Like you were foolish for flying too high, like the sun was something to be feared, like the sky was never meant for someone like you.

But I don’t think you were a mistake.

I think you were curious.

I think you looked at the sky and didn’t see a boundary, didn’t see a line drawn for you to stay under. I think you saw something endless, something inviting, something that whispered come closer instead of stay away.

I think about the moment before you flew.

The way your hands must have hovered for a second, not out of fear, but anticipation. The way your heart probably raced, not because you doubted yourself, but because you knew something incredible was about to happen. The way you didn’t look back.

Because why would you?

When everything you wanted was right in front of you.

You might’ve ignored the warnings of your father. Reckless? Yes.

But maybe it’s because you chose the feeling to be truly alive over them.

Chose wonder over caution.

Chose feeling over fear.

Chose trying over never knowing.

You wanted to rise high, to witness the world and escape from the monotonous. And maybe that’s why your wings were melted by the heat of the sun rather than the spray of the ocean.

And maybe people don’t like that.

Maybe that’s why they turned your story into something small, something tragic, something to keep others from doing the same. Because it’s easier to tell people don’t fly too high than to admit that flying, even for a moment, might be worth everything.

I don’t think your story ends where they say it does.

I think it lives in every person who looks at something impossible and feels their chest tighten, not with doubt, but with want. In every person who knows the risk and still leans forward anyway. In every person who would rather feel the sun up close than spend their whole life wondering what it might have been like.

I envision Icarus laughed as he fell.

Smiling at the face of death and laughing in the eyes of defeat with his unconquerable spirit.

Because there is a triumph in still trying and not succeeding. In knowing to make it this far is still an accomplishment in itself.

Because it is much better than having a life spent standing at the edge, wondering what if.

He, at least, chose something else. Chose to feel everything, even if it meant losing everything.

And maybe that’s what they miss when they tell his story.

It was never about the fall.

It was the impossible becoming real, if only for a heartbeat.

He didn’t fail.

He proved that the sky was touchable.

That limits could be tested.

And even as he fell, he carried something with you that most people never will -

the certainty of having lived, fully and without restraint, even if only for a moment.

So no, I don’t see Icarus as a warning.

I see him as proof.

Icarus, you fell.

Yes, it’s tragic.

But if you had never flown?

That would have been the greatest tragedy of all.

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This is how I imagined Icarus as he fell, according to the real story. The part where he falls in love with Apollo is just a modern day perception.

A year ago, my father died.

At the time it felt unreal, like something that had happened in the wrong story. People said the usual things. Time heals. He’s in a better place. Be strong. Words that try their best but always fall short, because grief is not something language is capable of holding.

What I remember most from that time is not the funeral or the rituals. It is the silence afterwards. The kind that settles into the corners of a house. The kind that makes ordinary things feel unfamiliar. A chair that no longer belongs to anyone. A voice that used to fill rooms but now only exists in memory.

You learn quickly that the world is indifferent to personal tragedy. The sky doesn’t dim. The streets don’t pause. Life keeps moving with an almost cruel efficiency, as if nothing significant has happened at all.

Recently I attended my friend’s father’s funeral. And standing there felt like stepping into a memory I didn’t know I still carried, standing there felt like stepping into a room I had already left behind but somehow still belonged to.

The same air heavy with things people didn’t know how to say.

The same careful kindness from people who mean well but cannot possibly understand the exact shape of the loss.

The same muted conversations.

The same careful condolences.

The same fragile atmosphere where everyone is trying to behave normally around something that is anything but normal.

And suddenly I remembered what it felt like to be the person at the center of that quiet storm. The person everyone looks at with a mixture of sympathy and helplessness, because no one really knows how to hold another person’s grief.

Watching my friend that day, I realized something uncomfortable. Grief recognizes grief. It’s like a language only the wounded can hear properly. You see it in the way someone stands, in the way their eyes move through the room, slightly detached from everything happening around them.

It’s not just sadness. It’s disorientation.

Because when a parent dies, something fundamental shifts inside you. The architecture of your life changes.

And the strange part is that the world expects you to keep walking through it as if nothing has changed.

The world becomes a little colder after that. Not cruel, not unlivable — just slightly less protected.

Grief doesn’t scream forever. It softens over time, but it never really leaves. It just changes form.

Standing at that funeral, I wasn’t just mourning my friend’s loss.

I was remembering my own.

And I realized that grief is not something we move on from. It is something we learn to live beside.

I was recognizing the moment their life quietly divides into two parts: before this loss, and everything that comes after it.

That is the real nature of grief. It is not a storm that passes. It is a fault line. Life continues, but it continues differently, with a subtle fracture running through it.

Grief does not end.

It transforms.

And sometimes it returns in the most unexpected places — like standing in a room full of mourners, watching someone else say goodbye to their father, and realizing that in some quiet way, you are saying goodbye to yours all over again.

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I hope you find the strength to overcome this.

The night we met was not loud with meaning. It did not announce itself as something that would stay with me. It felt ordinary in the way most important moments do while they are happening.

Questions that do not ask too much. Answers that reveal only enough to keep the moment moving. That is how ours began. Nothing in it demanded permanence.

And yet something in the quiet between our words felt different.

It was not certainty. It was not recognition. It was simply ease—the strange comfort of speaking to someone who did not feel unfamiliar for very long.

Time moved in a way it rarely does with strangers. Minutes stretched without becoming heavy. Silence did not ask to be filled quickly. It stayed gentle, like a pause both people trusted.

In that moment there was no thought of what would come later. No awareness that the memory of that night would one day feel heavier than the night itself.

We were simply two people existing inside a beginning we could not yet see.

That night was not just a conversation.

It was the beginning of knowing you.

Looking back now, the night feels softer than the ending that followed. Not because it was perfect, but because it held something fragile that only beginnings can hold—possibility.

There was no distance then.

What hurts about remembering is not only that things ended.

It is knowing that there was a moment when nothing had broken yet.

There was a moment, on that night, when nothing had gone wrong yet. When the future had not broken into separate paths. When the possibility of staying was still real.

We did not know then how deeply we would enter each other’s lives. We did not know how much space we would eventually take up inside each other’s memories.

If we had known, maybe we would have stayed in that moment a little longer.

Maybe we would have listened more carefully to the quiet beginning of something that would later become so difficult to let go of.

Now when I think about that night, it feels suspended in time. Untouched by the ending, untouched by the distance that came later.

A moment when the future still belonged to both of us.

The night we met lives in that space now. Untouched by the silence that came later. Preserved in the quiet simplicity of two people who did not yet know how much they would one day matter to each other, or how deeply they would one day miss the simplicity of that beginning.

Some memories will always remain gentle. Gentle in such a way that it brings tears to my eyes.

And the night we met will always be one of them.

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5th March, 2025

Tried my best not to think about it, but here we are.

(Love you 3000)

But weight that is shared does not wait for silence to end it.

Some burdens are heavy not because they exist, but because they are carried wordlessly. When something is never spoken, it begins to settle deeper, pressing harder, asking more from the person holding it. Silence turns weight into isolation.

Complete sharing begins with talking, not dramatic confessions or perfectly timed honesty, but the simple, ongoing act of letting another person know. Of saying, this is heavy today, and hearing, then let me hold it with you.

When people truly share a burden, they don’t wait for proof of pain. They don’t need breakdowns as evidence. Conversation keeps the weight visible, present, and divided. It allows the burden to move between two people instead of anchoring itself to one.

Talking does not weaken the weight in fact it reshapes it. It gives it edges that can be held, named, understood. What remains unspoken grows heavier because it has nowhere to go. What is spoken is no longer trapped inside a single chest.

In a fully shared connection, there is no moment of realization brought on by loss. No shock when someone finally lets go. Because nothing was ever hidden long enough to surprise. The weight was already there-heard, acknowledged, and carried together.

When the weight lives entirely within you then it doesn’t make the burden less real. It makes the loneliness sharper.

Love is not recognizing the weight when words stop.

And weight, no matter how heavy, cannot be divided in silence.

It is making space for it long before silence ever has to speak.

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I hope you realise, that i never wanted you to carry the weight alone. It was the last thing i ever wanted. You were not a liability.

People come into our lives and fill it with so much, so much happiness, so much love and sometimes even with sadness, then they vanish the next day like it meant nothing to them.

You come into my life and fill it with so much and the next day you walk out of the door, like it was just child’s play. Did you ever wonder that maybe I wanted you to stay? not forever, not in some grand promise etched into stone, but long enough for the echoes of your laughter to stop sounding like a goodbye?

I said to you, you were presented with opportunity and you left. And you said an opportunity doesn’t come,it’s made and you seized it because it costed you something. And maybe I did hurt you, maybe I did cause you a lot of pain. But what about me? I learned how to hold my breath around your name, how to pretend the hollow didn’t ache, how to convince myself that loss is just another form of learning.

Maybe people leave because staying asks something of them they don’t yet know how to give. Maybe they leave because growth is selfish before it is brave. Or maybe leaving is the only language they know when love starts asking questions they’re afraid to answer.

Maybe if you don’t want someone to leave, you have to give them the opportunity to.

Because staying without a door isn’t loyalty, it’s captivity.

Because love that survives only when options are removed was never really love it was just fear dressed up as permanence.

But if they are given the choice, the risk, the open road and still turn back then staying means something.

Then it isn’t obligation or guilt holding them beside you, but longing.

You left because it costed you something, but what about me? You paid with courage, with risk, with the weight of choosing yourself; I paid with silence, with all the things I never said and all the love that had nowhere left to land. You call it growth, and maybe you’re right, but I call it learning how to grieve someone who is still alive somewhere else. I learned that some losses don’t arrive with closure, they arrive with endurance, and you don’t heal from them so much as you learn how to live around them.

And maybe this is the hardest truth I have to accept that you didn’t leave to hurt me, and I didn’t keep staying because I was weak; we were just standing on opposite sides of the same fear, you afraid of what staying would cost you, and me afraid of what leaving had already taken.

So now I’m not really afraid of you leaving anymore, because it has happened too many times. Fear dulls when it’s overused, and loss, once sharp, becomes familiar something you learn to brace for instead of something that knocks the air out of you. I’ve learned that goodbyes don’t always announce themselves; sometimes they arrive quietly, disguised as distance, as silence, as a gradual loosening of hands. I’ve learned not to beg for what has already decided to go, not to mistake endurance for strength or attachment for love. If you leave now, I will feel it, yes, but it will not unmake me. I will gather the pieces you never saw me holding together, and I will keep going, softer perhaps, more careful, but still open. Because even after all of this, I refuse to become someone who closes the door before love even gets the chance to choose me.

People leave not because the door was open,

but because their hearts were already halfway out the window.

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Probably the first time i couldn’t stop crying while writing a sub.

We have so much potential, but what good is that potential if not put to use?

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story, from the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig. A wonderful future beckoned and winked.”

- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

But what if when I finally reach that possibility, the fig turns out to be rotten?

The truth is, we aren’t scared of the fig being rotten; we are afraid that all the effort we put in might turn out to be for nothing. We are afraid of being uncomfortable for a brief period for the sake of eternal comfort.

We are tired of life without even living it first. Tired of something we haven’t fully tasted yet. And maybe that’s the reality of our fig tree, that even after everything, the grief, the discomfort, there is still life worth living, to experience, to feel.

We live in grief, and and it quietly seeps into the soil beneath the tree.

Grief is not always loud. Sometimes it is subtle, almost polite. It tells us to wait a little longer. To think a little more. To prepare until we are “ready.” And while we hesitate, the figs remain untouched not because they were meant to rot, but because neglect is its own kind of decay.

Grief teaches us to mourn outcomes that haven’t happened yet, to rehearse failure until it feels inevitable. We grieve the effort before it is even spent. We grieve the discomfort before it ever arrives. And in doing so, we drain the life from the very possibilities we are afraid to lose.

The figs rot not because they were flawed, but because grief starves them of time. Of courage. Of reach.

We stand beneath the tree, looking up, telling ourselves that someday we will climb—when the fear fades, when certainty appears, when we stop hurting. But grief does not fade on its own. It grows heavier the longer we carry it without moving. What once was caution becomes paralysis. What once was pain becomes identity.

And so the tragedy is not that some figs are rotten. The tragedy is that grief convinces us they always will be.

The mistake is believing that one fig must save us. That there exists a single, perfect branch where everything finally makes sense, where fear dissolves and effort is rewarded without residue. Life was never built that way. Some figs will be sweet, some bitter, some half-eaten by time before we arrive. And still, the act of reaching matters.

Because meaning isn’t found in guarantees. It’s found in movement. In the trembling hand that will reache anyway.

Grief may consume us, but it does not have to define us. And the figs only truly rot when we decide we are done reaching.

So maybe being alive isn’t about finding the right branch. Maybe it’s about touching as many as we can.

Feeling the bark bruise our palms.

Letting the juice stain our hands.

Letting some hopes fall and break at our feet.

Because at the end of it all, it won’t be the rotten figs that haunt us. It will be the branches we never touched.

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We are so busy measuring what we have received that we don’t pause to give back. Understanding, love, and compassion are all currencies that we demand but spend sparingly. We are so desperate to be understood that we forget to be understanding. We want love, but not the vulnerability it brings. We want compassion, but not the suffering it brings. And somewhere along the way we expect connectivity to be handed over to us on a silver platter.

But connectivity is a two-way street, and the moment we start taking and giving nothing in return it turns into a parasite. It feeds on closeness while hollowing it out, leaving behind relationships that feel crowded yet empty. We call it loneliness even when surrounded, because connection without contribution is just proximity, not presence.

It slowly teaches us to see people as resources rather than beings, as means to fill our emptiness rather than as mirrors of our own complexity. And when they fail to meet our expectations we name the world as cruel and unkind.

Because understanding requires effort and time, something that the people in this world are still not ready to spend on.

Instead of contemplating how wicked the world is, have we asked ourselves how much effort we are putting in being understanding? Have we ever paused to understand what the other person is going through? We speak, explain, and justify ourselves endlessly, but rarely pause long enough to absorb another person’s silence, that other person might be going through something much heavier than what we are.

To be understanding is to sit with discomfort, to listen without preparing a defence, to offer patience even when none is guaranteed in return. It is a quiet, usually thankless act, and perhaps that is why it is avoided. Because effort without applause feels like a loss in a world obsessed with return.

So maybe the truth we resist most is this: the understanding we crave from others often begins with the understanding we refuse to offer.

And until we don’t see that we will continue walking past each other, continue to blame each other for being cruel. We will be expected to go the full way, but will only be half met in our journey. Understanding is a transaction, in which we receivea finer, more compassionate world in return and until we give as freely as we demand, we remain trapped in our own need, surrounded by others who are trapped in theirs, all of us desperate to be understood, but forgetting that understanding is something we must first choose to give.

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I keep telling myself this is just a phase, that eclipses are temporary, that the sun never truly disappears. But some days it feels like the darkness has learned my name.

I’ve stopped expecting, stopped hoping. I move through days with lowered expectations, because hoping feels heavier than disappointment.

I tell myself survival is enough for now. That maybe this dimness is not the end of my story. Even eclipsed, the sun is still burning somewhere behind the dark. Exhausted, absolutely, but not extinguished.

So I keep going, not because I am brave, but because stopping would require a kind of energy I no longer have. I learn to measure days in small ways, a quiet morning, a song that doesn’t hurt, a moment where I’m allowed to breathe.

And still, life keeps moving around me, indifferent to how heavy everything feels. I show up where I’m supposed to, respond when spoken to, and do the bare minimum required to be present—some days that feels like an accomplishment, other days like a defeat. I don’t search for meaning anymore. I settle for neutrality, for moments that don’t hurt as much as the ones before them. I’ve learned that healing isn’t always progress in the way people talk about it, sometimes it’s just staying intact, not falling apart any further. I don’t feel hopeful, but I’m not completely empty either, and that in-between space is where I exist now.

And maybe that’s the hardest part, not the darkness itself, but how easily life continues around it. How the world keeps asking things of you while you are learning how to exist in half-light. How you become skilled at being present without being whole, awake without feeling alive, breathing without feeling relief.

So I stay, not because I want to, but because there is familiarity in staying.

I’m devoid of my light, and maybe one day it’ll return, stronger than before. With the light of a thousand suns, rather than one.

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It made me realise that life is so intricate so complex that even death, a bodiless, vicious creature took the form of a human to experience and live. And a life he did live. A life that even we humans, who reside on this earth fail to experience, a life full of excitement and awe, and most importantly a life where he experienced love.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how strange it is that death had to borrow a heartbeat to understand what something we casually waste, and take for granted. How he had to feel hunger, confusion, passion, and tenderness just to understand what it means to be alive. In his borrowed skin, every second, every moment mattered. Every laugh lingered. Every touch meant something. He listened, he learned, he felt, as if feeling itself was the greatest revelation of all.

And maybe that’s the tragic part, that we humans failed to understand life, treating it as an obligation rather than truly living it.

We are given what death had to steal, yet we rush through it as if it were infinite. We postpone joy, we weaken love, and we treat time like a renewable resource. Death fell in love not because it was forbidden, but because it was fleeting. Because love, like life, is precious only when you know it can be taken away. Watching him experience love so honestly felt like a mirror held up to us. If even death could be eased by connection, undone by affection, then what excuse do we have? Perhaps the film isn’t really about death learning to live, but about us remembering how.

We wait for the right moment to live. We save our laughter, ration our love, silence our desires, convincing ourselves there will be time later. But later is something that is never promised.

There is something humbling in watching death tremble at the thought of losing what he just learned to cherish. In that trembling, he became more human than most of us ever be. He didn’t love cautiously. He didn’t hold back. He stepped into love knowing it would wound him, knowing it would end. And still, he chose it. That choice is the quiet lesson of the film that the risk of loss is not a reason to evade love, but the very reason to embrace it.

Maybe life isn’t asking us to be fearless, only to be honest. Honest about how deeply we feel. Honest about what matters. Honest about the fact that one day, we will have to let go of everything we cling to. And when that day comes, what will remain won’t be the things we postponed, but the moments we fully lived.

It’s a reminder that to live is not simply to exist between birth and death, but to love, to notice, to choose presence even when it hurts. If death could fall in love with life in such a short time, then perhaps the tragedy isn’t that life ends, but that we so often forget to begin. Truly living isn’t just how long we live here, but how deeply we learn to feel, to love, and to live.

Be deliriously happy, or at least leave yourself open to be. I know it’s a cornball thing, but love is passion, obsession, someone you can’t live without. I say, fall head over heels.

Find someone you can love like crazy and who will love you the same way back. How do you find him? Well, you forget your head, and listen to your heart. And I’m not hearing any heart.

Cause the truth is honey, there’s no sense living your life without this. To make the journey and not fall deeply in love, well, you haven’t lived a life at all.

But you have to try, ‘cause

if you haven’t tried, you haven’t lived.

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What if we truly never heal?

What if, time just softens the wound. It closes it just enough, but not enough to seal it shut properly. What if it just dulls the edges of the knife, but leaves it just sharp enough to cut through you. You stop talking about it, people stop asking but deep inside it still lingers patiently, waiting to be awakened.

It doesn’t undo the way it changed you. It just makes the pain familiar enough to carry. You learn how to move without reopening it.

No one is gonna hold our hands and teach us how to heal. Yes, people might or might not be there for you but ultimately it is something that we must venture through alone. We endure through it all, we learn to build ourselves up again brick by brick, piece by piece.

It’s as if someone has deprived you of your very being, sucked the soul out of you and all that is left of you is an empty, lifeless stack of bones. So you learn to live with it, to swallow it down even when you’re choking underneath it. It becomes part of the way we breathe. Some days it’s lighter, almost forgettable. Other days it weighs down our chest without warning, reminding us that healing is not a straight line, but a series of circles we keep walking through.

And maybe that’s what healing really is, not the absence of pain, but the ability to carry it without letting it consume our entire being. It’s learning how to make room for the ache without letting it define the shape of your whole existence. Healing is quiet, almost unnoticeable. It doesn’t arrive with closure or neat endings. It arrives slowly and steadily.

Some wounds never disappear. They become scars, proof that something once broke you, and that you survived it anyway. And doesn’t mean that you’re weak, they mean you were brave enough to feel, brave enough to keep going.

So we keep going, with the weight, with the parts of us that never quite returned to who they were before. We learn to be gentle with ourselves on the days the pain comes back, to rest instead of defying it.

Healing, is not becoming whole again. It’s learning to live beautifully while being cracked. It’s choosing to exist fully, even when parts of you still ache. And maybe that’s enough, maybe that’s more than enough.

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It is as if something enormous has been placed on your throat, and you keep pushing that oh so heavy weight but no matter how much you push it just won’t budge.

You wish for the words to come out, to tell someone, anyone how you feel, but nothing comes out. And no matter how much you try- a sentence, a word, absolutely nothing comes out.

You want to tell them something is wrong, something is disturbing you, but every time you try you’re just stuck in the middle of nowhere. Standing deserted on an island surrounded by your thoughts.

It’s as if something has pierced your very being, and this unexplainable feeling has taken control, feeding upon me, and my existence like a parasite, evolving more and more.

And it’s not like you don’t want to tell anyone what’s wrong, you do, you really do, but how do I explain what’s happening when even I don’t know what’s going on.

God how I wish I could put this feeling into words. Give it shape, give it structure, to learn about it, so I never feel this way again. A feeling without a language, a disease without diagnosis. It sits inside me, urging to be understood while refusing me the tools to understand it.

I repeat conversations in my head, imagining myself finally speaking about this illness. In my mind, the words are clear, they spill out effortlessly. But its reality is less forgiving.

Some days it feels quieter, which makes it eviler. Just a constant hum beneath everything I do. I go through my day answering questions, laughing at the right instant, nodding when I’m supposed to, while this thing sits in my chest, heavy and watchful. It doesn’t rush me. It waits. It knows I’ll carry it anyway. And the more I ignore it, the more it spreads into my being.

So I learn to swallow it instead. I learn how to smile through it all, how to breathe shallow breaths so no one notices I’m drowning. I become fluent in pretending - pretending I’m okay, pretending to know what I’m doing, pretending this weight is something I can carry alone. Every unspoken word settles someplace inside me, stacking itself layer by layer, until even rest feels heavy.

And still, I wait for the day this feeling finally takes shape, when it stops being a blur and becomes something I can point to, something I can name. Because once it has a name, maybe it will loosen its grasp on me. Maybe then I won’t feel so lost inside myself, searching for a voice I know exists but can’t yet reach.

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We’re told to toughen up, to care less, as if caring in the first place was a crime.

We treat emotions like a deficiency, that decays our bones, our very being. Why? Because the world isn’t kind to those who show their true emotions, it feeds on them, the way a parasite feeds on its host. It sucks out their soul and leaves them with nothing, like stripping a rainbow of its colours.

But feeling deeply is not the flaw that we’ve been taught it is. It is not a crack in our armour — it is the armour itself, just one that the world does not recognise. It is the ability to notice the tremble in someone’s voice, the quiet grief behind a smile, the beauty in moments others rush past. It is the reason some hearts love harder, grieve louder, and hope even when hope feels like nothing.

Life passes through them fully, leaving marks, but also meaning. They carry joy with the same intensity as pain, and that balance is rare in a numb world. The problem was never that they felt too much, it was that the world learned how to take from them without knowing how to give back.

It is a language that only a few are fluent in. While the world shouts, we listen. While others skim the surface, we sink, willingly, into the cemetery of life where truth lives raw and unpolished. It means every moment leaves an imprint, every connection carries weight. Yes, it hurts more but it also means nothing is hollow.

The world is a graveyard, and we walk on it like skeletons, hollow and unalive. But emotions and empathy are the secret elixir that transforms us into human beings.

It gives colour to the blank canvas of our lives.

Numbness is not strength, but survival stripped down to its bare minimum. And survival was never ever the point. We were not meant to merely tolerate the days, going through them like burdens, we were meant to live them, to let them hurt us, soften us, change us.

To feel everything so deeply is evidence that we are alive.

So let the world misunderstand softness. Let it mistake sensitivity for submission. By choosing to feel, we choose depth over emptiness, colour over grey.

And maybe that is real courage, not closing off, but remaining open for a world that keeps giving you reasons not to.

To feel deeply, after everything, is not a curse.

It is a form of valour the world has yet to learn how to honour.

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I already asked all the normal, regular questions your favourite colour? Sea foam. Your favourite book? Looking for alaska. Your favourite movie? The davinci code. Burgers or pizza? Pizza. Your favourite chips flavour? West indies.

But that wasnt enough, i wanted to know more, to know everything about you, to remember what you loved, your regrets, your fears, your silences too.

The way you went quiet when a question came too close to something tender, the way you laughed when i asked something dumb, the way we argued when we once played would you rather, the way you’d be so stubborn once you stuck your mind to something and nothing could ever change it. The way I’d be twice as stubborn and challenge you every time, determined to change what you thought. The way your eyes softened when you talked about things you loved, your family, even if you tried to keep your voice steady. The way some answers were rushed, like you were afraid of staying there too long, and others were stretched out, carefully chosen, as if words could bruise if handled wrong.

And sometimes i’d notice the way you’d look at me while i’d ask those questions, like it was the most wondrous thing in the world. The way we’d sit silently while I’d think of something new to ask. The way you’d suddenly start talking about something you loved, all excitedly, and all that i could do in that moment was shut up and listen to you.

I wanted to ask you the questions that don’t fit neatly into conversations.

The ones people don’t ask because they’re afraid of the answers.

What keeps you awake at night when the world finally goes quiet?

What part of yourself do you protect the hardest?

What do you miss that you never talk about?

I wanted to know which memories you revisit when you’re alone, and which ones you avoid altogether.

I wanted to know if you ever felt lonely in rooms full of people, if you ever wished someone would notice the things you never said out loud.

And somewhere between all those questions, I think I was really asking for permission to stay a little longer, to know you deeper, to matter in the way questions matter when they’re asked with care. Because asking you things was never just curiosity.

But time has a way of stealing questions.

And now they just sit with me, unanswered, echoing in the spaces you left behind. Maybe I didn’t ask them because some part of me was scared that once i knew everything, I’d have nothing left to discover.

Or worse, that knowing would make losing you hurt more than it already does. So i hold onto the questions instead.

Because in them, you’re still here pausing before you answer, smiling like you know more than you’re saying, existing in the almosts and the maybes.

And maybe that’s how I keep you with me.

And honestly, I’m tired of giving so much and getting nothing in return and maybe that’s the cruellest part of it all, not the exhaustion but the way I can’t stop.

You continuously keep giving so much that it becomes a reflex so deeply rooted that saying no feels like treachery. That expecting something in return makes us selfish. So we lower the bar, again and again, until we’re crouching beneath it.

We sacrifice our food for your hunger, without you knowing that we’ve been starving for days, being content in your fullness.

But sometimes even the most giving hearts need reciprocity. Hands that are always reaching out eventually tremble, not because they’re weak, but because they’ve never been held long enough to rest.

In the end, it teaches people that you will always stay, always forgive, always adjust. And slowly, your needs start feeling like inconveniences, even to yourself. But to constantly give and expect nothing in return is something I can’t stop doing anymore, because it’s who I am, it has moulded into my very being so perfectly, the way the colours blend in a rainbow.

But there is a particular loneliness in being the giver. You are surrounded by people, yet profoundly alone. Everyone knows where to find you when they need warmth, but no one thinks to ask if you are cold. And after a while, you stop asking too. You learn to survive on the illusion that being needed is enough to keep you whole.

Still, something inside me is tired in a way sleep cannot fix. Tired of being the understanding one. The patient one. The one who always bends. Kindness was never meant to feel like quiet self-destruction.

Maybe the hardest thing I will ever learn is not how to give, but how to pause. How to let my hands rest without guilt. How to believe that I deserve the same care I give so freely,

Because giving is an art, yes.

But knowing when to stop?

That might be the hardest masterpiece of all.

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“God gives its strongest battles to its toughest soldiers,” but can someone tell God that I’m tired of being strong?

Each and everyday we go through so much, so much pain, so much anger, and all we wanna do is be vulnerable at the end of the day. To let the words that we kept in ourselves for so long break through, to let our tears fall freely, but what do we hear in return, “you’re so strong”.

This strength is not something to be proud of or to be in awe of. It’s brutal, it’s a survival instinct, that we have to bear because there was no choice. It’s waking up with the feeling of a heavy weight on your chest every day, and no matter how much you try to remove the weight you get buried beneath it with more force each time.

It means carrying your pain so that others can’t taste it. But how do I tell them the storm that is brewing inside me has consumed my entire existence, it has dismantled the joy inside me. It has dried up the hope in me, and left me with a void, a hollowness, which I can’t explain and every time I try to explain it, it’s as if someone has choked me and all I’m left to do is grasp for breath.

The world will keep applauding your calm, but don’t they know that it’s a facade? A disguise to keep them away from the withering storm inside.

And the worst part is that people expect you to keep enduring, like it’s something that comes intrinsically to us. Your pain becomes invisible, your struggle normalised.

But strength shouldn’t have to mean loneliness. It shouldn’t mean being held, never being allowed to break. Sometimes strength is admitting you’re tired. Sometimes it’s asking to be saved instead of always being the one who survives. Because even the strongest soldiers deserve a bit of rest. And even God’s toughest battles shouldn’t cost us our softness, or our right to fall apart.

“I came to you, to be vulnerable, to let myself fall apart, to let my armour crack and be laid bare, not to learn how strong I am.”

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Grief is like cancer, it weakens you slowly but it’s always there. You might not even know you have it, but when the effects start kicking in, you wish it would stop. It’s metastatic, it grows continuously, till it consumes you whole. It consumes you in such a way, that you think that you’re meant to be this way. That there is no out. That this was what is meant for you.

It spreads into places you never thought it could reach- your memories, your relationships, the way you see yourself, the way you see the future. It grows continuously, feeding on silence and time, until it begins to consume you whole.

It consumes you so thoroughly that you start to mistake it for who you are. You begin to believe this heaviness is your natural state, that this numbness is permanent. You tell yourself there is no cure, no escape, no way back to who you were before. You convince yourself that this pain was written into your fate, that this is what you were meant to carry.

You might mistake it for exhaustion, for stress, for growing up. You tell yourself you’re just tired, just sensitive, just changing. Meanwhile, it’s already there, growing beneath the surface.

By the time the symptoms show, it’s hard to trace them back to a single moment. Your energy drains in ways sleep can’t fix. Your chest feels heavier for no clear reason. Things that once brought you joy now feel distant, muted, unreachable. And when you finally realize what’s happening, when the truth settles in, you don’t ask for answers —you beg for it to stop.

And eventually, the most dangerous transformation happens, you begin to accept it. You start to believe this hollow ache is permanent, that this version of you is the final one. You stop looking for exits because you’re convinced none exist. You stop fighting because you assume this is what survival looks like.

And the cruelest part of grief is not just that it hurts but that it makes you believe the hurting is all you’ll ever be.

And you can’t help but wonder, is this what is left of me?

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Grief does not visit it rents the entire house. It moves into your marrow, rearranges the furniture of your soul, hangs its coat in your throat and whispers your own name back at you.

They say grief is love with nowhere to go but mine went everywhere, into the seams of my palms, into blood, into the language of sleep. It gnawed the syllables of joy until only the consonants remained hard, brittle.

there are nights i touch the air and feel its pulse still carrying you. as if your absence is a living thing. sometimes i fee it my silence, sometimes my tears, sometimes my whole body.

The world still keeps blooming, while I hold on to your memory like a dying candle to my chest.

I have learned that grief has no mercy. it doesn't arrive like thunder, it seeps in teaspoons, in breaths.

It keeps you awake at night, until you drift of into slumber less sleep and the next day when you wake up, you are consumed by it again.

Day by day it keeps getting stronger, and all you wonder is when it will stop, cause no matter how hard you try, it comes back, in waves.

It comes back like how a tide returns to the shore, more forcefully, with more power than before, and the entirety of you drowns beneath that tide. You try to escape, to come back to the surface but it keeps pulling you down, down and down.

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