As a child, you don’t understand dysfunction as you call that life. You go to school, you laugh, you come back. You adjust.

It isn’t until you start entering other people’s homes that something feels slightly off. Not wrong. Just unfamiliar. Their houses breathe differently. At first, you think they are lucky.

You never think you are unlucky. Because that would mean accepting that something was missing. And children don’t think in terms of missing. They think in terms of given.

'This was given to you. So this must be normal.' It takes years before questions appear. "Was it normal?" And even then, you don’t fully believe it.

Because when you leave, when you build a softer life somewhere else, the past begins to feel fictional. Like something you exaggerated to survive. You tell yourself: "it wasn’t that bad. I am dramatic, maybe I misunderstood everything."

Memory becomes something you negotiate with until someone who knew you then, speaks. They mention things casually. Things you thought nobody noticed. The was they felt in your home. The way you used to go quiet. The way you watched everything. The way you seemed older than you were.

And today, it was my book. My personal diary, as I called it.

I poured everything into it. I drew what happened to me when words were not enough. I wrote about the days that felt too heavy to carry. I used to even circle my tears on some pages, as if to prove they were real.

That book has been hidden in my secret cupboard for years. I hid the key when I moved away, determined that no one else would ever open it. After I left, my mother cleared the shelves, sorted through drawers, erased the traces of a child who no longer lived there. In that quiet act of tidying, she threw the key away. Not just a key, but the last way back into who I was.

And sometimes, when I look too long, I can’t tell if the world is shining in your eyes or if your eyes are what make the world shine at all.

It’s strange, isn’t it? How God carved two small openings in our bodies and called them sight? How through those fragile windows, I get to see mountains, oceans,

and then, you.

When you forget to close the door, I will close it softly, so the wind stays warm around you.

When you forget who you are, I will remind you with my hands, my voice, my love, until you remember.

I want to sit across your lap and trace galaxies between the freckles on your skin.

I want to memorise the timbre of your voice as you tell me stories, and offer mine in return.

Even the unfinished ones, the ones that still tremble.

And if there comes a day you cannot choose yourself, I will choose you twice.

Once for the man you are, and once for the man you’re still becoming.

I will choose you. In every lifetime, in every sky,

until the last star sighs into darkness

I didn’t know how to brush my teeth without rushing. How to take a shower without panicing. I adored people who had the power to pick things up and arrange them beautifully across a desk. My hands could never.

I didn’t realise how many things I had been doing just to survive, not to live. I thought I was functioning. Turns out, I was mimicking function.

I used to watch my man brush his teeth slowly, rinse with care, fold towels, move like the world was never on fire. I used to watch him, like how a toddler stares at his mumma. I started copying him. Not out of helplessness, but out of quiet awe. Because i realised that, that too, was healing. Learning the softest and most basic rituals from someone whose body has known safety longer than yours.

The key sticks. Takes five, sometimes seven presses before the car gives in with a click. It’s been that way for a while. Never had an urgency about it. Just a quiet understanding: press enough times, and it’ll work. The fan hums louder than it should. A door doesn’t close fully. The light flickers, but only sometimes.

These things gather slowly. Not broken enough to matter. Not whole enough to forget.

& that's okay.

memory is not a shrine,

it is a weight.

sometimes soft like a folded sweater,

sometimes sharp like the bones i had to step over

they say never forget where you came from

but what if remembering

keeps me small?

i left

what if forgetting

is how i finally learned to breathe without guilt?

not because i was ungrateful

but because love, no matter how deep,

cannot always carry you across oceans

you were meant to swim alone.

& maybe

the most honest thank you

Where do you go when everything you're running from has already made a home inside you?

Everytime i sat on the floor while helping my mom prepare veggies for the next day, i used to observe how she had awfully cracked heels. I've seen her apply medicine on it, struggling to walk sometimes. She used to always complain about it. All that while, i thought to myself, couldn't she have seen this get worse day by day? Why didn't she take care of it?

I was 22 when i saw that my heels started cracking too. A time in my life when i didn't have the means to do the bare minimum of what humans do to take care of themselves- the reason. Once i realised it, it took me a while to heal it back, but i did. Today, i was sitting on the floor, looking at my foot when i realised, what if she never got a chance to sit down and see herself, like i did?

We are all cracked, a little more or less. Some of them, they know it. Some accept it, and some work for it. The happiest people are not happy because they don't have to rethink if they have enough money in their bank account before buying something, or because they have their favourite car. The happiest people are happy, because at the end of the day, they keep some time to look in the mirror and reflect.

So if you think everything is going wrong lately, have you taken care of yourself enough?