8489 days + 1

4th February 2026

This image is my favourite because the fairy lights look like stars are surrounding us.

My tingling teeth remind me that I’m now older than you. All the equations we proved and all the odds we calculated, this was never shown except for in a September dream once. Me. Older than you. 8489 days + 1 = Death hasn’t called for me yet. 

Are you perhaps looking at me with a smile? Or maybe disappointment. Maybe you aren’t. I believe in science more than the concept of the afterlife. All the fantasy writers eventually succumb to the constraints of reality. 

My dark circles stain my dreams. I read through blogs of betrayals and betrayers. Separate the art from the artist, but never the artist from the art. Maybe I’m lying. I wear my heart on my sleeves and carry pride under my toenail. I always sniff out their karma before I look into someone’s eyes. 

Don’t get me wrong, Manan. I have learnt to live by myself. I enjoy it even. Just me and Turtle kissing the sun on my grandfather’s terrace, eating bananas with a spoon and grinding green grapes with my front teeth, listening to ARR in Hindi. It’s a beautiful language. All languages are beautiful. My mother tongue is mine. But, there’s a feeling I can’t explain when I listen to languages that aren’t soaked in my blood yet. I’m against every type of extremism, that includes languages. Does that make me an extremist?

 Contrary to a popular take where South Indians aren't fond of Hindi, I take the deepest pleasure in understanding a foreign song. But, Manan, I don’t know if I yet understand myself. I love poetry, what about my own tangles of thoughts? Is unspiralling the same as a descent? Is a descent the same as a fall?

All doors in the labyrinth look familiar in strange shades of darkness. I find myself in crossroads and realise all of them lead to the same destination. I twirl, tango, and tap dance in shoes of nihilism and absurdism. My neck twists. My knees give up. Unsaid horrors still haunt me as I lay awake at 4:30 am, staring at a shadow on my ceiling that looks like a girl. She scares me because she might be me. A me that I never got to be. A girl who is maybe still holding your hand. 

I ask my mother why she gave birth to me. Because despite all the bright things in this world, I still don’t think any capacity of pain is worth it. When music no longer touches you, when you realise neutrality is the choice you weren’t given, is that depression or nirvana? What happens to souls that attain it while stuck inside a biological body? What is reality if not a shared delusion, what is consciousness if not a pseudo hallucination? Do souls even exist? Am I falling into traps set by my mortal brain that’s only ever known life? Am I falling into traps set by patriarchy and capitalism? 

Am I privileged to experience the torment behind these questions or privileged to even ask them?

Why can’t I be like everybody else? Normal people who go to jobs, get married, have children, not have a second thought about life or its purpose until it’s too late and they embrace death instead of this torment?

I do not have the “best” coping mechanism. I do not fall back into the crutch of gods/religions – I no longer see the difference between them. If they can blame a human for neutrality and being a spectator, I will blame the god/s for being one – If they exist. There’s no anger there, it’s a hollow indifference. No curiosity either. What’s the difference between going in search of someone who doesn’t exist and someone who doesn’t want to be found?

What’s the difference between finding out there’s an answer to everything but you won’t get to find out versus there’s no answer at all? One lets you create your own answer, another drives you insane and also makes you believe you are a sinner for existing, there are “rules” you have to follow or be thrown into hellfire and also breeds in-group out-group mentality and manifests hatred.

I do not know the purpose of this letter, Manan. I guess I just have the tendency to ramble to you whenever I get waterboarded with pain. Lately things haven’t been making any sense. Whatever I do, it seems to me the question, “what’s the point of all this?” is stuck in between the folds of my brain like a chewing gum. 

As much as I have decentralised romance in my life, I miss you terribly. Or maybe I miss the ‘simpler’ times of my life before the existentialism infested my mind. But, I think I miss you more. I miss the times I thought we found the answer to our equations. I miss us. But, in this universe, I’m now older than you. Sadder. Wiser. Filled with questions and puzzles and metaphors and pain. But, it’s a privilege to ask those questions. It’s a privilege to belong to yourself. 

And I do belong to myself now, Manan, and it is a lonely experience. 

She is golden.