, my friend, I'd like to leave you with something warm. But never have I been a blue calm sea, I have always been a storm.”

All of this to say, I miss the innocence of feeling the cold-water dance around my feet, the tickling sensation of a brave little fish crossing paths with me before making its way into the great unknown, and having that strange sense of nostalgia for a moment you’re currently living in. In a past life, I believe I was a voyager, with nothing to anchor me to the shore, and oceans to travel across. Perhaps in this past life, I whispered secrets into the ocean’s ears, secrets unbeknownst to my present form, but secrets that she enshrined, such that now, the shore feels like a place that was once nearer to home than to a vacation, and the ocean seems to scream my whispered secrets back at me any time I am close enough for its waves to touch.

A couple of years ago I came across an article about Vladimir Nabokov and his writing style. While, I had not (and ashamedly, still have not) read any of his work, I found that one thing in particular jumped out at me. When working on his memoir, he wrote in three separate languages; Russian, English, and French. The result of this was that, what should’ve been three identical works, ended up being marginally different, each bearing minute details of memories, jokes, and dreams that the others did not, as though different sects of his memory were written in different languages.

Growing up in a bilingual household, one where English was mostly reserved for formal conversations with teachers, while Hindi served as a vessel for discussion between my family, friends, and I, I’ve always been particularly intrigued by the theory of bilingual memory. There are conversations that I remember in such vivid tenor but cannot for the life of me translate without losing the core of their essence; the nuances, the crooked words, the stubborn emphases that refuse to convert into a different language. It’s almost as if there are certain parts of my memory too intimate, too visceral, to ever share in a language that feels so foreign, so unnatural.

I’ve always seen language as a guide to a person, like the legend on the bottom of maps, allowing you to dive deep into the crevices of their soul. I recently revisited one of my favourite movies of recent years, Past Lives (2023), and found this to be very true of the characters at the forefront of the film. While the movie largely explores the what-ifs of love lost, I’ve always thought of language as a catalyst for the film. When Arthur says to Nora, “You dream in a language I can’t understand, it’s like there’s this whole place inside of you where I can’t go,” I couldn’t help but realise that, because her primal memories all exist in a language unbeknownst to him, there is an entire person inside of her that he will never truly know. Her dreams, her jokes, her fundamental memories, exist in a language that will always be foreign to him. He’ll never know what the specific tenors and emphases, that are second nature to her, represent, what they hide behind the thick veil of language barriers. There will always be a piece of her she will never truly be able to share with him in its entirety.

One of my favourite reads of the year thus far, was Boulder by Eva Baltasar, a book about the love and subsequent sorrow and resentment that transpires between two women before, during, and after their affair. One of the (many) quotes that I found myself crazily underlining and noting down was this; “the Spanish lessons she enrolled herself in so she could have something of mine, as though by loaning each other our languages, we were giving sustenance to one another.” Almost as though, learning one another’s language seemed to offer them the ability to unearth facets of themselves previously hidden.

There will always be parts of my psyche that will exist independently of each other, perhaps even clueless to the existence of the other, purely because of the hindrance of language. I’d like to be an open book but there are pieces of me that will remain sequestered despite my objections. And as much as I would love to dedicate my life to the study of linguistics, I am aware that there will always be people, unquantifiable to my feeble mind, that I will never truly know. But perhaps that is the greatest act of love, to love someone even though there will always be aspects of them that you won’t reach, that will never be fully known to you despite both of your best efforts. Perhaps to love is knowing that their dreams exist in a language you can’t unravel, but wanting to be a part of them regardless. Perhaps love doesn’t just exist in knowing hence loving but also in not knowing and still loving.

References in this text include:

- Past Lives (2023) dir. Celine Song

- Boulder by Eva Baltasar

- Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

I spent hours that evening, doting on the hazy voicemail you left me that time I couldn’t answer my phone. You hated voicemails; that was the only one you ever left me, but every time I feel the memory of your voice getting away from me, I play it again. I scrolled back to the very start of our messages, my mouth bittersweet with the joy of your memory and the pain of your absence. I would betray and ruin myself in every way imaginable if it resulted in even one moment of relief in the warmth of your arms. Grief feels like too barren a word to describe what I feel; losing you has changed me in ways too extensive for a single word to truly fathom. The innumerable facets of my grief expand and reveal themselves to me, one by one, as the days pass, as though they were the petals of a newly formed flower.

My grief is like a volcano; most days, it quietly resides in the deepest pits of my gut, easily mistaken for a mere mountain. But some days, it bubbles up, the stream of lava, carrying in it every memory, every regret, every fight, every hug, burning me as it makes its way around my whole body. My grief is a patch of quicksand blending into the landscape, the kind that you don’t know is trapping you until you’re shoulder-deep and realise the easiest thing to do is to stay still and wait for it to be over. My grief is all my unspent love, it is all the love I have for you that now has nowhere to go, that now aimlessly wanders the halls of my heart. My grief is a shapeshifting entity, disguising itself as a new thing every day: the bitter words sitting at the tip of my tongue, the puddles of salt in the corners of my eyes, the hint of a smile on my lips every time someone recalls a fond memory. My grief is also a badge of honour. It reminds me that to truly love is to open yourself up to loss. My grief is a photobook of old Polaroids, a record player with an old mixtape stuck in it, a projector that only plays a compilation of home videos and warm memories.

You exist in everything around me; the trees dance the way you did when the wind is strong. The night sky has the specific shade of blue that you loved so much. That park bench I see every morning, where you’d sit and talk with your friends, the corners of the house, your favourite teapot, your prayer books, your favourite song. Your eccentric stories will live on among the mess of my own, and your tendencies to exaggerate will migrate from your soul to mine. I feel you all around me because you exist within me; so much of me is you. There are things that I’ll never get to tell you, memories that I’ll never get to share with you. I’ll fondly remember all those evenings we spent daydreaming about the food we’d serve at my wedding and the dress you’d wear to my college graduation, but I cannot pretend that a part of me will not shatter at the thought of it.

There’s a corner in my heart that is empty now. It bears your silhouette. And I hope it never fades. Grief is the final form of love, the one that stays with us forever, a receipt for the love you gave and the love you were given. I want the sharp pain of your absence to remain raw. I want it to hurt just as much 15 years later as it did that evening in December. I want it to feel brand-new forever because it is proof that I have loved and been loved in a way that is worth remembering, worth longing for. And what more could I possibly ask for?

I’ve slowed down, and I think you’d hate me for it. I let the bugs out instead of jumping to kill them, and I stop to take pictures of the flowers, and I always tell my mom to have a good day. I bake, and I write, I do French lessons and have picnics in the park. We listen to different music, wear different clothes, eat different kinds of bread, and I know you, but you don’t know me. I scroll through old pictures sometimes, that one Tuesday in June when you decided to dye your hair red and that one Thursday, two years later, when I decided to chop the remnants of it off.

I feel the need to hold onto every last piece of you that I have left, but every time I reach out, I come back with hands devoid of anything but a razor burn and stinging pain. I’m still lost, more so in fact, but I have the patience to allow life to unfold itself in front of me, without worrying about the ticking clocks and your naïve voice in my head telling me to “speed up.” I’d like to say I worry less, but my tension headaches will tell you otherwise. I wish I could tell you that everything miraculously gets better but the speed at which life falls into place is glacial. Perhaps there is a version of us in the future, writing a letter akin to this, that completely contradicts everything I’m saying. That crystal clear vision that you have of your future will eventually crash and break into a million pieces, too copious to even dream about glueing them back together.

I don’t dream of a life that is bursting to the seams with activity anymore, I dream of one that is quiet and romantic, one where peace comes knocking at my door every morning with a basket of freshly baked cookies and a familiar smile on her face. All of that to say, I still dream of purpose and success, I still bleed for the things that I want, but I know now that I don’t have to suffer for it.

Life was cruel to you, but you were always crueller to yourself. I wish I’d had the courage to smile at you in the mirror instead of putting you down. You did your best, and I hope you exist somewhere in my subconscious, peaceful with the knowledge that your best was good enough. I don’t lie in my journal anymore, but I’m sorry that you felt the need to, to keep up false pretences in the company of your own self. I wish I could meet you, if only to tell you that you will, eventually, be alright, and even though everything is not perfect, most days, it’s beautiful enough that the imperfections fade into the background.