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.