The taste of not enough

If joy arrives suddenly, unexpectedly, do not hesitate. Give in to it. 

The world is often brutal, frequently cruel, and much of it lies beyond redemption. We are rarely wise and even less often kind. But life still possesses a quiet capacity for resistance. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back: that sometimes, something happens which outweighs all the riches or power in the world.

It could be anything, but you will likely recognize it the instant love begins. Whatever it is, do not fear its abundance. Joy was never meant to be a crumb.

Happy days are not meant to satiate; they are too fleeting, too refreshing to ever truly fill the cup. They are butterfly wings against your eyelashes, not the bruising touch that pins you to the earth. They are kites in a high wind, children running barefoot, the sudden heat of a holiday romance.

How does one write about them? 

What is there to say other than: All was well.

The sky was a constant, deep blue; the sun held you like a warm hand on bare skin. Even the rain felt like a blessing, turning the world into a playground that made you giggle. 

Every meal was a discovery, a rhythmic progression of Mmms that deepened with every bite. I remember the merchant: the same hands, the same rhythm. He would stretch the dough so thin you could see the grey of the metal cart underneath, roll it into a layered ball, and fry it to a golden, shattering crisp. Then, he would halve it and stuff it—with a non-negotiable gluttony—full of soft, marinated meat, fresh herbs, and aromatic juices. It was the same taste, the same loop, the same way of melting into deliciousness.

There is nothing to do with happy days but to keep having them. To think we spend our lives chasing, enduring, and dying a thousand small deaths, all to reach for something which, when it finally arrives, offers no grip. 

You cannot hold it. You cannot can it, pickle it, or store it away for the lean seasons.

The only response to a happy day is to live it outrageously. You must be wasteful with it. You must bite into the ripest parts of the day and admit, "I have had enough for now." You have to allow yourself the luxury of gluttony because there is no sensible way to enjoy goodness. You can never reach the rind; the flesh of a good day is forever tender, juicy, and overflowing.

And yet, you never feel full.

I call this the "Taste of not Enough." It is the paradox of joy: it is absolute, total abundance, yet it is only ever as much as your hands can hold.

"Love me now," it whispers. "Only now. Later, I will be a mirage."

It is infuriating. It is unfair. To toil, to dream through seasons of drought and death, to face adversity embedded within adversity and then for the good days to flow so unburdened? To have the impossible suddenly feel like normalcy? 

It is maddening that there is nothing to do but take part in the dance, to flow with the current and not ask it for more than what it is currently giving.

Truly, it is ridiculous.

And yet, I return to it. I return to the table. 

The faucet is open, the happiness is flowing, and I am stepping into the current: curmudgeonly, sour, and utterly, helplessly happy.

The Liver Doctor

Three nights of ink and moonlight. 

I didn’t just read The Liver Doctor... 

I sat at the bedside of strangers, 

their families, and beloveds, and hopes crushed,

hands held,

consuming their histories until the hours blurred. 

Three consecutive nights, 

just before the world turned inward, 

I let these pages hold me.

It has been an age since a book felt this alive...

since I felt the sudden, sharp friction of the drama 

between the pulse and the silence. 

It forced me to sit with the weight of it all: 

the fragile choreography of life, 

the slow surrender of death, and 

everything messy and magnificent that breathes in the space between.

I see the hand that holds the pen: a master physician, 

who knows that the best medicine is often 

just the act of looking, truly looking. 

Dr. Abby is an observer of the human fray, 

cataloging the micro-expressions of hope 

and the slow, intricate retreat of the spirit. 

As a poet, I recognize that gaze; 

I bow to the patience of that craft.

And that ending: 

a quiet, resonant bow to a story well-told. 

It didn’t just close the book; it left a lingering note in the dark, 

inviting me to carry the reflection 

into the waking light of the next day.

Alchemy of companionship

Seven years is not just time.

 

It is a slow, steady tide

The way the water shapes the stone, not by force, 

but by the relentless, quiet insistence of returning.

We have been a geography of shifting landscapes. 

Two people, once separate, 

slowly knitting a single horizon. 

I think of the small, unrecorded histories: 

the shared air, 

the way the silence between us has changed its texture, 

no longer an empty space, 

but a substance: a soft, anchoring hum that grounds the day.

We do not hold on by gripping tight. 

We hold on by letting the seasons cycle through us, 

by weathering the droughts and the sudden, lush growth of being truly known. 

Seven years of witnessing: 

you have seen the versions of me that I have already shed, and 

I have stood watch over the shadows you have outgrown.

This is the alchemy of companionship. 

We are mirrors that have stopped reflecting our own faces and began, instead, to see the other as the primary landscape of our lives.

There is no sudden arrival. 

There is only the long, beautiful transit of staying: 

of choosing to be the person who wakes up in the same gravity, 

in the same light, and knowing, 

with the deep, quiet rhythm of the heart that 

we are exactly where we intended to be all along.

You know

I know. 

But I don’t know.

On the quiet days 

when breathing slows and my feet find the rhythm of the earth 

I can feel it pulling closer. 

The thing that was always meant for me.

Light, love, home. 

They are just different frequencies of the same pulse 

traveling toward the same coordinate.

I say it was meant for me because this was signed into existence 

at the very beginning of time itself?! 

While I was busy swearing that the silence meant nothing was happening because I wasn't there to force the pieces into place 

it was already in motion. 

Undeterred by my disbelief,

this light that knows my name kept moving.

It has been traveling a terrifying distance to find me. 

It has navigated the debris of dead planets 

and the crushing gravity of nascent galaxies 

drifting through the dark everythingness of creation. 

It got caught in the webs of time 

tangled in the long rivers of delay 

stalled by the mirages of my own doubt.

To me it felt lost. 

To me it felt late.

But there is a light so absolute that 

its arrival erases the history of the wait. 

It lands and the old pain simply dissolves. 

The universe resets. 

A new life begins...

With a sore thumb nonetheless!

The burdens we let go

The weight we carry isn’t always dropped with intent. 

Sometimes, it simply dissolves— a slow hemorrhage of detail until the palms are empty, and we haven’t even noticed the lightness.

These are the quietest farewells. No ceremony. No backward glance. Just a name dissolving into the static of a defunct motherboard.

I search now for a face etched into the architecture of a former life—a steady presence whose name has slipped through the cracks of time. A ghost locked within the green circuitry of a dead phone, gathering dust in the dark of a drawer. Beneath that cracked screen lies a fossilized version of me: twenty-four, anxious, standing in the cold, blue neon of a city that never stopped moving.

I remember the shared silence of the daily Mumbai train commute. The way the world turned hollow and reflective in the late hours. The vulnerability of being alone in the vast, silent dark, and the sudden, glowing ember of a stranger’s kindness. A reassuring look that wasn’t a mask. In a night that sharp and lonely, you learn to recognize the humidity of genuine humanity.

But life is not a circle; it is a displacement. 

We don’t return to the start; we only pivot from where we last stood. This is how we lose the child, how we shed the teenager—by simply moving toward a different horizon until the previous one is swallowed by the curve of the earth.

I used to be the one who clutched the ache, wondering how others could walk so freely while burdened by the gravity of so much loss. 

Silly, to think that holding on was the only way to honor the past.

The secret is in the transit. To move forward is to exhale. 

You look toward the next light, you take the step, and without a word, your hands have already let go.

Alex, the architect of our combined worlds

At 19, the syntax of the world becomes more deliberate,

a sequence of light and logic held within the glow of a screen.

You sit as the architect of your own quiet kingdom, Alex,

anchored by the crisp weight of a formal shirt, hidden from sight,

the tie a sharp, intentional line

against the soft blur of a wandering universe.

You do not seek the aimless exhaustion of the long walk,

the dust of roads that lead nowhere.

Instead, you find the sacred in the stationary:

the salt-etched geometry of French fries,

the dark, velvet gravity of a brownie,

and the thick, cold comfort of a chocolate shake.

In the familiar breath of Kiteblu,

or the steam rising at Cafe Gnocchi,

reality is not a thing that happens to you;

it is a landscape you compose.

On the wall, the Guitar Girl remains in her frozen, melodic grace.

She is more than pigment and canvas;

she is the silent resonance of Karen,

an imaginary presence of a past that once was, you’ve authored into being,

strumming chords that only the inner ear can catch.

And there is Idly,

the warm, living rhythm at your feet,

a companion who understands the beauty of the still moment,

the wag of a tail marking time

as you bridge the gap between design and soul.

Let the world spin its frantic, messy wheel.

You are busy building constellations,

one keystroke, one brushstroke,

one knotted tie at a time while you sit

to avoid shutting down the PC at 7:30 pm

In your striped t-shirt.

A meaningless puzzle?

The universe does not care that you forgot to pay your water bill.

It doesn’t care about your promotion, your heartbreak, or the fact that you’ve spent the last three hours doom-scrolling through the digital landfill of other people’s curated lives.

In the grand, silent theater of the cosmos, your entire existence is a rounding error... a brief, frantic spark between two infinities of darkness.

And that, quite frankly, is the most diabolical joke ever played on a sentient species.

 

You’re a biological prank

You are a collection of atoms that, through a series of increasingly improbable accidents, developed the ability to feel anxious about its own mortality. For four billion years, life on this damp rock has been a brutal, red-toothed relay race.

Your primate and even reptilian ancestors dodged asteroids, outran predators, and survived plagues just so they could pass a baton of scorched DNA to you.

And what do you do with this hard-won gift? You sit in traffic and wonder if you’re "living your best life".

Biologically, you are a meat-suit piloted by a chemical-soaked sponge. Your brain is wired for survival on the savannah, yet it’s forced to navigate tax codes and existential dread. 

 

We are the only creatures on Earth that know we are going to die, and we spend every waking second trying to pretend we don’t. We build cathedrals, write symphonies, and launch rockets into the void, all as a desperate "I was here" scratched into the bark of a tree that will be cut to be a piece of paper that’ll be shredded in sometime.

 

You’re a graveyard of ambition

Look back at history. It is a long, bloody ledger of people who thought they were the protagonists of reality:

• Ozymandias had his statues; now they are stumps in the sand.
• The Romans had their eternal city; now it’s a picturesque backdrop for tourists eating overpriced gelato.
• The Genghis Khans and Napoleons burned half the world to ensure their names would live forever, but a million years from now, the sun will still rise over a planet that has forgotten the sound of every human tongue.

We are standing on a pile of skulls several miles high, and we have the audacity to find ourselves "unique." Every war ever fought, every empire ever raised, every "unspeakable tragedy" is eventually reduced to a thin layer of compressed carbon in the Earth’s crust.

To the universe, the fall of a civilization is no more significant than a gust of wind blowing through a canyon.

 

You’re ‘scientific’ silence

 

Science used to be a comfort. It was the torch we held up to the darkness. But the more we learn, the more the darkness seems to grow.

We discovered that we aren't the center of the solar system. Then we found out the solar system is a speck in a galaxy of 400 billion stars. 

Then we realized our galaxy is just one of two trillion in the observable universe. We are living on a "pale blue dot" suspended in a sunbeam, surrounded by a vacuum so vast and so cold it defies human comprehension.

And then there is entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the ultimate cosmic "No." Every star will eventually burn out. Every galaxy will drift so far apart that the night sky will become a perfect, terrifying black. The universe is heading toward a state of maximum disorder, a "Heat Death" where nothing happens, forever.

The universe isn't just indifferent to you; it is actively erasing the possibility of you.

 

So, where does that leave us?

If history is a graveyard and science is a countdown to a cold, dark room, seeking "meaning" seems like a fool’s errand. 

We look for signs in the stars, but the stars are just nuclear furnaces millions of light-years away. 

We look for purpose in our work, but our work is just a way to trade our finite hours for pieces of paper we can use to buy things to distract us from our finite hours.

But here is the twist: the punchline that makes the joke worth it.

The very fact that you are a glitch in the system is what makes you a god. In a universe governed by cold equations and dead matter, you are a point of light that can think. 

You are the universe’s way of looking in a mirror and saying, "Huh, so that’s what I look like."

The lack of inherent meaning isn’t a prison; it’s a blank check. If the universe didn’t give you a purpose, it means you don’t owe the universe anything. 

You are free to invent a meaning that is entirely, selfishly, and beautifully yours:

• Meaning is the taste of a perfectly ripe mango or a peach or a strawberry or a blueberry.
• Meaning is the way the light hits the floor at 4:00 PM on a Tuesday.
• Meaning is the irrational, defiant act of loving another person even though you both know it may end in grief.

We are ghosts driving machines made of stardust. We are the only part of the cosmos that can laugh at the absurdity of it all. 

To seek meaning in the "big picture" is to miss the point; the big picture is a vacuum. The meaning is in the pixels. Maybe.

 

That’s it!

The crisis ends when you realize that "mattering" is a human invention. The universe doesn't need you to matter. It just needs you to be.

You are a temporary arrangement of matter that has been granted a backstage pass to the greatest show in existence. You can spend your time worrying about your seat, or you can watch the performance before the lights go out.

So, stand on your tiny rock. Look up at the billions of cold, dead suns. Feel the crushing weight of history and the terrifying scale of the void. And then, do something purely, pointlessly human:

• Make a cup of coffee. 
• Hug a friend. 
• Write a poem that no one will read in a thousand years.

The universe is a vast, empty house. But for a few decades, you get to be the one who leaves the lights on.

You, matter

Consider the dust mote floating in the shaft of afternoon sun.
It navigates the air like a hull-less ship on a frantic ocean,
obeying currents of heat we cannot feel,
turning invisible the moment the light shifts two degrees to the west.
You're not so different from that suspension.

You're are the brief interruptions in the long, monotone hum of geology,
flickering with the same terrifying brevity
as a match struck in a cavern larger than the dark.

And yet, imagine the silence of a library without the turning of a single page.

Imagine the ocean without the friction of the wave against the rock.

There is a strange, quiet weight to being small.

If the universe is a sprawling, infinite fabric,
then you're the tension in the thread,
not the pattern itself, but the strain that holds the weave together.

Think of the comma in a sentence written by a giant.
It has no sound of its own,
it is merely a pause, a breath, a tiny, hooked mark
dwarfed by the nouns and verbs that surround it.

But without that pause,
the meaning collapses into noise.

To be insignificant is to be the vessel, not the water.

It is to be the dark space between the stars that allows the light to travel.

You matter not because you persist,
but because for a fraction of a second,
you're the only place in the cosmos
where the universe could look at itself and ask,
“What am I?”