then the prayer ends. and not even a full minute later, in the same room, you hear the preacher telling your mother that the new woman who’s come to help with the house, muslim, he says it like a diagnosis, shouldn’t be allowed near the shelf where the brass gods live.

you don’t understand the sentence completely. not then. you only remember wondering why god needed rules. but you understand the tone completely. it is the exact same tone he used sixty seconds earlier to ask for a good harvest, a healthy family, wisdom, forgiveness for whatever he thinks our family did this year. the tone doesn’t change at all. only the address does.

you didn’t have a word for that before. you do now. ventriloquism. someone speaks, and you’re told the voice belongs to something benevolent, except benevolence apparently needs a middleman with extremely specific opinions about who gets to touch the shelf.

, Have you’ve played the game? one where you sit in a circle and whisper a sentence into the next person’s ear. by the time it comes back around, everyone laughs because the sentence has become something else entirely.

I think we’ve been playing that game with God for a very long time. (i have a theory, trust me) So, if there was ever an original transmission, by some original god then it must have been something almost unbearably simple.

feed the hungry. let the frightened rest. do no harm you wouldn’t accept done to you.

an instruction so basic a child could hold it without help however nothing that simple survives contact with men. cause men are evil? pffft— that would almost be too convenient.

because men have always had a problem with simple things. we need layers. we need conditions. we need someone standing between the sentence and the person it was meant for. mostly, we need to be able to sell what was never ours to sell and also because there is very little power in a command that asks everyone to be decent and nobody to be in charge.

i don’t think this is one religion’s mess to clean up alone. i’ve watched religious leaders sit behind wooden screens and decide, on god’s behalf, that a woman’s grief was a sin. i’ve watched a man on a huge stage tell forty thousand people that another group was the problem, and forty thousand hands go up together. i’ve watched a religious leader bless a crowd that had come to tear down a family’s home, calling it cleansing, calling it correction. with a tone that sounds akin to a prayer.

As if apathy in name of the almighty is divinity itself

each speaks as though god has personally appointed them custodian of the moral order, handing them a perfect manual for governing society, sorting people into the righteous and the sinful, the deserving and the condemned.

when the conviction that belief grants one an unquestionable mandate over another person’s life. It makes you wonder what mercy is worth when those preaching it never have to bear its hardest demands, what humility means when it is spoken from a position of power, and what becomes of god when all that is left is its name.

which is why it becomes strange when god starts showing up in politics too.

there is supposed to be a line between the two. the idea behind the separation of religion and state is fairly simple: a government should not need god to justify its laws, and a citizen should not have to belong to the right religion to be treated equally by it. the state can protect someone’s right to practise a faith without becoming the authority that decides which faith is the right one.

in india, that line has always been more complicated than the phrase makes it sound. the British administration classified and governed people heavily through religious categories, and policies such as separate electorates helped turn those categories into political identities. after partition, the people building the new republic had to confront what that politics had produced, and secularism became part of the answer. the promise was that the state would belong equally to people of different faiths.

The irony that remains is that religion never really left Indian politics. secularism is used as a tool to gain political mileage. we call ourselves secular, and yet more and more of the things around us seem to be acquiring a religious colour. history gets rewritten as textbooks change. public spaces take on a particular symbolism. there are debates over whether a colour just a colour or whether the colour itself has become a message. religion slips into speeches, campaigns, television debates, government programmes, and then into the language of what it means to be a good Indian.

there is something almost medieval about the image of a religious authority occupying the highest political office in a state while the machinery of the state is used to make examples of people accused of wrongdoing. dissent gets relabelled by the same logic that runs through all of this. disagree with the government on taxation, unemployment or economic policy or you challenge the government on questions involving religion, minorities or national identity, you are accused of being anti-national which later equates itself to being anti-hindu

and we have seen this elsewhere too. where a government has wrapped itself in religion so tightly that questioning the government begins to sound like questioning the religion itself. criticising the Israeli government, its military actions or its policies is not, by itself, antisemitic. jewish people are not a government, and israel is not beyond political criticism at the same time, genuine antisemitism exists, and sometimes criticism of Israel can cross into it. the difficult part is refusing to pretend those two things are the same.

and that is what unsettles me.

we spent centuries arguing that the church should not rule the state, only to find ourselves repeatedly putting the state in the position of a church with its own sacred language, its own heresies, its own people who are allowed to speak. once disagreement becomes disloyalty, the substance of the disagreement almost becomes irrelevant. you no longer have to answer what someone said. you only have to question whether they are entitled to say it.

being an atheist, is a surprisingly effective way of getting religious men to take an interest in your personal development. there is always one. you mention that you don’t believe in god and suddenly a man you have known for approximately four minutes has taken it upon himself to save your soul.

i call myself an atheist, and people tend to assume that means i am angry at the ‘benevloent’ (?) which is an interesting assumption, because anger generally requires the object to exist. so blaming god for the state of the world has always seemed a little strange to me. it would be like blaming the ocean for being wet.

honestly, i find that a bit strange. people often treat disbelief as a position you have to defend, while belief gets to sit comfortably in the other chair and simply ask questions.

, don’t you worry, i am not particularly interested in taking your faith away from you. believe in krishna, chist, allah, brahma, yahweh, a deist creator, spinoza's god, or some conception of consciousness that neither of us has the vocabulary for yet. i mean the universe is enormous. i am willing to admit that i may have missed a few things, however what i am less willing to do is pretend that because something is sacred to you, it becomes exempt from questions.

i think believers should be allowed to interrogate their own beliefs too.

ask yourself whether you believe something because you have thought about it and found it convincing, or because you were five years old and the found the stories real or someone you trusted told you to, ask whether you would believe the same argument if it had been made by a different religion. challenge your belief and atheists are not immune to this either.

i mean you shodul be certain enough to live by your convictions, but uncertain enough to examine them. if an argument can destroy your entire worldview, maybe it deserves to be heard before you dismiss it. if the religious person is claiming certainty about an invisible being they cannot demonstrate, the atheist who claims absolute certainty about the non-existence of that being is making a remarkably similar move in the opposite direction.

either way, none of us gets a particularly impressive origin story. we are all just here. so if there is a god, i find it difficult to imagine that the god who made all of this is particularly impressed by the divisions we have invented between ourselves. if there isn’t one, then those divisions are entirely our responsibility anyway.

maybe that is what i have been trying to say all along. i don't need to know whether there is a god to know that no man can own the answer, and no belief should make one human being worth more than another. we came from the same strange beginning, from the same ancient life that eventually became all of us, and if there is a god somewhere behind that whole ridiculous, beautiful accident, i cannot imagine that he would look at his creations and see the categories we have spent our lives drawing between them.

perhaps faith can be private, perhaps doubt can be private, perhaps both can coexist without either demanding a conversion. but the moment someone tells me that their god has made them more deserving of dignity than the person standing beside them, i think the question is no longer whether god exists. it is whether the person speaking for him ever stopped to wonder why he needed them to speak at all.

So, there is a draft, i’ve been “working on” for weeks. which is technically true if you count staring at a blinking cursor as work. The room has shrunk to what the laptop can prove exists, and right now the only thing it seems particularly interested in proving is a thin vertical line blinking patiently in the middle of a blank page.

unfinished things have a funny way of messing with time. finished things get dates. they become books, birthdays, funerals, emails, receipts, anniversaries. unfinished drafts just stay there sitting like a furniture. so how should i proceed with this draft?

maybe i should read it again…no, that sounds productive and productivity has always struck me as a capitalistic buzzword designed by suspiciously well adjusted people. so they wouldn’t have to justify their overconsumption and the deffered mental breakdown at supermarket parking lot.

its amazing how much emotional damage can be done by a vertical line that blinks pretty reminisicent of someone tapping their foot asking me to hurry. like look at this. trust me it is not doing anything special. it just appears, disappears, appears again. like a metronome, and there was no music. anyway, i’ve looked at it long enough to know i don’t really know what it’s called. do you,

a cursor?

no, that’s too general. even mouse pointer is cursor too. this thing has a more specific text based job than that. so i do what every writer does when confronted by a blank page and a creative rut. I open another tab. what is the blinking line when you type called?

Caret.

Caret. (try to say it aloud, once). it sounds a depressingly medieval sort of thing to say. like some little knight who gets killed in chapter two of an arthurian romance.you know something like Sir Caret of somewhere-unimportant.

no. I am getting distracted. i should probably get back to reviewing that untitled draft. so what could this piece be about, what is something that i want to put out that keeps everyone happy (because i can’t bear the thought of anyone hating me).

maybe i should write about how fucked up the world is. sounds important. things that sound important get respect usually. i could write about wars, elections, or atrocities commited by these tech lord (losers) billionaires who suddenly find empathy every tax season. every thought is already worn out. now everyone has an opinion, nicely packaged with bold fonts, thumbnails and a podcast microphone. before I can truthfully describe the world it has already moved on to the next disaster.

also not to forget i’d be the last one accused of being neutral anyway. i have little patience for power dressing itself up as virtue, and i have never found the establishment particularly convincing when it asks to be trusted. so my sympathies tend to be with those who don’t hold power, and with the rightward drift that has rather oddly come to define politics in much of the world.

oh i can always write about films, perhaps. i mean cinema has always been nicer than reality because at least films own up their own cliches. i could write about how industry is after mix up nostalgia and critique, how every reboot or even the legacy sequel is an implicit plea for the audience to remember who they used to be instead of judging what’s in front of them.

no, that’s horrible, because whenever i tell why i love something i accidentally do an autopsy and take out its organs one metaphor at a time and say it was beautiful while it was alive.ermm i think i shoud just remove that sentence…maybe not. let’s keep it?. NO, scrap the “autopsy” bit, because writers have apparently unionised around that metaphor and I won’t stand in another creative queue waiting for originality like it’s government paperwork.

actually, just forget it, because not being derivative is itself just another derivative trait, and self-awareness has become such an over-inflated currency that acknowledging clichés now counts as innovation, which is the kind of loophole only exhausted people like myself would care to celebrate.

or you know i should dig deeper in my own soul and write something so deeply personal yet so universally relatable. i mean everyone loves truth with a side of vulnerablity right? (or atleast the aesthetics of a tragic poet that has enough emotional punction to be devasting-ly haunting-ly yearning-ly beautiful?) besides, personal essays these days seem too slick. all the feelings have been cleaned up, explained and put in front of anyone to see. then maybe fiction. fiction has always had the luxury of lying convincingly enough. i mean people applaud instead of calling relatives out of concern, and maybe that’s the trick i’ve been missing all along, confidence masquerading as craft

i could create a man with purpose and send him on a journey to a place and let him walk there in the weather that mirrors his inner feelings but at some point on page three he’d stop and look me right in the eye and ask why i’d given him certainty when i couldn’t even choose a font without opening six tabs on the psychological implications of Garamond (I am sorry Times New Roman).

nah that wouldn’t work, fiction needs belief too. characters don’t have to exist, but they need someone to believe they deserve to exist for three hundred pages. for someone who has been having trouble justifying their own continued existence in grocery stores, its a tough sell

perhaps poetry. i mean i claim to be a poet, so you’d think this would be the obvious choice. well it isn’t anymore. i even tried to write one yesterday. by the end it looked less like a poem and more like a shopping receipt of melancholic, saccharine words. poetry isn’t easier than prose it merely rythmic

well, like a defeatist maybe i would admit i just don’t have anything to say. writers love to pretend that silence is profound, because it sounds a lot more romantic than saying i have no thoughts and my mind is empty. each morning I knock on my own skull for revelation and hear instead the echo of my own emptiness and lack of originality.

as for this untitled draft my dear , i will sleep on it. atleast that’s what people say when they want tomorrow to inherit a problem today didn’t fix and tomorrow well, who knows what happens tommorow. either way, the draft can stay where it is for one more night, because if it has survived this long on hope alone, one more evening of neglect will probably do no harm.

i mean its a draft, i’ve been “working on” for weeks….

i want to hang a frame there or a poster, or even something heavy and permanent that says i live here, but i don’t. instead, i leave the wall blank. i want to get a plant, but i am afraid that i will end up keeping it in its flimsy plastic nursery pot rather than repotting it into ceramic. its as if i have taken in a subconscious concession to the fact that in ten months, i will have to pack my life into cardboard boxes once again. inadvertnly a belief creeps in and you begin to train your desires to be aerodynamic. you learn to love things that can be folded, compressed, or deleted with a single tap of a thumb.

you become a curator of the temporary which is exactly how this neat domestic choreography of a life lived on a lease is designed to be.

on my desk, my phone hums with a notification from the application i use every day to hold the silence of this room at bay. it is a beautiful interface, clean and frictionless, holding millions of songs i will never have time to hear and as i watch the little green icon glow in the dark, a strange, hollow anxiety settles in my chest. i have spent thousands on this platform over the last decade. but if i closed my account tonight, i would inherit nothing but silence. i do not own the songs that got me through my teenage years. i am merely renting the air they vibrate through.

before you know it, a bloodless automated notification presents itself while you slept: one hundred and forty rupees has left your account, an eviction in miniature that happens twelve times a year, not for the roof over your head but for the software you use to write, or the music that keeps you from feeling entirely alone in the afternoon. you are spending more than your parents ever did at your age, your bank account a sieve through which capital drains in a hundred tiny invisible streams — and yet if you look around your room, there is almost nothing you can point to and say, this will outlive me. To live this way is to realize that how crazy it is that the most expensive thing you can buy in the modern world is the right to remain exactly where you are

comically enough in the ancient myth, the danaids were condemned to the underworld to fill a vessel with water using bowls that were riddled with holes, an eternity spent pouring substance into a void that could never hold it, which is the exact mechanical engine of the modern economy. you do not buy the tool anymore; you buy the access to the tool, a distinction that seems harmless until the morning Adobe alters its terms of service or a streaming platform quietly scrubs a movie from its library, and you realize the word “Buy” on a digital interface is just a semantic lie protected by digital rights management. you are paying indefinitely for the temporary permission to stay in place, trapped in an access loop where the price of entry rises every year while your equity remains exactly zero.

like we were promised that to let go of things was to become someone cleaner, someone less encumbered by the weight of their own wanting. no more plastic cases, no more crates of vinly, no more shelves that needed dusting, no deed with your name on it. just you, unmoored and luminous, passing through the world without leaving a mark on it. they called it frictionless because friction implies a surface that remembers you

and i want to be fair to the appeal of this. i know that keeping things for the sake of keeping them is its own kind of trap. the hoarder and the minimalist are having the same argument from opposite corners of a burning room, and neither of them is entirely wrong. there is a real freedom in traveling light. there is something honest in the fantasy of the unlodged self. The feeling of being portable, spontaneous unentangled, ready to leave at any moment, unburdened by the tyranny of objects that need dusting and insuring and eventually disposing of. i understand the desire to own nothing. i understand the defensive, quiet peace of not being owned by your possessions in return.

but what we have is not the minimalist's discipline, not the conscious unburdening of someone who looked at their life and chose. what we have is a generation whose yearning was redirected and toward an endless, frictionless wanting that renews itself every thirty days. they gave us the aesthetic of release without the sovereignty of it. they gave us the saccharine lightness of owning nothing

But what we have now is not that. What we have now is not the enlightened minimalist who has chosen carefully and released everything else; what we have is a generation that was priced out of permanence and handed a subscription as a consolation prize. What we have is the choice to pay, continuously, for something that will never be ours, or to have nothing at all. And we have been so thoroughly convinced to call this freedom.

anyway you can call it the anxiety of a rented life, the slow, psychological erosion that happens when nothing around you is rooted. when you cannot strike a nail into the wall to hang a picture of your mother without calculating how much will be deducted from a security deposit you already know you will never see again, you begin to treat your own history as something provisional, a lease that can be terminated at ninety days’ notice. its not just me but we as a collective have substituted the stability of ownership for the illusion of flexibility, marketed under the banner of “no commitment,” (as if commitment were a prison and not the very soil in which an identity takes root).

anyway to combat this i spent three hours yesterday evening hunting down and downloading audio files of an album that is already saved, in pristine high-fidelity, on an app that costs me a monthly subscription. I dragged the files onto my computer which i plan to move onto an old, heavy MP3 player (or a walkman). I am not the only one doing this. There is a quiet, desperate mutiny happening right now, a structural immune response to an economy that demands we become completely weightless. You see it in the sudden, staggering resurgence of film and digital cameras, in the teenagers hoarding physical CDs of their favourite movies, in the people collecting all those vinly they can store in their crates. Cultural analysts would call it nostalgia but honestly with all due respect, they are misunderstanding the symptom. it isn’t a longing for the past; it is a panic about the future. it is a generation collectively realising that a frictionless life is just another word for a life with nothing to hold on to.

We are returning to the heavy, breakable, finite object because an object that can break is an object that is actually yours. The internet promised us the sky, an infinite, unburdened cloud where everything we could ever want was available everywhere all at once, but i think we would still actively, expensively choose to crawl back into the dirt.

so when we choose to hold a physical media in our hand. it just rests there heavy and finite, offering no infinite algorithmic discovery and demanding no monthly rent. It holds exactly what we gave it, and nothing more. when that running media finally stops, it won't be because a licensing agreement expired or a server went down on the other side of the country. It will be because you and i were the one who finally decided to turn it off.

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I am, by most reasonable definitions, the guy who brings up Nietzsche at parties. persistently. I have read the texts, and I have opinions (a lot of them). I have, at various points in my life, used the phrase “the will to power” in a sentence that did not require it. I own this about myself the way someone in their quarter-life crisis owns a mildly emb…

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3 months ago · 45 likes · 12 comments · shyam

which is fine. it’s fine. everything is fine.

here’s a thing that happened to me. i watched a city flood on my phone. actual footage, rising water, the whole thing. and i felt bad about it for maybe four seconds. genuinely, sincerely bad. a real human emotion. then i scrolled and saw someone making pasta, and i got a little hungry (respect, that’s just biology), and then there was a dog getting reunited with its owner after three years, and i choked with sadness at 2 am. over a dog i didn’t know and would never receive updates about.

and i lay there thinking: i could not cry for the city. but the dog got me immediately. and the reason is so obvious and so embarrassing that i almost don’t want to say it, which is that the dog video had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it was thirty seconds, and everything resolved, and my brain gave me the little chemical reward for experiencing a complete narrative arc. the city just kept being flooded with no resolution. my brain didn’t know what to do with that. my brain is now a golden retriever that only responds to treats.

here’s the thing: i used to be a person who could just be confused. as a teenager i would sit with a question and not solve it. i’d lie there at night actually thinking about my life and what it was and what i was supposed to do with it, and yeah it was uncomfortable, but it was mine. the confusion had texture. it was a real thing i was living inside of.

now the question barely finishes forming and i’ve already opened my phone and someone has written a substack about it. with a title like “on the quiet violence of not knowing who you are (and why that’s actually okay).” twelve thousand people liked it. it has a hopeful ending. i read it and feel briefly seen and then i close it and nothing has changed and i still don’t know who i am, but now i’ve also outsourced the processing of that, so i’m behind.

we used to have to sit with our confusion long enough that something would grow from it. even if that something was just a scar. now you don’t even get the scar. you get a thought, and before you can do anything, a reel surfaces and hands you someone else’s processed version of it neat, summarised, resolved. you look at it, you nod, and you save it to a folder called insightful things, where it lives next to a sourdough recipe you will also never make.

speaking of that folder.

i have, on my phone right now, 847 bookmarks. i have never looked at any of them again. they exist as a kind of museum of the person i was intending to become the person who was going to read a long-form piece on the geopolitics of rare earth minerals, and that one thread about how to think more clearly, and a recipe for vegetarian shakshuka that genuinely looked great, and seventeen different articles titled some variation of how to focus in the age of distraction, which is such a perfect and horrible irony that i want to lie down every time i think about it.

turns out saving or bookmarking something feels exactly like doing it. thats a trick to make your brain release a pat on your back so when you hit the bookmark button your brain reacts, the same way it does when you add something to a to-do list instead of just doing it. the thing enters a queue. queue has infinite storage. nothing ever leaves the queue just like you might have a stacked TBR list somewhere. by the end of filling this queue you are a very productive person who has never done anything.

and the thing that’s wild to me is that the bookmarks are weirdly aspirational. like, they are a portrait of who you think you should be.

i look at mine and i see someone who is deeply interested in screenplay writings , and cognitive science, and fermenting things, and improving their posture, and the entire history of the ottoman empire i guess. and i’m like, that’s a great person. i would love to be that person. Funnily enough in reality i just also watched a forty-minute youtube video last night about why a guy thinks a particular 2009 comedy film is actually misunderstood, and before that i was on a page about some beef in a corner of the internet i don’t even participate in. so… take it as you will

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Oh, also we have completely forgotten how to be bored. like, actual boredom. Think about it, you just have to sit there and exist and your brain, with nowhere to go, starts doing this weird freeform thing where it wanders into rooms you didn't know were in there. you'd stare at the floor tiles and then fifteen minutes later you'd have half an idea that felt genuinely new, that just doesn’t happen anymore (until and unless you are in washroom and you forgot your phone).

and i genuinely think we don’t understand what we’ve lost with that yet. boredom wasn’t just dead time. boredom was weird brain time. a lot of people did their best thinking while doing something else entirely, in the shower, on a walk, in traffic, because the conscious mind was occupied with something low-stakes enough that the other thing could surface. now the conscious mind is never that free. it’s consuming content. always content. Like i once had a good idea in the shower. one time. i don’t remember what it was because i didn’t write it down. i’m telling you this as though it’s a charming anecdote but it is actually a tragedy.

i have been meaning to write something for six months. i’m not going to tell you what it is, because i haven’t written it, so it doesn’t deserve to be described. it exists as a thing i have been meaning to do, which i think about every time i open instagram in the most useless possible way. i have spent roughly four hours watching videos about how to write more instead of actually writing it.

i think about Keats. which i realise is a specific person to bring up in what started as an essay about phones, but bear with me. Keats was twenty-five and dying, and he knew he was dying. he wrote the Ode to a Nightingale knowing the nightingale would outlive him by centuries, and wrote it anyway. when you have a year left you don’t spend evenings on nothing. you don’t save things to a folder. you don’t watch four hours of content about how other people write.

i am not Keats. i want to say that with complete clarity. i am someone who spent an entire evening researching whether Keats was happy in his final months (finding no satisfying answer) then watched three videos about completely unrelated things and went to sleep without writing a single word of the thing i have been meaning to write for six months.

Honestly, it’s not just that we’re distracted. it’s that we’ve traded away something specific: the felt knowledge of things. the difference between reading about grief and sitting inside it long enough that it changes the shape of something in you. between saving the article and actually thinking the thought. between knowing about Keats and writing something anyway.

i’m not going to tell you to delete your apps or go live in the woods. the woods have bugs, and you’d spend the whole time anxious about your phone, which is arguably worse than just being on it. the feeds will keep filling. something will always be on fire before your water has boiled. the grief will keep arriving faster than we can process it and keep turning into numbness, and we will keep calling the numbness fine.

but what we’ve lost (what i’ve lost) is the willingness to stay inside the incomplete thing.

there is always a reason to be quiet because the it’s expected out of it. it looks like “i’m fine” said so often your tongue forgets how to shape other words but inside the body, denial is not forgiveness. denial is storage…

you can refuse an impulse and still keep it.

it doesn’t evaporate. it doesn’t get redeemed nor does it just dissolve. even if a hot priest tells you contrary. it doesn’t pass. just because you didn’t act on it. it goes somewhere. it moves like contraband. it gets smuggled into the bloodstream, tucked behind ribs, pressed into the soft marrow where you’re not supposed to keep sharp things. it curdles there …slow…patient until its rancid enough to demands a new exit wound.

if you are the kind of person who learned early that your skin is not an acceptable place for mess, it will choose another opening. the page is an easy one. the page never flinches. the page does not call you dramatic. the page does not ask you to lower your voice.

the first time i understood this, standing in my childhood bathroom with a toothbrush in my mouth and rage in my throat. there are certain rooms that teach you theology as a nine year old; kitchens, bathrooms, the backseat of a car. in that bathroom the light was too white, the mirror too honest. my mother knocked once and then entered anyway…motherhood as a permission slip and asked why i was taking so long. i remember the specific humiliation of foam. mint red froth around the lips is what animals wear, not sons. i wanted to spit at the mirror, at my own face for having a face, at the entire practice of being a body that must be maintained. but i swallowed instead, because i had learned the trick: turn anything outward into something inward.

be good…be clean…do not stain…and repeat

it’s strange, the things you train your body to do when you have zero clue that you are training it. you don’t call it repression or bottling it up when you’re a child; you call it being mature. being the bigger person. being the ideal son who doesn’t make scenes.

what you are really doing is building a dam out of your own cartilage. you are stacking your vertebrae like sandbags. you are learning to hold the river inside but you and rivers do not like to be held. in elementary school, i used to sit in the library during recess because the playground was a theater of small cruelties: the bright sun exposing every awkward limb, every wrong laugh. in the library the air was cool and the carpet smelled like dust and old glue, and the books waited with their mouths open. i would choose the same corner seat by the window and watch other children run across the blacktop, their bodies spending themselves freely like wilderness alive. shouting, falling so loudly it looked like a kind of fire.

i remember pressing my forehead against the glass and imagining what it would feel like to throw myself into that noise. not to join it, necessarily, but to break it. to run straight into the swarm like a thrown stone. to shove someone. to scream a name until it turned into a bruise in the air. i didn’t do it. i stayed inside. i was good.

i went home with hands that never punched anyone and a mouth that never confessed. my report cards were excellent. my teachers wrote words like “quiet,” “thoughtful,” “well-behaved,” as if obedience were a talent and these words were stars. my body learned its lesson: if you do not release your violence, your violence will find a more civilized way to become real. this is what people misunderstand about “sensitivity.”

they think it means softness. they think it means you bruise easily. but sensitivity is often just a nervous system that has been forced to become fluent in signals. you learn to detect weather in a tone. you learn to hear an argument before it arrives. you learn to take inventory of exits. you learn to keep your heart somewhere it can’t be confiscated and still, the yearning remains.

not just yearning for love…though that too, always that but yearning for an ending. a clean conclusion, like a fucking clairty. a blaze that would make sense of all the smoke you’ve been inhaling.

i can’t help but confide in you dear reader. i do think deferred destruction is its own kind of desire…the secret wish that something will finally happen big enough to justify your constant readiness. you live with your muscles braced like a prayer that doesn’t know who it’s praying to. to think one like me wanted peace. but what i inherently want is permission.

there is a childhood memory i keep like a shard: i am seven years old, watching my father light a match for a candle during a power outage. the whole room is dark, but the moment the match catches, his face becomes a sudden statue—half-gold, half-shadow. the flame trembles as if it’s afraid of him. i remember staring at the match and thinking: that is what i am supposed to be careful of. and then, more quietly: that is what i want to touch.

children are honest in the way they hunger. we don’t have metaphors yet, so we reach for the nearest element. fire. water. teeth. even god. later, when the lights came back on, my father blew the candle out and the smoke curled up like a question. the smell lingered in the curtains, in my hair. it followed me to bed. i lay awake tasting soot and understanding, without words, that survival is not always mercy. sometimes it is simply delay. sometimes it is the match being pinched out before it can become a housefire. sometimes it is the almost. the body remembers almost more sharply than it remembers disaster. disaster is a story you can tell; almost is a loop you keep living. writing, for me, began as a way to give the almost a body. people want to call it art because that word is soft and flattering, because it puts a frame around what is essentially self-harm with better punctuation. but when you have spent your life denying your body an honest outlet, the page becomes a surgical table

You climb onto it willingly. you arrange your own limbs. you hand the scalpel to your own hunger and say: do it. open me up. if i cannot be witnessed as a person, witness me as evidence, if i can’t bleed…let the ink do it. there is an intimacy to autopsy that no one admits. it is the closest anyone ever gets to you without your consent, and the closest you ever get to being understood without having to speak. it is interpretation made literal: a body turned into a text. an answer extracted. so you write like that. you write not to create something beautiful, but to discover what has been rotting politely beneath your skin. you drag the river of your subconscious into daylight and make it confess what refused to drown and the river hates you for it.

so i think, yes, if there are first forms of writing, its a voice released into a room that does not accept or invite it. prayers chanted under breath without believing in a god. a hand extended into air like help called out by someone drowning.

to say in a specific way to grow up in that is to be an echo. you can become either unseen or overexposed, and both produce the same hollowing effect. unseen is obvious but with it the ache of being missed while you are still standing there, the way your name feels like it belongs to someone else because no one uses it with intention. to be the friend to walk on grass when sidewalk is narrow

overexposed is trickier. it is when you are looked at constantly but never met. when you become a surface for other people’s interpretations…good son, bright student, sensitive friend, “so mature”, until you feel your insides thinning under the glare. you are observed, yes, but with scrutiny. your life becomes light without warmth. saturation without contact. you could be fully visible and still unreal.

when this meaning falters because nothing presses back. no shared breath. no reciprocal gaze. no other heartbeat answering yours like a hand on the other end of a rope. you begin to document. you begin to archive yourself because if you don’t it will all be stuck to you.

my fellow writer vivi names this accumulation when she writes, “am i not just a graveyard of all the people who have ever loved me and i have ever loved back? the memories, both good and bad, rot inside me” this is what happens when feeling outlives reciprocity. when love has no witness, it doesn’t disappear, it decomposes. it turns the self into storage.

just how museum preserves artifacts carefully, and reverently, like difference between living and surviving is whether someone will later be able to point at you and say, “this existed” . then one day you realise its borrowed. you are not making art. you are making proof. a closed loop of being: you write to feel real.

Often forgetting page is not a person, and so it cannot look up and look back. it can only accept. it can only hold. it can only become a mouth that never quite becomes a face. you return to it, because it is the only place that holds you without asking you to be palatable.

like if you see writing becomes the lingering soot from a house that almost burned down. it is not the fire itself. stain marked that insists something happened here, even if the walls remain standing. you look at the soot and you remember the heat you were ready for. you remember the match in their hand, the smoke in the curtains, the way your body has always been a building full of dry wood. Survival was a delay disguised as mercy.

you were spared not because the world was kind, but because the timing was wrong, because someone interrupted, because you learned to swallow the scream before it became sound. you are alive the way a bomb is “safe” when buried deep enough…never… defused, just displaced. and so the yearning persistently grows hungry not only for love, or recognition, but for a completion. an ending that would make your vigilance feel earned.

also consider reading:

my tangled labyrinth of desire

graveyard of all the people i've ever loved

it's 9:28 am and i'm thinking about death. there's an iced black coffee in front of me on the table, i wish there was a word for the condensation that's happening because of the heat. the ice cubes are slowly disappearing, i have to leave in 30 minutes if i want to reach there on time. yesterday, when i was coming back home, i took the road less travele…

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2 years ago · 180 likes · 12 comments · vivi

This is what survival becomes: not a choice, not a single transaction, but a burden that resets with each dawn. The price changes daily. One day, it’s counted in rupees. The next, in hours of sleep. Then it shifts—into something harder to name. A dull, gnawing hunger that settles beneath your ribs. A weariness that makes the bones feel borrowed. A kind of living measured not by what you build, but by what you lose just to remain. And always, the corpse whispers. It speaks in riddles that resist answers.

What is heavier than hunger?
A father turning his wallet over and over, trying to make two hundred rupees become five.
A mother lying beside her children, telling them their stomachs are mistaken. That emptiness is a game they can win if they sleep fast enough.

What is the price of staying alive?
A name handed over at the border like a coat no longer needed.
A girl stepping off the path to school because the bus fare has turned hostile.
A man breathing factory air that will kill him slowly, because the alternative is quicker.

This isn’t a cycle. A cycle suggests movement, something natural. But this weight is designed. It’s placed on backs, written into contracts and budget cuts, spoken through smiling mouths. It’s sewn into the logic of economies that run on someone else’s desperation. The corpse doesn’t return because you failed to let go. It returns because the world won’t let you.

Grief doesn’t expire. It clings like a second skin.

What becomes of a body that carries loss too long?
What becomes of a child who learns early that love often leaves, that staying can be more dangerous than running?
How many times can a person abandon the things that once tethered them to meaning—names, homes, languages—before they become unrecognisable to themselves?

Displacement carries its own mourning. The land that once held your footsteps gets paved over. The language you once spoke is met with laughter or indifference. Your ancestors become footnotes in someone else’s textbook. Even silence after catastrophe holds grief—the hush before the names are read, before the dead become rows in a spreadsheet.

What is heavier than hunger?
History.

And the corpse no longer laughs. Suffering has lost its mystery. There’s no riddle left. No twist of language to soften the blow. The corpse doesn’t gloat. It already knows it has won.

They’ll call it resilience. They’ll praise your ability to crawl. They’ll celebrate how you keep waking up. But resilience is a word used by those who never had to trade for it. The world says endurance is strength. That there’s dignity in clawing forward. But every act of endurance comes at a cost.

Each day, something is given up.
A worker trades the future of their spine, their eyesight, their breath for a paycheck that vanishes before rent is due.
A migrant trades the rhythm of their voice, the comfort of familiar seasons, to survive in a place that insists they don’t belong.
A woman learns to measure her silence—each word a risk, each bruise a ledger—calculating what kind of pain leaves fewer marks.

And still, the world demands gratitude. It reminds you that things used to be worse. That progress has been made. That you should be thankful to be alive at all. But what good is progress if the weight only shifts to a new back?

You think you are alive? the corpse asks.

This is not a hymn for hope. Hope would be too clean.

Let this be a refusal. The corpse will not be buried. The cost will not be erased. It will be spoken; in names remembered, in absences felt, in bodies bowed under an inheritance they never chose.

Not silence. Not surrender.

The corpse no longer crawls back to the tree. It doesn’t need to. It knows it will be carried.

over time, this became instinct. not kindness, not empathy—just a survival tactic disguised as generosity. the more i disappeared into what others needed, the more i was praised for it. love became synonymous with utility. if i could be useful, i could be kept.

so, i honed myself into someone indispensable. quiet, competent, giving. always giving. even when no one asked. especially then.

i used to think there were only two ways to survive in this world: be the one who takes, or the one who is taken from. strength or softness. the sharp edge or the open palm. they don’t say it like that, of course—no one hands you the blueprint. it’s learnt, its known, it’s there, under everything: in the praise reserved for those who endure quietly, and the warnings about what happens to people who ask for too much.

so i picked my part. i chose to help because it seemed nobler. so i wore hats as much as i could, the listener, the group dad, the one who stayed up late just in case someone needed something and on the days that felt heavier, when the giving started to feel like splitting, i told myself this was the honourable choice. the tender one. that there was something holy in offering yourself before anyone had to ask.

i have known giving as easy as breathing but lately, i’ve started wondering if that story was meant to protect me, or if it was just the easier one to live inside. when you are always giving, always soft, always folding yourself smaller to make space—at some point, you stop noticing when the edge begins to grow. when your kindness grows teeth. when your selflessness starts to ache like a wound.

sometimes i wonder if i ever made a choice at all—if becoming useful was just the only way i knew to be safe. if it started quietly… in those small, unspoken calculations on what to say to keep the peace, what to offer before someone had the chance to ask like a skill set refined through observation, not instruction. there’s no ceremony for it, no moment of realisation. you just look up one day and realise you’ve built your entire identity out of other people’s needs.

people admire it. they call it empathy. reliability. selflessness even as if those are virtues that don’t cost anything. they act as if being essential to others doesn’t eventually mean disappearing from yourself.

maybe its a pessimistic view to hold but i learned how to shrink in ways that look like generosity. to anticipate before anyone expresses lack. to hand over pieces of myself in such small, quiet portions that no one notices i too am starving.

they say you’re either the lamb or the blade but no one tells you what it does to a person to be both.

the fun about it is that we don’t always call it usefulness. sometimes we call it kindness. responsibility. love. we are raised inside systems that mistake output for worth.

systems that reward efficiency, obedience, resilience—but only in the right proportions, only in the right bodies. from the beginning, we are not asked who are you, but what can you do? what can you provide? how will you serve?

usefulness doesn’t land on every body the same. some are trained to carry more—quietly, endlessly, without breaking. women. caregivers. children in immigrant households. the ones who clear the table before anyone thanks them. the ones who read a shift in tone before the words arrive. they apologise for taking up space unless they are filling it with something consumable.

be helpful. be agreeable. be competent, always competent. especially when you’re tired. especially when you’re hurting.

usefulness becomes identity becoming a slow performance. becomes inheritance.

the more we are praised for disappearing, the more invisible we become to ourselves. we learn to anticipate need before it’s spoken. we learn to keep the world from falling apart, even when we are quietly crumbling beneath it.

but don’t you worry! this is not personal failure. this is design.

and it evolves. The metrics shift—grades, salaries, follower counts, acts of care—but the math stays the same: worth equals output. we chase validation through usefulness, not realising the goalpost is always moving. the reward for being good at everything is being expected to do everything.

you grow up believing you must earn rest. earn softness. earn being loved.

you learn to weaponise your own capacity. you learn to monetise your pain. you learn to be proud of being needed—even as it hollows you out.

…and still, you give. still, they take & still, you stay useful.

because what happens if you stop?

some of us learned early that to be useful is to be wanted. not loved. not seen. just tolerated in the shape of necessity. so we became indispensable. quietly. softly. without questions. we became the ones who remembered. the ones who stayed late. the ones who carried what no one else would name.

and we were praised for it. not like devotion. like expectation.

of course you did. you always do.

the don’t build altars for people like us.
we are the altar. we are the hands that clean up after the offering. the plate that fills itself again and again. the silence that makes the room feel whole.

this is how usefulness becomes identity.
how vanishing becomes design. how you start to believe that being needed is the same as being kept.

but…what happens when no one is hungry anymore? who are you when the hands are empty? what’s left of you, when there’s nothing left to fix? and is there any worth in a body that simply... exists?

Hope feels like that sometimes—like something you force yourself to keep digging for. Gritted teeth optimism. Not the kind of hope they write about in greeting cards or self-help books, but the kind that knows the world is a fractured, hollow place and still decides to say: “So what? I’ll make something of it anyway.” You bite and claw your way through the days because what else is there? Because meaninglessness is an open door, and the beauty is in what you choose to drag through it with you.

I’ve never trusted easy answers. Life doesn’t care if you’re okay or if you’re drowning. But I do believe there’s a kind of defiance in sticking your hands in the dirt and planting seeds anyway. In loving fiercely and without caution. In sharing a meal, watching the sky bleed itself into gold, or letting someone see the parts of you that still ache. None of it erases the void—but maybe it doesn’t need to.

Despite everything—despite the grief and the weight of it all—I think I’m grateful. Not in a soft, simple way, but in the kind of gratitude that burns. That says, thank you for letting me hurt like this, for letting me love, for letting me stay long enough to see another sunrise.

and if I close my eyes long enough, I can almost hear it: the earth murmuring back, You are loved. You are here because I asked you to be. Just for a little while. So stay. Bite down. Make something of it.

And maybe that’s why I keep going—not because I think it’ll get easier, but because there’s a kind of savage beauty in wrestling with life and saying, I’ll take you as you are. There’s something holy about the dirt under your nails, the ache in your shoulders after a long day, the way your breath burns in your chest when you’re gasping from laughter or rage or grief.

I think about all the times I wanted to quit—when the days felt too heavy to carry, and every minute crawled like an eternity. But then there’s that sliver of something—a stray cat blinking at me from under a streetlamp, the way the light turns a cracked glass into a kaleidoscope. The smell of garlic and onions sizzling in butter, how it fills a room like an embrace. Those moments hit me like a gut punch, reminding me that even in this vast, absurd emptiness, there are things that make it worth staying.

Because isn’t that it? Isn’t that the whole point? Not to find meaning but to make it. To dig it out with bloody hands and trembling fingers, to scream it into existence if you have to. To hold someone’s hand so tightly it feels like you’re stitching the universe back together, even if just for a second. To say, I don’t care if it all ends in ashes, because I was here. I was alive. And fuck it, I loved.

The truth is, the world doesn’t owe us anything, and it sure as hell doesn’t care if we’re okay. But every time I look up at a bruised, endless sky, I feel it: the quiet, aching love of something vast and indifferent that still lets us exist. The earth doesn’t promise forever; it only asks us to stay a little while, to feel its weight, to let it hold us even as it crushes us.

And maybe that’s enough. To know that, despite everything—the chaos, the pain, the suffocating silence—we were invited here. To touch, to taste, to ache, to laugh, to build something beautiful out of the shards. To make this fleeting moment ours, teeth bared, hands raw, hearts wide open.

companion piece:

my tangled labyrinth of desire

maybe it's okay to let your figs rot

“i have done nothing all summer but wait for me to become myself again…

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8 months ago · 92 likes · 13 comments · vivi

she leaves traces of herself everywhere—on my skin, in my thoughts, in the spaces between my ribs. i wake up to the ghost of her fingerprints on my arm, her warmth lingering like the last note of a song. i breathe her in, and the world is suddenly made of her—like i could tilt my head back and taste her name in the air. some nights, i think i dream in the color of her voice.

she tells me to stop looking at her like that, but how could i not? she is a quiet storm, a summer night heavy with something electric. she smiles, and the tide shifts in my chest. i want to map every version of her—the girl she was before me, the one she is now, the one she will become. i want to know her the way the ocean knows the shore, endlessly, without hesitation.

"you act like i’m something divine," she says, half-laughing, shaking her head.

“you are," i say, but she doesn’t believe me.

she calls me ridiculous when i say i could die happy just watching her exist. i tell her she doesn’t understand—watching her is like watching fire. beautiful. dangerous. my hands ache to reach out, even knowing i might burn. and i would burn, gladly.

she tilts her head and studies me like she’s searching for something, like i am a mystery she’s only halfway through solving.

"you’re mine," she says, and it doesn’t feel like ownership. it feels like safety. like truth. like something that has always been and always will be.

i have never belonged to anything the way i belong to her. i could be nothing better.

she traces circles on my wrist with the pad of her thumb, absentminded, like she’s writing something only my bones will understand. i wonder if they do—if deep inside me, my marrow already knows her name, if my blood runs warmer because she is near.

she doesn’t realize what she does to me. the way her presence rewires the world, turns every sharp edge soft, makes the unbearable feel like something i can hold without cutting myself open. she is not a cure, not salvation—she is something truer than that. she is the quiet promise that i am not lost.

and i—i am hers.

i could be nothing better.

it’s not about possession. it’s not about being claimed like something small and breakable. it’s about the way she says my name like it belongs to her mouth. about the way she tucks herself into me, like i am something worth resting in. it’s the way she looks at me—like i am not a fleeting thing, not something the wind will take.

she asks me why i smile when she holds my hand, why i shake my head when she tells me she loves me as if she’s saying something ordinary.

"i don’t think you understand," i tell her.

she frowns, waiting.

"i don’t think you understand what it means to be loved by you."

she laughs, soft, like i’m being ridiculous again. like she isn’t the sun tilting the whole world on its axis. like her love isn’t something holy, something i would carve into the sky if i could.

but she doesn’t need to understand. it is enough that she is here. that she is mine. that i am hers.

and i—i could be nothing better.

she has pressed herself into me so deeply that i do not know where i end and she begins. i wake up tasting her name, my throat raw with it, my body aching like i have been emptied out and refilled with something unbearable and sweet.

somewhere in me, there must still be a self untouched by her, but i do not care to find it.

there is no version of me that does not belong to her. no self i could construct that is not shaped by the way she has touched me, carved me out of my own ruin. to love her is not to hold something delicate in my hands—it is to be unmade, to let her unravel me thread by thread, to let her wear my skin like it was always meant for her.

she sees me, and i am gutted by it.

she sees me, and i am whole.

there is no safety in this love, no gentle harbor. it is a fire i have thrown myself into willingly, a hunger that cannot be named without trembling. i do not love her in the way that is soft or careful. i love her like a wound that refuses to heal, like a scar i run my fingers over again and again just to remember the pain.

she does not flinch from me.

she does not turn away when i am ugly with wanting, when i am jagged and cruel, when i am shaking with the unbearable weight of needing her. she only holds me tighter, her fingers digging into my ribs like she is afraid i might slip through them. she only whispers, “i know. i know.”

i wonder if she understands the enormity of it.

that i would rip myself open just to prove she is inside me. that i would tear the world apart if it ever tried to take her from me. that i have never believed in anything the way i believe in the sound of her breath beside me, in the way she says my name like it is the only thing she has ever known.

she is in my blood now, written into my bones, curled between my ribs like something sacred.

she is the softness i never deserved.

she is the hunger i will never satisfy

i am hers.

i could be nothing better.

The universe creates eyes to see its own beauty, ears to hear the music of its own waves, hearts to feel the ache of its own vastness. Every neuron firing in a human brain mirrors the filaments of galaxies, a fractal resonance connecting the infinitesimal to the infinite. The lightning in the sky echoes the synaptic sparks of thought, and every ripple on water mirrors the expanding spheres of time itself. Individuality, as we call it, is the thinnest illusion, a distortion of perspective. The trees do not mistake their leaves for separate beings, nor do rivers divide themselves from the oceans they feed. We are moments in a singular current, fleeting eddies in the river of the cosmos.

To exist as a human is to know the weight of brevity. What are our lives but the blink of a cosmic eye? A human heart beats roughly three billion times—each thrum an event so minuscule it barely registers against the drumbeat of stars collapsing, galaxies colliding. Yet, paradoxically, this fleetingness gives rise to a unique gravity. Does the firefly’s brief luminescence burn brighter because it knows the dawn will extinguish it? Do we? Perhaps our significance lies not in our duration but in the intensity of our awareness.

We are meaning-makers. We name the constellations, write symphonies, capture sunsets in paintings that will outlast their creators. Is this meaning arbitrary—a desperate attempt to impose order on chaos—or is it a purpose embedded in simply being? Perhaps the universe does not ask for us to make sense of it but to bear witness to its grandeur, to hold its fleeting moments of beauty as sacred. When we gasp at a sunset, when we are moved to tears by a symphony, is that not the universe marveling at itself?

The philosopher asks, "What is the point of a cosmos that creates observers to see itself?" but perhaps the question is its own answer. The point is in the experience, in the ripple becoming the wave, the wave touching the shore. The universe is vast enough to hold joy, pain, curiosity—and we are the instruments through which it plays these notes. When you stare at the stars, feeling small and infinite all at once, that is the universe feeling wonder at its own existence. When you weep for beauty or for loss, that is the cosmos grieving and rejoicing through your body.

We are swirls in a nebula, momentary currents in a cloud of dust and light—shaped by forces unseen, unique only in the way we scatter the starlight before folding back into the infinite. We are fleeting neurons in the vast mind of existence, sparks of awareness in a dream that spans epochs. Our lives are brief, yes, but they are also miraculous, for we are the cosmos savoring itself, moment by moment. To be human is to embody this paradox: to be finite in a boundless expanse, to be both observer and observed, to carry within us the weight of stardust and the wonder of knowing it.

And what is it like, then, to be stardust that breathes? To have hands that can touch the bark of a tree, feel its ridges spiral like fingerprints, to hold something ancient and alive and not know where you end and it begins? The atoms in your fingertips are older than the tree, older than the ground beneath it—calcium forged in the hearts of stars that burned their last before Earth had a name. And yet here you stand, mortal and trembling, smelling the resin, the earthy musk of bark warmed by sunlight, tasting salt on your lips as the wind brushes your face.

The universe is not an abstraction. It is the tang of copper in your blood, the way an orange bursts on your tongue, sharp and sweet, like sunlight condensed into flavor. It is the warmth of another’s hand in yours, the texture of skin against skin, the soft ache of connection. It is the way the ocean spray smells like memory, like something you’ve never lived but have always known. It is your heartbeat pulsing against your ribs, a drum echoing the rhythm of tides, a ripple answering the moon’s pull.

And yet, as grounded as we are, we carry the stars in our bones. At night, when the sky blooms with light—cold, distant, and indifferent—it feels like an old hunger stirs. You tilt your head back, and for a moment, you are not a person with bills and regrets and half-remembered dreams. You are a thread unraveling into the cosmos, woven back into the fabric of what you once were. The air is sharp with the metallic scent of night, and the stars seem to hum—not to you, but through you. You are their echo, their mirror.

We live on the edge of a knife, perched between the infinite and the immediate. The taste of coffee in the morning, bitter and smoky, reminds you that you exist, that you are alive in this fleeting now. But beyond the cup, there is a universe expanding, galaxies spinning, dark matter whispering secrets no one will ever hear. The contrast is almost unbearable: the vastness of it all and the smallness of your hands, your breath, your life. And yet, there is something sacred in this tension, in the way the mundane holds the weight of the infinite.

Is the universe lonely, you wonder, in all its vastness? Or is it content, spilling itself into symphonies of matter and light, into fleeting creatures who feel its wonder in their blood? When a baby’s first cry slices the air, raw and unformed, is that not the universe gasping at its own birth? When you sit beside a fire, the scent of smoke and wood sap mingling with the warmth on your face, is that not the cosmos savoring its own transience?

You think of the lightning you once saw in a summer storm, how it split the sky open, how it illuminated everything for an instant: the wet asphalt, the drenched leaves, the wild hunger of the clouds. It felt like a nerve firing, like the universe thinking aloud. That same electricity hums in your synapses, in the tangled network of your brain. When you close your eyes, the sparks inside you are no different than the stars you see when you look up.

the improbable balance, the thin line between too much and too little. This is not just the story of Earth, but of everything. The universe is a tightrope walker, balancing on the edge of chaos, creating beauty through its precariousness. And we, too, walk this line, each breath a miracle, each heartbeat a testament to the improbable alignment of forces beyond our comprehension.

Maybe the point is not to find an answer but to live in the question. To feel the grass underfoot, cool and damp with morning dew, and know that you are part of something vast. To taste the salt of the ocean on your lips and recognize it as the same salt that once coursed through ancient seas. To look up at the stars and feel both small and infinite, a ripple in the water and the wave that stretches across the horizon.

To live, then, is to be the universe in miniature, to hold the infinite within the fragile vessel of your body. You are not a speck in the void; you are the void, condensed and aching, tasting salt and sweetness, feeling wind on your skin, hearing the music of your own breath. You are the ripple and the wave, the observer and the observed. You are fleeting, yes, but in your fleetingness, the cosmos finds permanence. And as you exhale, the air tasting faintly of smoke or memory, you wonder: is this the point? To be a fragment that feels whole, to be a moment that stretches forever?

Read More From Shyam —

Oh! what a beautiful story, providing us warmth in its simplicity, but it’s a lie—a gilded trap that will ensnares you in a cycle of disappointment and self-doubt. afterall it tells us that somewhere out there is someone who will meet every need, fulfils every desire, and never falter in their devotion.

this narrative is dangerous. it frames love as passive—something that happens to us rather than something we create. it encourages us to view relationships through the lens of destiny, and when things inevitably become messy or difficult, it gives us an excuse to walk away. After all, if love requires effort, then perhaps they weren’t “the one” after all.

but love isn’t completion. It’s completion through construction.

we don’t want to hear this. we crave the fairy tale, the dopamine drip of a perfect fit. we’re taught to chase chemistry, the kind that ignites skin and sends blood surging. to demand compatibility that smooths over every sharp edge. love, we’re told, is meant to happen to us, effortlessly, like a story unfolding just as it should. but stories lie.

the truth is this; it is a splinter lodged beneath the skin, a thorn that festers and aches until you do the slow, painful work of removing it—or learning to live with it. its like digging your nails into the dirt, planting seeds that may or may not bloom. its turning toward someone when every selfish part of you wants to turn away.

It’s knowing that there is no “one,” only this one, here and now, with all their flaws and blind spots and hollow spaces that will never perfectly mirror your own.

the modern affection is disposable, an aesthetic glamorous performance for an audience that will never applaud loud enough. we are raised on the belief that we deserve everything. a partner who will fit perfectly, effortlessly, into the empty spaces of our lives. someone who will read our silences like scripture, heal our wounds with their touch, and make us feel seen in a way that doesn’t demand we do the same. we are not looking for a person; we are looking for salvation.

and when the cracks show, we run. we tell ourselves the universe got it wrong this time. that the next person will be easier, softer, more attuned to the rhythms of our chaos. we leave when the discomfort begins, when the quiet between words becomes unbearable. we forget that silence, too, must be tended.

but we don’t want that mess now, we want a sterilised form of it and we have twisted that into stages one must pass to prove they worthy of the love - worthy of a companion.

and this arcade starts with the swipe, the flick of a finger that sets the machinery into motion. left, left, left—until someone catches your eye, until the conveyor belt delivers someone attractive enough, interesting enough, digestible enough. their life, their essence, is compressed into a few bullet points: job title, favorite show, height. a snapshot of who they are, tailored just for you.

ITS A MATCH, congratulations the first level is won. but this is only the beginning.

now there are conversations akin crosswords that you need to fill. Be charming, but not too much. funny, but not offensive. be casual, but don’t come across as disinterested. a wrong answer—a delay in replying, a poorly timed joke—and you’re disqualified. the belt moves on.

If you pass this stage, you move on the next, its a messy dilemma but don’t you worry they have a name for it - situationships — A liminal space between wanting and not wanting, between affection and avoidance. It’s safer this way, we tell ourselves—no titles, no expectations. But it’s a lie, and we both know it. one person always feels more, and the other holds the leash.

a first date, the next trial. its like walking into an audition where the role you’re vying for is your own worth. you must smile enough to seem approachable but not so much that it looks forced. you must reveal just the right amount of yourself—your quirks, your desires, your vulnerabilities—but not too much. never too much.

you are not building a connection; its as if selling yourself. and the terrifying part is that they’re doing the same. two people trying to outwit the algorithms that brought them here, pretending this isn’t a transaction and if the date goes well? welcome to the next level.

Now the stakes grow higher. There are milestones to hit—shared vacations, declarations of exclusivity, meeting friends or family—all carefully choreographed steps toward the ultimate prize: a relationship. But even then, it doesn’t stop. You must constantly perform to maintain what you’ve won. Post the anniversary photos, the date night selfies, the grinning holiday shots. Show the world that you’re winning at the game, that you’ve made it.

The lie we’ve built around connection is that it’s supposed to be easy, that the right match will click effortlessly, and if it doesn’t, you just start over. Swipe again. New player, new stage, repeat. But what happens when you’ve been playing so long that you can’t even remember what it felt like to meet someone without a screen mediating the experience? When you start seeing people not as individuals but as profiles to be evaluated, discarded, or pursued?

And still, it’s never enough.

Because you can’t build something real on half-truths and half-measures. Connection—raw, unfiltered, gut-wrenching connection—requires risk. It requires mess. It requires letting someone see the parts of you you’ve hidden, the parts you’re still learning to accept. But we don’t have time for that anymore.

We invent words to avoid saying the hard things: I care about you. I’m scared of losing you. I want to try.

Instead, we ghost. We orbit. We breadcrumb. We walk away before we can be left behind.

And what’s left? A landscape littered with half-finished stories and unspoken truths. We sit in rooms filled with people but feel utterly alone. We keep reaching, swiping, texting, hoping, but the ache never leaves.

What a lonely way to love.

Because love is not an altar; it is not worship. It is a kitchen floor littered with crumbs, a shared glance across a crowded room that says, I see you. It’s fighting about who left the lights on again and then sitting in the dark together because the power went out anyway. It is ugly and imperfect, a splatter of paint that never quite dries, no matter how hard you try to clean it up.

Love is an act, not an accident. It’s the decision to stay when leaving feels easier, the choice to reach out even when your hands are shaking. It’s turning the soil again and again, even when the roots won’t take hold. It is saying, I choose you, not as a declaration of destiny but as a vow to keep trying, even when it’s hard, even when it’s thankless. Especially then.

lies will tell you this is settling, that putting an effort will lead to failure. that ease is the only measure of worth.

but tell me, has anything ever worth holding come from ease?

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my tangled labyrinth of desire

maybe it's okay to let your figs rot

“i have done nothing all summer but wait for me to become myself again…

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8 months ago · 92 likes · 13 comments · vivi

In these moments, it’s easy to wonder if we’re all in on some cosmic joke—participants in a grand farce that we nod along to with glazed eyes. It’s an odd sensation, this split between living and observing yourself live. A russian doll watching its own hollow shell move, to find another one equally hollow inside, performing the choreography it was taught, knowing it could never choose another step even if it wanted to.

You look around, and it’s all the same faces, staring blankly at their phones as if there’s salvation hidden somewhere in those blue screens. People laugh at jokes they don’t find funny, share memes about burnout as if acknowledging it is the same as solving it. They wear shirts that say "Be Kind" while scrolling through headlines that scream the opposite. We wear slogans like prayers, a collective mantra that nothing is wrong as long as we keep smiling. Just keep moving. The worst thing you can do is stop.

We’ve mastered the art of not looking. we’ve mastered this sitting in silence while a tell tell heart hums beneath everything, we’ve learned to live with because acknowledging it would mean admitting that the foundations are cracking, that the whole structure is leaning precariously and we’re just waiting for the day it topples.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? We’re waiting. We know what’s coming. There’s this heavy, dull inevitability to it all, like the ticking of a clock you can’t turn off. It’s the kind of waiting that seeps into your bones, a slow, creeping paralysis that makes everything feel muted and distant. And still, we carry on—acting like there’s still time, like we’re not barreling headfirst into a wall we built with our own hands. We consume tragedies like they’re entertainment, letting the horror wash over us for a second before moving on, because what else can we do? There’s only so much grief we can hold before it starts spilling out, and we’ve become experts at keeping it contained

Sometimes I think we’ve all agreed, silently, to play along. We nod and smile and keep going through the motions, whispering to ourselves that it’s fine, that this is normal. We’ve bought into this collective lie because it’s easier than facing the truth, easier than admitting that we’ve lost control. There’s this deep, shared apathy—a weariness that’s settled into our bones, a resignation that’s almost comforting in its familiarity. It’s the kind of apathy that makes you laugh when you should cry, that makes you shrug when you should scream.

i think about the way we talk about the future, the way we throw around words like sustainability and progress with this hollow kind of hope, like we’re trying to convince ourselves that the train isn’t already off the tracks. we put our faith in technology, in innovation, in the promise that someone, somewhere, will figure it out. We’re clinging to the idea that there’s still time, that we haven’t passed the point of no return. But deep down, we know it’s a lie we tell ourselves to keep the fear at bay, to numb that gnawing sense of dread that lurks just beneath the surface. We are ants that built a burning hill, and we keep marching in circles, careful not to notice the fire licking at our backs. We scream at the smoke, but still, we keep piling on more leaves

The apathy isn’t just in us; it’s in everything. It’s in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the ground we walk on. It’s in the hollow promises made by people in power, in the empty gestures of corporations that paint themselves green while they choke the earth. We watch it all unfold, and there’s a part of us that wants to care, that wants to scream and fight and claw at the walls. But then the weight of it all settles in, and we realize how small we are, how little we can do. So we let it go.

There’s a collective numbness that binds us. It’s there in the way we talk about the weather—how it’s unseasonably warm again, how strange it all is—and then move on to lighter topics, as if we haven’t noticed the pattern, as if we haven’t felt the slow shift in the air. It’s in the way we gather around our screens to watch the latest disaster unfold, clucking our tongues and shaking our heads before flipping to the next channel. We act like spectators, as if this isn’t our mess, as if we’re not the ones who set the stage.

We exist in this half-light, this in-between place where everything is both too sharp and too blurry, where we’re too aware of what’s happening but incapable of looking directly at it. It’s as if we’re staring at the sun through a pinhole, squinting into the blaze while insisting we see clearly. We have this collective sense that something is wrong, fundamentally and irrevocably wrong, but the wrongness has become the wallpaper of our lives—something we’ve grown so accustomed to that it feels like home. this apathy is a balm for the sting of reality, but it doesn’t go deep enough. It only numbs the surface, leaves the wound festering underneath

Look around, and you can see the shape of our denial in everything. It’s there in the glossy advertisements that promise happiness if only we buy one more thing, as if consumption could ever fill the void. It’s in the headlines that scream disaster but are pushed aside by the next piece of celebrity gossip. It’s in the way we treat the earth like an endless buffet, scooping up resources with both hands while the ice melts and the forests burn. We’ve turned the planet into a slaughterhouse, and we’re too busy snapping photos of our plates to notice the blood pooling at our feet.

There’s a quiet tragedy in how well we’ve adapted to this, how smoothly we’ve slipped into the role of the passive observer. We’ve learned to numb ourselves, to shrink our awareness down to the size of our own little worlds. We close our eyes to the suffering outside our doors because it’s too much to hold, too much to reconcile with our own comfort. We tell ourselves we’re doing our best, that it’s not our fault, that someone else will fix it. But the truth is we’ve made a home in this apathy, made a bed out of it and pulled the covers tight around us. It’s warm here, under the blankets of collective denial. It’s easier to sleep when you don’t let yourself think about what’s lurking outside the window. It’s this strange duality that haunts me—the way we can be so aware and yet so oblivious at the same time. We know that the system is broken, that it’s rigged against us, that it’s chewing up the world and spitting out ash. But we’re trapped in it, tied to it by a thousand tiny threads of convenience, of comfort, of fear. It’s like watching a train hurtling towards a cliff and staying in your seat because the snacks are good and the Wi-Fi works.

There are times when the veil slips, when you catch a glimpse of the absurdity beneath it all. You’re standing in line at the grocery store, or brushing your teeth, or sitting in traffic, and it hits you like a wave—the sheer absurdity of being alive right now, in this time, in this place.overwhelming awareness of your own smallness, your own helplessness in the face of a world that feels like it’s unraveling. You feel the weight of every decision you’ve made, every compromise you’ve accepted, every time you chose to look away. It’s like staring into the sun and realizing it’s burning out, but you can’t stop looking because it’s the only light you have.

And then it passes. The moment fades, the veil slips back into place, and you go back to whatever you were doing before. You return to the comfort of routine

Maybe that’s the most surreal part of all—that we’re living through the collapse in slow motion, watching it unfold in real time, and we’re still pretending that everything is fine. We’re holding our breath and waiting for someone else to fix it, someone else to say the words we can’t bear to speak. And in the meantime, we keep moving, keep scrolling, keep numbing ourselves against the weight of it all. We tell ourselves that this is normal, that it’s just the way things are, and we let the days pass by in a blur of muted colours and background noise.

Dear reader, do you find a dull comfort in knowing that we’re not alone in this? We’re all complicit, all playing our part in something far bigger than any one of us? We talk about change like it’s a possibility, like it’s something within our grasp, but we don’t really believe it. not deep down. We donate to causes, sign petitions, share posts about saving the planet, write pieces like the one you are reading now. It’s all part of the performance, a way to keep the guilt at bay, to make us feel like we’re doing something, even if that something amounts to nothing at all.

In the end, we’ll go down with the ship, smiling and laughing and pretending we didn’t see it coming. Because that’s what we do. That’s what we’ve always done. And maybe, in some strange, twisted way, that’s the most human thing of all.

i often think of a home that no longer exists—not in the sense that its walls have crumbled or its roof has fallen in, but in the quieter way it was quietly rewritten by time. It’s a memory of sunlight on cracked tiles, the metallic creak of a gate that was always left ajar, the dim hum of voices wafting through a kitchen window, half-heard and half-felt like the distant chime of train that’s already left. i can see it clearly, this place that was once my घर, but it’s not the same as it was, it’s not the sight that stirs me. It’s the echo that hums underneath, like the hollow space in a shell when the sea has long since gone.

there was a time when I could locate myself there, find the outline of who i was within its rooms, trace the shape of my own small self along the chipped edges of its furniture. I remember the way the door frame marked my height in uneven pencil scratches. i grew, but so did the door, or so it seemed. i outgrew the marks and then the frame itself, but what do you call it when it feels as though it’s the house that outgrew you?

these days, when i close my eyes and reach for that place, what i find instead is a dimmed reflection, not the original. its the memory of a memory, a faint impression that has been played back so many times that the colours have washed out, like old film exposed too long. voices are muffled now, and i wonder if it’s my own mind dampening the volume, refusing to let me hear clearly because what remains would be unbearable in its clarity. each replay distorts it further, and i’m left holding fragments—bits of laughter, a scent of rain on hot pavement, the silhouette of a loved one against a flickering TV screen. i don’t know if these pieces are even real anymore or if i’ve polished them into stories, given them a shape they never truly had just to keep from losing them entirely.

but what’s most painful is that i can no longer tell if i’m mourning a place or the self i once was, the child who could fall asleep against a scratchy couch with the comfort of knowing they were safe. i can never return, not really, because even if i stood on that same patch of ground today, i’d be a stranger, looking in from the outside.

its funny how the self that lived there is as inaccessible as the place itself. i wonder if this is what it feels like to haunt yourself, to be your own revenant. i can’t escape the shapes of the places i used to belong to—they’ve made a home beneath my skin, and I can feel them pulse when i press my fingertips to my temples, close my eyes, and try to sink back into the person i was. i see innocence, joy, pain feelings i can no longer inhabit, a shape i’ve grown past like a hermit crab abandoning its shell.

I once read that said, "You can’t step into the same river twice," because the river is always changing, always flowing but what they failed to tell me is that it’s not just the river—it’s me, too. You can’t step into the same moment twice because you’re not the same person who stepped into it the first time and maybe that’s the real tragedy of nostalgia, that it’s not just a longing for what was, but a longing for the version of you who existed in that moment. its mourning your own impermanence, your own erosion, the way you’ve been scraped away bit by bit until you’re standing here, in this present moment, wearing the bones of someone you used to know.

In my worst moments, I wonder if this is all we are: layers upon layers of selves that we outgrow and discard, a constant shedding until there’s nothing left but the hollow core, an echo that grows fainter with every passing year.

the phantom limb of memory—something that’s not quite missing because it was never really there in the first place, only my mind playing tricks on itself. I’ve started to realize that nostalgia isn’t about the past at all; it’s the shadow cast by all the things I’ll never be able to touch again, all the selves I’ve buried without even knowing I was holding the shovel. I thought it was longing for a place, but it’s not that simple.

and what haunts me most is not the memories themselves, but the fear that even this grief will fade, that one day I’ll wake up and realize the ache has dulled, and I won’t remember what it was like to feel the sharpness of it anymore. That I’ll forget the laughter and the warmth, not because I want to, but because time has made it so. That I’ll be left staring into the hollow spaces, where even the shadows have abandoned me, leaving only silence and the dull, empty echo of a name I can no longer recall.

It’s longing for a moment in time that’s become a wound, unhealed and raw, because I never had the chance to say goodbye.

i shove my hands deeper into my pockets like i can keep something from slipping away. it probably nothing, it’s probably just december. it always feels like a drink poured too full—heavy in the hand, spilling over the edges, impossible to hold without losing something. It carries the weight of an ending that hasn’t yet happened, the kind you can sense but can’t quite name. The cold slips into your bones like it belongs there, and the air smells faintly metallic, like the aftertaste of something bitter you can’t spit out.

it wasn’t always like this, not very long ago this month was different. it was full—of movement, of noise, of breath visible in the cold air. streets used to hum with life, badminton rackets swinging under dim bulbs as we tried to keep the shuttlecock in the air a little longer, just a little longer. it never was about the game; but rather the rhythm we had found, the way we made the dark feel smaller by moving through it. tired and red , breaths puffing like clouds in the cold. it felt so full, those moments—alive, glowing, like the world was something we held in our hands. afterward, there’d be soup waiting, steam curling up like a promise of more. i think about that now, how easy it all seemed, how certain i was that it would last.

what am i waiting for?

i think about how the days will get shorter still, how the cold will deepen before it breaks and i wonder if I’ll ever learn how to hold this—this season, this silence, this ache that never quite leaves. maybe it’s enough to just stand here, under a sky that feels heavier than it should, and let the cold remind me of all the warmth I’ve ever known.

this month always carries the weight of endings, doesn’t it? Not loud, dramatic endings but the quiet, inevitable kind. the ones you don’t notice until they’re done, until you’re standing on the other side, trying to figure out what’s been taken from you. It’s not just the year winding down—it’s the way the days grow shorter, the way the cold seeps in, not just outside but inside, too, into the places you thought were safe but maybe that’s what this season is for: to dismantle, to unravel.

i stare at the ember of the cigarette on the ground, watch it pulse weakly before fading into the dark. There’s something in that slow extinguishing, something that feels like a warning, or maybe a memory I don’t want to face. I light another, not for the warmth, but for the illusion of it. the smoke rises, twisting itself into fragile shapes before the cold air pulls it apart, unraveling it into nothing. i keep telling myself it’s enough, that the warmth it left behind will last, but i know better. It never does. It’s always just another fleeting thing, here and gone before you even realise you needed it.

in december, we change. not multiplied but dispersed. pieces of us sneak out in the quiet, stolen by the dark, leaving behind a hollow space we’re afraid to face. i look at the empty street and think about the sense of it all—the dismemberment, the slow, aching process of becoming something new. a time when stay because this cold, this silence, this heavy, unrelenting stillness—it’s the closest I’ve come to feeling alive in a long time. there is something raw and feral in the way it consumes me, in the way it demands to be felt.

i walk towards this small shop, still unsure on why i even got there. it’s just the need for something small, something to prove i’m still here. i grab a packet of gum. doesn’t matter what kind. my hands feel cold as they fumble for the change, and the gum feels heavy in my pocket like it’s holding me down, dragging me through the seconds

and the shopkeeper looks at me, eyes tired, voice soft. “season’s greetings.”

i nod. that’s all I can do. its stupid. but for some reason, it’s enough. the sound of his voice, the words that don’t mean much, don’t change anything, but for a second, it feels like something. something real. i step back out into the cold. it’s still there, just as sharp, just as empty but the gum’s on my palm now, small and simple.

i chew it, feel it flood my mouth, and it’s stupid, but it makes me feel something. maybe that’s all it takes. to feel something, anything, when everything else feels like it’s slipping away.

maybe that’s enough.

everyone say thank you to for their lovely illustrations

it’s absurd, isn’t it? that something so small, so mundane, could carry so much weight. but in the soft glow of afternoon, as I reach for the cold aluminium, there’s a familiar sense of comfort in the palm of my hand. like everything else in my life could spin out of control, but here—here, I have this. this one small pleasure, predictable and consistent.

and yet, even in the comfort, there’s a creeping awareness of dependency. there is a quite awareness of slow, methodical poisoning dressed up as pleasure. i can not be rational man making decisions based on logic; rather a slave to this blind, irrational force—an endless wanting that no amount of indulgence can ever truly satisfy. i’ve lost count of how many cans I’ve consumed, the tally erased by time and repetition. the sugarless sweetness has woven itself into the fabric of my days, like a thread i can’t untangle maybe i do not want to know. each sip becomes a quiet acknowledgment of my need, though I hide it beneath layers of excuses.

"It’s not that bad," i tell myself. "There are worse habits.”

but then again, is there anything worse than knowing you’re tethered to something so insignificant? it’s not about the drink anymore, is it? it’s about the comfort i seek from it, the momentary silence it offers in the noise of life. it’s a ritual born from the same hunger that drives us to fill our lives with things that will never truly satisfy us—possessions, distractions, fleeting moments of pleasure. we are all grasping for something to hold onto, even if what we’re holding onto is just a hollow can.

for me, is the paradox of modern living. It’s everywhere—cheap, available, almost banal in its presence—yet it represents something much deeper. It mirrors the way we reach for things to fill the emptiness inside us, to soothe the discomfort we can’t name. It’s the same impulse that drives us to scroll endlessly through social media, to chase after the next new thing, to consume rather than confront. we become unwitting participants in a cycle that feeds on our cravings, perpetuating a cycle of dependence that extends far beyond the confines of this can. It reflects a world that prioritises consumption over connection, a system that rewards insatiability and alienates us from the deeper, more meaningful aspects of life. the ancient greeks spoke of hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. but they also warned against the dangers of excess, of indulging too deeply in the fleeting pleasures of life. heidegger would argue that our relationship with consumption reflects our relationship with being itself.

but here i am, a creature of habit, caught in the endless loop of desire and denial. It isn’t just about the diet coke anymore, not really. it’s about the constant grasping for control in a world that slips through my fingers like sand. i drink not to quench a thirst, but to cling to the illusion that something—anything—is within my grasp. It’s a gesture of control in a life that often feels uncontrollable. the ritual, the craving—it all becomes a reflection of the way we let our desires define us, even when we know they’re slowly consuming us in return. yet, isn’t that the quiet tragedy of it all? we’re built to want, to crave, to fill ourselves with things that slip through our fingers the moment we grasp them. awareness of the deeper truth stays even when we don’t want to face: that our lives are shaped by desire—small, constant, gnawing desires. not just for things, but for approval, for meaning, for control. we try to take hold of something, anything, that can soothe the rawness we feel deep down, though we can barely name it.

in that sense, it’s never just about diet coke, or coffee, or cigarettes, or whatever small indulgence we’ve turned into a necessity. It’s about the way we cling to these rituals as a means of escape, as a way to stave off the creeping sense of chaos that lurks at the edges of our carefully constructed lives. It’s the same impulse that makes us check our phones obsessively, scroll through feeds without really seeing anything, the same drive that pulls us toward comfort when discomfort becomes unbearable.

and from this early age we are taught, that discipline is the antidote—that self-control will keep us safe from our worst impulses. but what if discipline, too, chains us to our desires? The more we try to resist, the more we become aware of the need. Like a can of soda taunting us from the fridge, the very act of denying it makes it loom larger. in a world of abundance, restraint becomes its own kind of craving. we build walls around ourselves, call it self-control, and then grow desperate to tear them down. We long for both structure and freedom, comfort and chaos. We try to curb our desires, only to be swallowed by them in new ways. And so, the diet coke is just a symbol of that broader tension—a tension that underpins the way we live, how we interact with the world, with each other, with ourselves.

consider how we romanticize these small addictions. we make them seem harmless, a part of our personality even—like how people joke about needing their morning coffee or craving a sugar fix. there’s something almost endearing about it, as though we’ve collectively agreed that these little dependencies are an acceptable way to cope with the weight of existence. but if we were to strip away the humor, the soft framing we give these habits, what’s left?

It’s instant gratification in a world that constantly delays it.

maybe that’s why we hold onto these habits, even when we know better. Because in the grand scheme of things, they seem so insignificant, so harmless. the things we reach for to escape are the very things that start to define us and at some point, a strange awareness creeps in - we’re shaped by what we consume, by what we desire. And yet, even with this awareness, we continue. because what’s the alternative? to sit with the discomfort of wanting, to confront the truth that no matter what we fill our lives with, the hunger remains. It’s an insatiable need, masked by the small, habitual comforts we reach for to make the world feel a little more bearable.

in the end, we’re left with the same question: why do we cling to things that don’t truly satisfy us? Is it because they provide the illusion of control? Because they offer a brief moment of escape? or is it simply because it’s easier to focus on the small, immediate desires than to confront the vastness of what we can never fully grasp—purpose, meaning, connection?

Whatever the answer, the can remains.

but guess what? no one is coming.

It’s not a punishment or some cosmic cruelty. It’s just how the world works. you have been alone all along. whether there were people around you or not, the real battle has always been yours, a fight waged behind your ribs, where your heart sinks like a stone on nights too quiet for comfort. the fix isn’t coming and as this realisation cuts deeper than a knife ever could—the world isn't here to save you, and neither is anyone else. it was never designed that way. It doesn’t pause to offer you a hand when you're shattered and scattered across the ground. nope, it keeps spinning, indifferent, as if your cracks were just part of the natural order, as if your undoing is nothing more than another leaf falling from the tree.

You have to lie there, alone with your thoughts, with your pieces. The clock ticks, time moves, and you—well, you’re left to gather what you can. Your hands shake, your knees buckle under the weight, but you’ve got no choice but to move. This is the quiet reality no one tells you about: you are your own repairman, the one left holding the needle, threading through the sinew of your heart, piecing yourself together when the world offers nothing but its cold, distant gaze.

this whole time, you’ve been looking outward when the answer has always been inward. Kierkegaard talked about this, the leap of faith, the absurd notion that meaning can only come from within, from the individual’s confrontation with the void. But what they don’t tell you is how that leap feels like flinging yourself into nothingness, hoping you’ll find ground to land on, knowing full well that you might just fall forever. The leap is terrifying. But staying where you are? Staying broken, waiting for the world to catch you? That’s a slow death, one that eats away at you piece by piece, until there’s nothing left but a hollow shell, waiting for a savior that never arrives.

you need to understand this isn’t a call for pity or some melancholic revelation. its just truth. its you. you internalise a sobering power in it. you breathe again but this time the thought doesn’t crush you—it pushes you forward. And there’s a strange kind of solace in knowing that only you hold the answer. you’ve been waiting for someone else to step in, to swoop down and rescue you from your own wreckage, but now you see it clearly—the hands you’ve been waiting for have always been your own. They’re imperfect, sure, trembling from the weight of it all, but they’re there. you pick up the pieces, one by one, knowing each is sharp enough to cut but necessary all the same.

you either find a way to rebuild, or you remain in ruins, caught in the limbo of waiting for a rescue that will never come. in this cold, stark reality that you have to find your strength. you need realise that fixing yourself doesn’t mean becoming whole in the way you once were; it means learning how to live with the cracks, with the jagged edges, with the parts that no longer fit the way they used to. It’s making a home out of what’s left and understanding that the act of rebuilding is never really done. It’s ongoing, continuous, a testament to your ability to survive.

And maybe that’s the most important lesson of all. No one is coming. But you’re still here. You’re still standing, even when you thought you couldn’t.

Only you can fix yourself. And it will be ugly. It will hurt. You’ll bleed and break, and there will be days when you feel like the pieces will never come together. But you will do it. Because you have to. Because the alternative is to stay broken, and that isn’t an option anymore. You know that. You’ve always known that.

So you gather up the shards, you make your hands into tools, and you start to build. You won’t do it perfectly, and you’ll probably screw it up along the way. But it’s yours. Your life, your mess, your creation. No one else gets to take that from you.

And in the end, maybe that’s the point. Not to be fixed by someone else, but to learn that you were always strong enough to do it yourself. Even when it didn’t feel like it. Even when it still doesn’t.

it is in these moments that the significance of human connection burns brightest, like a flare against a starless sky. sometimes it’s just a voice, a hand, a presence in the silence when words fail. you realize then how deeply we need each other, how essential it is to be seen, heard, understood—not necessarily fixed or saved, but acknowledged in our rawest forms.

there’s a strange intimacy in shared suffering, in being there for someone when the world feels like it's crumbling beneath them. to sit beside them in their darkest hour, not with solutions, but with empathy, is to affirm the shared weight of our existence. we all carry something, some burden or wound, and the act of showing up for one another—when there’s nothing to say, when the pain is too vast—becomes a small revolution. It is a defiance of isolation, a reminder that we are not alone in the chaos.

in the end, what else do we have but each other? we live and die in the arms of connection, whether we acknowledge it or not. Being there for someone in their worst moments is more than kindness; it’s a declaration of humanity.

we are all just waiting to be held, to be reminded that the burden isn’t ours alone to bear. maybe that’s all there is to this messy, fleeting human experience—the chance to offer our hearts to one another, to bridge the voids between us with compassion, and in doing so, remind ourselves that we are more than just solitary islands in an indifferent universe

there is a shadow, flicker of something unspoken just beneath the surface, the kind of tension you can almost feel but can’t quite name. you sit with them, offering what you can—words, silence, a shoulder—but there’s a hesitation in the air, a subtle distance that wasn’t there before. It’s as if their pain has grown its own armor, something they wear so tightly now that even your presence feels like an intrusion.

you wonder if you should ask. Should you push a little deeper, peel back the layers they so carefully wear? There’s a weight in their eyes that tells you there’s more, something heavy they’re holding back, but you can’t be sure. maybe they’re just tired. Maybe it’s not the right time. or maybe they’re afraid, too—of being seen too clearly, of the vulnerability that comes with letting someone in when the wound is still fresh.

but the words catch in your throat. What if you’re wrong? What if you’re pushing too hard, too soon? What if all they need is for you to sit beside them in the quiet, without prying, without pressing? and yet, you can’t shake the feeling. there’s something fragile here, a tightrope you’re both walking. you keep thinking that maybe, if you just tread lightly enough, they’ll let you in—give you a glimpse of the real wound beneath the rehearsed answers, the polite smiles, the practiced deflections. but then, maybe they won’t. maybe the mask is all they have left to protect themselves from breaking completely. maybe they’ve worn it for so long they’ve forgotten how to take it off.

and in moments such as this uncertainty that pierces at you, this quiet dance between care and concern, between offering support and respecting distance. you want to be there, to show them that they don’t have to carry it alone. but you also know that some walls aren’t meant to be scaled, at least not yet. maybe all you can do is wait—wait for them to feel safe enough, ready enough, to lower their guard.

still, you sit with them, the air thick with words unsaid. you offer what you can, hoping that your presence is enough, even as the doubt lingers in the corners of your mind. are they okay? are they really okay? or are they slipping away, hiding behind the veneer of normalcy while something darker festers beneath?

you want to believe they’ll tell you when they’re ready, that your patience, your empathy, will coax the truth from them in time. But the truth is, you don’t know. You can never truly know the depth of someone else’s pain until they decide to reveal it. And until then, you’re left with the silence between you, wondering if it’s enough to just be there, or if the distance you feel is the beginning of something breaking. something you’re powerless to fix.

but there’s a cost to this concealment, isn’t there? your mask gets heavy after a while. It starts to slip in those quiet moments when no one is looking. when the facade is no longer needed, and you’re left alone with the weight of all you’ve been hiding. And in those moments, it’s not just the pain that surfaces—it’s the loneliness. the disconnection from others, yes, but also from yourself. becase after a while, even you forget what’s real and what’s just the performance.

but in all this we forget that vulnerability isn’t a weakness—it’s the purest form of strength. it takes courage to strip away the mask, to stand there in your uncertainty, your fear, your brokenness, and say,

This is me.

to trust that someone will see the mess and not turn away. That they’ll stay, not because you’re perfect, but because you’re real.

i have always hated birthdays because i feel there is something quietly cruel about birthdays. not the day itself, but the whispering weight that comes with it, a weight that settles in your bones like it's always been there, waiting for the clock to tick over into the next year. today, i turn 21, and it feels like I’ve been peeling away the edges of myself, trying to find where the boy ended and the man was supposed to begin. i can’t find the line.

i remember being 18. barely. i remember the hunger of it, the desperate clinging to the edges of some version of myself i thought i was supposed to be. there was a fire in my chest back then, one that told me this was the year things would finally make sense. i am finally an adult, i’d figure it out. i’d be someone. but now, here i am. and I’m not 18 anymore.

some days i remember turning 19 i was chasing the ghosts of things i thought i’d have by now. thought the answers would come if I just kept moving forward, kept pretending like i had some grand plan, like i wasn’t just guessing at everything. as if i had direction, the sense that I’m enough. but here i am, older, and still… nothing.

and i also remember walking through fog, everything just out of reach, my own reflection a stranger in the mirror, i was 20, they said it all the time, right? that your twenties are for figuring things out. But no one tells you how much it hurts to stumble through the dark with no idea where you’re going. i started to feel the weight of time, like i could hear the seconds ticking louder, faster, pulling me away from everything i thought i could still become. i kept waiting for the moment when everything would click, when i’d wake up and feel like i’d finally crossed over into adulthood. but it never came. instead, i was just… older

now, i’m 21. and the divide between who i was and who i’m supposed to be is blurrier than ever.

It’s not that I’m scared of getting older—I think I’ve been scared of staying the same. Of being stuck in this half-formed version of myself, looking back years from now and realizing that all this time, I’ve been waiting for something that was never going to arrive. I’ve been waiting to feel whole, to feel like I’ve arrived at adulthood. But what if that never happens? What if there’s no finish line, no moment of arrival?

I thought by now I’d have more to show for it, more to point to and say, this is what I’ve done, this is who I am. Instead, I’m holding a fistful of air, grasping at accomplishments that never materialised, at dreams I haven’t quite let go of. I’m haunted by the idea that maybe I’m not doing this right—that everyone else has found a way to cross that line, to grow into the space they were meant to occupy, and I’m still here, running in place.

its ironic isn’t it, to think as a kid, all i could think about was the future — the version of me that would finally be free, who wouldn’t have to answer to anyone — believed growing up meant gaining control, that someday I’d be the one steering the ship instead of being dragged along by the current. when you’re young, all you see are the open doors. you don’t see the walls that rise up around you as you pass through them. you don’t see how growing up means learning to live with your own disappointments, with the way the world doesn’t quite match up to the version you had in your head. maybe thats all it is, this fear, this slow-burn panic that ignites at edges of every thought.

what if i’m not enough? what if i never will be?

it just curls around my ribcage, sits heavy in my chest. i can feel it at night, lying awake, counting all the things i haven’t done. its not just fear of failure—it’s fear of inertia, of waking up ten years from now in the same place, the same person, with nothing to show for the time I’ve spent living.

you know, i think about time, the way it unravels in front of me like some endless spool, and how i keep tripping over it, unable to walk the line everyone else seems to follow so effortlessly.

dear reader, do you feel the weight to that, too? the kind of quiet despair that settles deep in your gut, reminding you that while the world keeps moving forward, you are still here, suspended between versions of yourself that never seem to fit.

do you have to constantly remind yourself that growing pains are not just a reminder of what you’re leaving behind—they’re a testament to the fact that you’re still becoming? that they are proof that something in you is shifting, evolving, even when it feels like breaking.

so, happy birthday to me. another year older, none the wiser

There is no safety in connection, only the raw thrum of exposure. You hand over your tenderness, your wounds still bleeding, and in the space between breaths, you wait—for the grasp of fingers that might never come or for the sting of abandonment. Love, they say, is the offering of your fragile self, the peeling back of layers until you are nothing, until you are like the salt in sea - dissolved.

In the quiet act of peeling a pomegranate, we find a metaphor for the tender vulnerability of love. Each crimson seed is a hidden truth, waiting to be uncovered, nestled within layers of tough skin—each layer a testament to the commitment we make when we dare to lay our hearts bare. To peel back the surface is to engage in an intimate dance, a delicate negotiation between the desire to protect ourselves and the yearning to be known.

As we reveal the juicy depths, we confront not only the sweetness of connection but the bitterness that sometimes lies within. Love, like the fruit, is not without its hard edges; it forces us to taste the unripe, the sour truths of our pasts and the shadows we carry. With each seed we unearth, we face the challenge of trust, the risk of exposure, and the fear of rejection.

Yet this discomfort is a necessary companion on the path to growth. It is through the sharp pangs of vulnerability that we begin to understand the intricate fabric of our own souls. The bitter notes remind us that love is a landscape of complexities, where pain and joy intertwine. In peeling back these layers, we not only reveal ourselves to one another but also confront the parts we’d rather leave hidden.

It is a slow, often arduous process—this unearthing of the heart. Each moment of honesty may sting, yet it also offers the chance for healing. Here, in the rawness of our shared experiences, we cultivate a deeper connection. We learn that vulnerability is not a weakness, but a powerful declaration of our willingness to face the unknown, to accept that love is as much about enduring the storms as it is about basking in the sun.

In this sacred act of peeling, we learn to embrace the whole fruit—the sweetness of joy mingling with the bitterness of truth. It is a commitment to journey together, to invest our time and effort into the rich, messy tapestry of our lives. And through this investment, we find that the rewards, though sometimes hard-earned, are the most profound: a bond fortified by honesty, a love that flourishes in the light of our shared struggles, and a promise that, despite the pain, we will continue to peel back the layers together.

pomegranates are so beautiful and worth the mess and maybe i'm beautiful and worth the mess too.

i think of icarus, not as a fool, but as a lover. he did not fear the sun; he revered it - so  wholly, so recklessly, that the thought of distance was unbearable. but it promised it warmth, glory, and the kind of blinding brightness that leaves you unable to see the earth below but above all, it promised him love. he must have believed that love, if true, required such intensity, that to love at all is to court destruction and so he flew, not towards his doom but towards a truth we are all too terrified to speak. passion . it is a flame that devours everything in its path—skin, bone, and soul. there is no end to its hunger.

we are all, in our way, born with wings—fragile things bound together by threads of hope and fear. this passion, our desire tempts us to fly higher, always higher, until the very wax that holds us together melts in the heat of our longing. there is no escape from this. we crave the sun, even as we burn beneath its gaze. we tell ourselves that maybe, just maybe, we can survive the flames, that our love will be the one to transcend the limits of the sky.

its poetic to think how passion is derived from suffering1. the greeks knew of passion, perhaps it was the only thing they truly knew. for passion is not just a spark of desire, it is a slow burn, a bodily state that eats away at us from within.  there is a place inside all of us that begs for ruin, for the heat that sears and splits us open. in feeling the molten the visceral truth of passion lies as it rots us from within, as it sinks into the marrow and consumes all that we are, until we are reduced to trembling flesh, charred wings, and salt-soaked bones - because in our desire we know the the heat itself whispers to us, come closer, let me make you whole.

the sun, like this madness, is not gentle. it was never meant to be. it does not hold you with tender hands or cradle you in soft light. it grips you by the throat, forcing you to bear witness to your own unraveling. no, it is a fever in the blood, a force that gnashes its teeth against the barriers we build around ourselves. the kind of passion that makes you lose track of time, of breath, of who you are. you tell yourself you can handle it, that you can balance between the pull of gravity and the intoxication of flight, but the higher you climb, the more the heat licks at your soul, the more the ground becomes a distant memory.

solomon once wrote of passion: “it is necessary that we choose our emotions, in much the same way that we choose our actions.” but does love, in its purest, most maddening form, truly give us a choice? or are we slaves to it? perhaps the real tragedy is not the fall, but the fact that we choose it. love is a decision to step into the fire knowing full well it will burn us beyond recognition. and yet, we lean in, driven by some primal need to feel the heat that makes us forget everything else, like a moth to flame. you think you can hold onto yourself, but love is patient, relentless—it wears you down until you become unrecognizable even to yourself. maybe that’s the truth icarus saw in the sun: that to love is to willingly dissolve. to lose shape, to let the heat twist you into something, just the essence of self - ousia

we talk about passion as if it’s this beautiful, exhilarating force, but we don’t admit how it erodes us, how it claws its way under our skin and strips us of every defense we’ve built. it caresses you with one hand and ravages with the other—letting your heart beat outside your chest, exposed to the air, to the elements. every gust of wind feels like a knife, every touch electric—until, finally, the pain becomes a kind of numbness, and all that’s left is this deep, aching need to keep feeling no matter the cost and isn’t that what we chase? not the comfort or the calm, but the storm. the way love can devour reason, how it makes us reckless, ready to leap without thinking where we’ll land. we always speak of the fall, but rarely do we speak of the flight—the ecstasy of that weightlessness, when every nerve feels alive, every cell burning with a fevered joy. we chase it until we can’t anymore, until the wings we’ve trusted for too long start to fail us.the hunger for something larger than ourselves. the need to become something we’re not, to merge with that consuming heat, as if in its light we might find a version of ourselves that isn’t lonely, that isn’t fractured by fear. but fire doesn’t save us; it only offers destruction as an answer to our yearning.

maybe icarus loved the sun because it taught him what it meant to feel alive. he wanted that last taste of the sun, the feeling of it pressed against his skin, even as it tore him apart. maybe that’s the part we don’t want to admit—maybe he loved the fall.

the fall is not the tragedy. the tragedy would have been never flying at all.

Read More From Shyam

1

from Late Latin passionem (nominative passio) "suffering, enduring," from past-participle stem of Latin pati "to endure, undergo, experience," a word of uncertain origin. The notion is "that which must be endured."

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8 months ago · 92 likes · 13 comments · vivi