the grease stains my fingernails before I touch the food.

deft fingers work the dough-

it remembers our last name better than I do.

as I watch mami hunched over the stove,

cheeks flushed like red cometas Hernando gave me.

I wear my apron,

familiar fingers tie the knot for me-

guiding me to the pot of los frijoles

steam colors my cheeks the same stubborn crimson as I hunch.

my fingers chop the vegetables,

stained with onion juice

as I get lost in the language of my ancestors.

I still stumble over my Spanish,

but my palms still remember how much flour to dust

don’t put too much chili—el diablo will swallow their tongue

Papi’s laughter spills through the kitchen,

mingling with the last light of the evening.

By closing,

the grease still rests beneath my fingernails.

Tomorrow, I’ll tie the apron myself.

Through an airport. Through rain. Through a crowded party where they’ve just spotted the person they let walk away three acts ago. They are almost always slightly out of breath, slightly disheveled, and completely certain — for the first time in the entire film — about what they want.

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We mock this scene, calling it unrealistic. We point out that post-9/11 airport security alone makes it physically impossible. We write essays about it. We make TikToks, and then, without fail, the next time we watch it, something tugs in the chest anyway.

I’ve been thinking about why.

The Grand Gesture Was Never About Love

Here’s the thing about the airport run, the boom box outside the window, the “just a girl, standing in front of a boy” speech: none of them are really about the other person.

They’re about the protagonist finally shutting up.

Watch any of these scenes closely and what you’re actually witnessing isn’t a declaration of love — it’s a declaration of internal quiet. The noise stops. The arguing-with-yourself stops. Every rom-com hero spends roughly 85 minutes in their own head, constructing elaborate reasons why this won’t work, why they’re too different, why the timing is wrong, why their career/past/emotional unavailability makes this impossible. And then, in the third act, something cracks. The armor comes off. They run.

The running is just proof that the internal noise has stopped.

We find this moving not because we want someone to chase us through Heathrow (though, I mean, sure), but because we want to feel that kind of clarity ourselves. The fantasy of the grand gesture is really the fantasy of knowing your own mind. Of being so certain about something that you stop overthinking and just move your body toward it.

That is, frankly, an extraordinary thing to feel. Most of us spend enormous amounts of our lives not feeling it.

What Real Relationships Actually Look Like

Real relationships don’t have the airport scene. They have Tuesday evenings where you’re both tired and nobody says the important thing, and you go to sleep with something unresolved quietly calcifying between you.

They have the “we should talk” text and the ten-minute walk to clear your head that turns into an hour. They have the slow accumulation of small choices — to stay, to show up, to apologize first, to let something go — rather than one cinematic sprint that resolves everything in 90 seconds of swelling strings.

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Real intimacy is less like a dash through departures and more like a very long road trip where you have to decide, at every rest stop, whether you’re still both going to the same place. Sometimes you’re not sure. Sometimes you keep driving anyway. Sometimes one person wants to take a different exit and you have to actually talk about it, without a soundtrack, without a studio audience, without the narrative guarantee that it’s all going to work out.

This is boring to watch. This is also, it turns out, what love mostly is.

And yet — we keep watching the movies. We keep tearing up at the same beats, in the same key, as if it’s new every time.

The Genre That Refuses to Be Embarrassed

There’s a particular kind of cultural snobbery reserved for rom-coms that I find genuinely interesting. People will freely admit to loving horror, to bingeing prestige TV dramas about morally compromised men, to having a soft spot for disaster movies where cities get destroyed. But say you unironically love Notting Hill or When Harry Met Sally or Crazy Rich Asians and there’s often this little pause, this micro-apology, this “I know it’s cheesy but—”

Why?

I think it’s because romantic comedies are unusually transparent about what they’re doing. The genre doesn’t pretend to be about anything other than what it’s about. It doesn’t wrap its emotional core in irony or genre scaffolding. It just looks you in the eye and says: someone is going to fall in love and it’s going to be wonderful and yes you’re going to feel things.

That directness — that refusal to be embarrassed about its own earnestness — makes people uncomfortable in a way that more “serious” genres don’t. We’ve built up sophisticated defenses against being moved by things, and the rom-com just walks right past them.

It’s not that the genre is unsophisticated. It’s that it’s unashamed. There’s a difference.

The Best Ones Know What They’re Doing

The rom-coms that last — the ones people rewatch twenty years later — aren’t the ones with the most elaborate setups or the most glamorous locations. They’re the ones with the most honest observation buried inside the fantasy.

When Harry Met Sally is really about whether two people can be changed by each other slowly enough that neither of them notices until it’s too late. Notting Hill is about the specific terror of loving someone whose life has a gravitational pull much larger than yours. Moonstruck is about the difference between the life you settled for and the life that could still crack you open, and how frightening it is when the second one shows up uninvited.

These films use the genre’s conventions — the misunderstanding, the dark moment, the grand gesture — as delivery mechanisms for something true. The fantasy is the wrapping. The observation is the gift.

And the reason we cry at the airport run isn’t that we believe in it literally. It’s that for a moment, we’re in contact with the part of ourselves that still believes clarity is possible. That you can know what you want. That you can stop being afraid of it. That you can run.

What We’re Actually Paying For

I’ve come to think the rom-com isn’t selling us a relationship. It’s selling us a version of ourselves.

Specifically: the version who doesn’t hesitate. Who has, at least once, been so sure about something that the only sensible response was to move toward it as fast as possible, logistics be damned.

Most of us don’t get that scene in our actual lives. We get the approximation of it — a text we finally send after writing and deleting it four times, a conversation we have while staring at the ceiling instead of at each other, a moment of “I think I love you” that arrives not at a dramatic peak but on a random Wednesday while someone is making coffee.

These moments are real, and they count. They’re arguably more meaningful because they’re not choreographed.

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But they don’t look like the movies. And sometimes — on a train, on a plane, on a Sunday afternoon when you need to feel something simple : you want the thing that looks like the movies.

You want the running. You want the strings to swell. You want, just for an hour and a half, to live in a world where people say exactly what they mean at exactly the right moment, and it works.

That desire isn’t naïve. It’s not even really about romance.

It’s about wanting to believe that certainty exists. That it’s possible to know. That when the moment comes, you won’t hesitate.

Filed under: things I figured out during a rewatch of Notting Hill on a delayed train to nowhere in particular

Not the silence of a quiet room or an empty street. Something interior—something that settles into the spaces between your thoughts like fog settling into a valley at night, slow, inevitable, and strangely beautiful if you can manage to look at it without flinching, yet most of us flinch.

I’ve been thinking about why we find, and what it truly costs us when we do.

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I. The Misclassification

We have made a philosophical error so old and so widespread that it;s become invisible to us.

We decided, somewhere along the way, that sadness was the enemy. The thing on the other side of the wall from happiness. The dark to its light. The problem to its solution. Once we decided that, everything followed naturally — the industry built around fixing it, the language built around pathologizing it, the culture built around outrunning it at all costs.

But what if the classification was wrong from the beginning?

What if sadness and happiness were never opposites at all?

Think about it this way. Opposites cancel each other out. Cold and heat. Light and dark. Presence and absence. One eliminates the other. But sadness and happiness don’t work like that. They coexist constantly, sometimes within the same hour, sometimes within the same breath. You can feel the sharp sweetness of being somewhere beautiful and knowing it will end. You can feel love and grief at the same time so completely that you cannot tell where one stops and the other begins.

These aren’t opposites—they’re companions.

The real opposite of happiness, if we are being philosophically precise about it ,is not sadness.

It’s numbness.

II. What Numbness Actually Is

Numbness doesn’t announce itself the way sadness does. It doesn’t arrive with weight or texture or that particular ache in the chest that at least lets you know something mattered. It arrives quietly. Politely, almost. It just takes things away one by one until you look up one day and realize you can’t remember the last time anything truly landed.

This is the thing we aren’t talking about enough.

We have built a world of extraordinary efficiency at producing numbness and we have marketed it as wellness. As self-care. As peace. Keep moving. Stay positive. Protect your energy. Don’t let things affect you too deeply. Build your walls high enough and call it healing.

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But there’s a difference — a profound, crucial, irreducible difference — between being at peace with something and being insulated from it. Between processing pain and simply refusing to feel it. Between genuine stillness and the kind of stillness that comes from having slowly turned everything down so low that nothing can reach you anymore.

One is freedom. The other is a very comfortable cage.

And we keep choosing the cage because it looks, from the outside, exactly like freedom.

III. The Texture of Sadness

Here is what I want to say about sadness that I don’t think gets said enough.

It has texture. It has specificity. It arrives with information.

Every instance of sadness is about something real. Even the ones that feel sourceless — the ones that descend on a quiet afternoon with no warning and no explanation — even those are pointing at something. A life moving faster than you can process. A version of yourself you quietly mourned without noticing. A longing so old it has forgotten its own origin.

Sadness is never random. It’s always, always a response to something that mattered.

And this is where the philosophy gets interesting.

If sadness is always a response to mattering, then the capacity for sadness and the capacity for meaning are not separate things. They are the same thing. You cannot open yourself to one without opening yourself to the other. The depth to which you can grieve something is exactly, precisely, the depth to which you were able to love it.

Which means every time we successfully insulate ourselves from sadness, we are also — whether we realize it or not — insulating ourselves from meaning.

We aren’t protecting ourselves. We are slowly, voluntarily making ourselves smaller.

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IV. What The Philosophers Knew

The Stoics believed in something they called amor fati — the love of fate. Not the tolerance of fate. Not the acceptance of fate. The love of it. All of it. Including the parts that break you.

This was not masochism. It was a philosophical position about what it means to be fully present in life. To look at everything that happens — the beautiful and the devastating in equal measure — and say: this is real. This is mine. I will not look away from it.

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The Buddhists arrived at something similar from a completely different direction. The first noble truth : that suffering exists, was never meant to be depressing. It was meant to be liberating. Because the moment you stop spending your energy pretending that pain shouldn’t be happening, you have energy left over to actually move through it.

Both traditions understood something that our current cultural moment seems to have forgotten entirely.

That the goal was never to feel less, but to feel more clearly.

There is an enormous difference between those two things. One makes you numb. The other makes you wise.

V. The Valley

There is something about sadness that is genuinely, quietly beautiful if you can manage to look at it without immediately trying to make it stop. Not beautiful in a performative way, nor in the way we post about it with soft lighting and a caption about growth, rather in the way that the weather is beautiful. In the way that winter is beautiful. In the way that anything is beautiful when it is exactly what it is without apology.

Sadness is honest in a way that very little else is.

It doesn’t perform. It doesn’t optimize. It doesn’t ask how it looks from the outside. It just arrives, heavy and quiet, and it sits with you in the dark until it has said everything it came to say.

And here is the thing about that , the thing I think about more than almost anything else when it comes to how we live and who we are becoming:

The people who let it speak. Who sit in the valley instead of immediately climbing out of it. Those who resist the pull toward distraction and numbing and performing okayness — those people come out of it different from the way they went in.

Not fixed. Not healed in the clean, linear way we love to talk about. But deeper. More real. More capable of recognizing what actually matters to them because they have felt, with their whole body, what it costs to lose it.

Sadness, when you let it move through you fully, leaves something behind.

It leaves you with a kind of knowing that cannot be acquired any other way. Not through productivity. Not through optimization. Not through any of the thousand things we reach for to avoid it.

VI. The Choice

So here is where I want to leave you.

We live in a moment that is working very hard , with every notification, every algorithm, every piece of content engineered to keep you moving just fast enough that nothing lands too heavy to make you numb. To keep you comfortable. To make sure that the fog never settles, that the valley never gets quiet enough to hear what it’s saying.

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Numbness keeps you functional; it keeps you moving. It keeps you from having to sit alone in the dark with the full weight of what it means to be alive in a world where things end, and people leave, and time moves whether you’re ready or not. But functional is not the same as alive, and moving isn’t the same as living.

Choosing to feel, really feel, all the way down, without immediately reaching for something to make it stop, is one of the quietest and most radical acts available to us right now. It’s a refusal—a refusal to be managed, to be optimized. A refusal to trade depth for comfort and call it peace. Sadness was never the opposite of happiness; it was always the proof of it—the proof that something was real, that someone mattered. You were here, paying attention to your own life instead of just moving through it at a safe and careful distance.

So feel the weight, because it was always meant to be carried.

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Imagine for a second that you’re arguing with someone: a loved one, your partner, a child, anyone. Dishes break, accusations are thrown, and suddenly, there’s silence. Not just any kind- the silence that you both try to fill to avoid confrontation. Television shows as background noise, podcasts humming in your headphones, and meaningless small talk like “can you pass me the ketchup?” It isn’t the kind of silence on a Sunday morning in a library. It’s the one where the music stops, phone face down, where you truly have to sit with yourself and contemplate your life decisions.

Silence feels like dread to us—it’s unnerving. Yet philosophers believe that silence is the most honest thing there is. Wittgenstein thought it was the only appropriate response to life's deepest questions. Heidegger thought it was the only way back to yourself. The Zen masters thought it was the whole point. Even John Cage, sitting in a soundproof room, discovered that silence doesn't exist — that what we call silence is really just the world asking us to listen harder.

I. Wittgenstein — The Edge of Language

Ludwig Wittgenstein believed that language had a boundary, and that most of human suffering came from not knowing where it was.

In his early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he argued that language can only meaningfully describe facts about the world, the kind of things you could, in principle, point to. Everything else, like ethics, beauty, love, God, the feeling of being alive, exists beyond what words can legitimately reach. We try to speak about these things anyway, and when we do, we produce not truth but noise. Elaborate, sophisticated, sometimes beautiful noise, but noise nonetheless.

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So what do you do with the things that matter most, the things language cannot hold? You fall silent. Not because you have nothing to say, but because silence is the only honest response. His final line in the Tractatus — “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” — is not a defeat. It’s a kind of reverence. An acknowledgment that some things are too real for words.

There is something quietly radical in that. We live in a culture that rewards articulation, that mistakes eloquence for understanding. Wittgenstein is saying: the wisest thing you can do, sometimes, is stop talking.

II. Heidegger — Coming Home to Yourself

Martin Heidegger thought most of us were lost, and that we didn’t even know it. He had a term for the condition: das Man, which translates roughly as “the they.” It describes the anonymous social world we all inhabit -the unspoken rules, the inherited opinions, the endless stream of conversation that tells us what to think, what to want, how to feel. We don’t choose these things. We absorb them. And over time, we mistake them for ourselves.

Noise, for Heidegger, is how das Man keeps its grip. As long as we’re talking, scrolling, filling every gap with sound and opinion, we never have to ask the harder question: who am I when no one is watching? What do I actually think, stripped of everything I’ve been told to think?

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Silence is how you find out. In stillness, the accumulated chatter falls away, and something more essential surfaces — what Heidegger called Being, the raw fact of your own existence, which is always there but almost always buried. Silence doesn’t create this. It just clears the ground so you can finally see it.

He also wrote about Gelassenheit — a German word meaning something like “release” or “letting go.” It’s a mode of being in which you stop grasping, stop forcing, stop filling every moment with intention and noise, and simply allow things to be what they are. It’s as close as Heidegger gets to peace.

III. Zen Buddhism — Silence as the Teaching

There is a story in Zen about the Buddha sitting before a large crowd, ready to give a sermon. Everyone waited. Instead of speaking, he held up a single flower.

The crowd was confused. Only one monk, Mahakasyapa, smiled. And in that smile, the Buddha recognized that something had been transmitted. No information. Not doctrine. Something that could not be said, only seen. Only felt. The flower was the teaching. The silence in the classroom was around it.

Zen has always been suspicious of language. Words, it argues, are maps, and maps are not the territory. You can describe water perfectly and still be thirsty. You can read everything ever written about enlightenment and still be completely in the dark. At some point, language has to give way to direct experience, and direct experience lives in silence.

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This is why Zen koans those famously unanswerable riddles, like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” — are not meant to be solved intellectually. They are meant to exhaust the thinking mind, to push it to its limit until it finally goes quiet. The silence after the struggle is not failure. It’s an arrival.

In the Zen tradition, silence is not the absence of something. It’s a fullness. A presence. The monks who sit for hours in zazen meditation are not waiting for something to happen. They are learning, slowly and with great difficulty, that nothing needs to.

IV. John Cage — Silence Doesn’t Exist

In 1951, the composer John Cage walked into an anechoic chamber at Harvard University: a room so heavily soundproofed that it’s, by every practical measure, silent. He sat down and listened.

He heard two sounds. One high, one low. When he told the engineer, the engineer explained: the high sound was his nervous system. The low sound was his blood circulating.

Cage walked out of that room a changed man. Silence, he concluded, was impossible. What we call silence is never actually empty; it’s simply the moment we stop generating noise and start hearing everything else. The world is always speaking. We’re usually just too loud to notice.

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This led him to one of the most provocative ideas in the history of music: that all sound is music, and that the composer’s job is not to fill silence but to frame it. His most famous piece, 4’33”, consists of a performer sitting at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds without playing a single note. The music is whatever the audience hears in that time — shuffling feet, a cough, wind against the windows, the hum of their own discomfort.

What Cage was really saying is that attention transforms everything. Silence is not a void. It’s an invitation to listen differently. And once you accept that invitation, you realize you have never actually been alone with nothing. You have just been ignoring most of what was there.

V. What Silence Is Trying to Tell Us

Four thinkers, four traditions, four different ways of arriving at the same uneasy conclusion: that silence is nothing. That is, in fact, where everything important lives.

Wittgenstein found its boundary- the place where language runs out and honesty requires us to stop speaking. Heidegger found its depth , the layer of self that exists beneath the noise of a life lived for others. The Zen masters found its fullness, the direct experience of being alive that no word can carry and no concept can contain. Cage found its impossibility — the revelation that what we call silence is really just the world, unfiltered, asking for our attention.

They aren’t saying the same thing, but they’re pointing in the same direction.

We treat silence as a problem to be solved. A gap to be filled. An awkwardness to be smoothed over with words, music, opinion, distraction. We have built an entire civilization around the project of never having to sit with ourselves for too long. And it is working. We’re very rarely silent. We are also, by almost every measure, very rarely at peace, and maybe that isn’t a coincidence.

This is not an argument for monasteries or meditation retreats or throwing your phone into the sea, though none of those are bad ideas. It is something simpler. An invitation to notice what happens when you stop filling the space. When you let a conversation end without rushing to restart it, when you sit with a feeling rather than immediately narrate it. When you allow a question to remain a question, rather than reaching for the nearest available answer.

Wittgenstein was right that some things cannot be spoken. But he might have added: some things can only be heard in the quiet. Not conclusions. Not answers. But the low hum of something true, running beneath everything, waiting for you to stop talking long enough to notice it.

We’re afraid of silence because silence asks something of us. It asks us to be present without distraction, honest without performance, still without purpose. That is harder than it sounds. It might also be the most important thing we ever learn to do.

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So stop. Just for a moment.

Listen.

as my fingers flick over the keys.

a magic wand to confront without confrontation.

doubts hewn in mind, steeped in the past,

my eyes yearn for closure,

yet my heart stills in aversion

hovering over send

means seeing the shadows of your face

and a kaleidoscope of your ashen stare-

an intimacy I don’t want to acknowledge

so I let the cursor blink

and call it closure.

as i let myself simmer in drafts left unsent.

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In the 1960s, the origins of such a stark fashion sense were steeped in both suppression and liberation.

The Women’s Liberation Movement was a feminist movement that aimed to end pervasive sexism and patriarchy. Strangled by inequality and stuck in silence, the Women’s Liberation Movement espoused for reproductive rights, childcare, and equal pay, a deep-seated issue in our society.

During and after the movement, designers such as Mary Quant began to introduce miniskirts, which symbolized bodily autonomy and represented a breaking of societal restrictions. Androgyny became trendy as women began to apply less makeup and adopted pixie cuts to break the convention of the 1950s. Women stepped into clothing that blurred the line between men and women as they began wearing suits and pants, symbolizing their presence in a masculine world. For the first time ever, fashion wasn’t about looking good-it was about choosing to exist. Once reserved for men—became part of everyday fashion, signaling not just a stylistic shift, but a deeper claim to space in a world that had long excluded them.

Le Smoking Suit, designed by Yves Saint Laurent in response to gender -bending fashion

Beyond designers and movements, the influence of actresses and public figures was equally powerful in shaping fashion in the 1960s. Style wasn’t just created on runways and movements; it was lived out on screen, in interviews, and in everyday appearances. Audrey Hepburn’s “capsule wardrobe,” featuring timeless pieces with clean lines and understated silhouettes, showcased quality over sporadic trends, redefining elegance as effortless rather than excessive. In contrast, Brigitte Bardot embraced a softer, undone femininity, with loose hair, natural makeup, and an unstructured beauty not tainted by societal views. Arguably one of the most influential figures was Twiggy, whose androgynous look, pixie cut, and wide-eyed minimalism disrupted conventional standards altogether. By displaying fashion in such color and boldness, these women didn’t just wear the decade’s trends, but gave them meaning. Their style carried the weight of a generation pushing against limitation and inequality, reflecting not just aesthetic change, but the resilience and transformation behind it.

From left to right: Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot, Twiggy

In the entirety of my life on this planet, I have very few regrets. They say that not many things are within your control, so do things right when you can. They also say that when you’re too sure of something, you’ll almost certainly be wrong. I think that with your passing, we were all guilty of that. We were so sure we had more time, more sparkling summers, and cozy days. We didn’t realize that time had the knife and you had the wound, yet no one had the bandage to stop time from taking you. All I can say is I’m sorry.

We were ripe into summer when you told us you’d visit us from India. It had been too long. My mind danced in forests and on beaches, where we would take you to cycle with the wind dancing alongside, and have late-night barbecues and crossword puzzles. I wasn’t robbed of my dreams; I was robbed of a life that was right within the grasp of my fingertips.

We never saw you. You flew back to India. On the same soil, yet separated by stubborn refusals and a pungent fear of what would happen next.

When you went back, I remember Mama told me. They found a mass in his brain. She assured me everything would be okay, but how could I believe her when her own face was creased with worry, her eyes filled with fear? I knew you were gone, I would never trace your face with my hands, never see your smiling eyes, and I would never hold your hand again. Yet I chose to live a lie, not for myself, but for the sake of my mother’s sanity.

Days turned into weeks, morphing into months. Our hope faded, and so did you. Full-length conversations turned into a bucket of silence, one which we tried to fill with small talk. Yet the walls speak-they knew that the train would stop. They knew that you would have to get off, and the train wouldn’t let us stop you.

Till this day, memories wash over me. I remember your voice, silky and rich, as if no one in the world could stop you. I remember your curiosity, a thirst which could never be fulfilled. Most of all, I remember the values you embodied-to treat men and women as equals, to always remember your roots, and to always do the right thing. You live in the corridors of my heart, and you’ll stay there forever, no matter where the universe takes you.

Love,

Vedanshi

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They cooked me-

heart boiling,

every pulse is a storm,

a breath fogs into plea

you’ll be fine

sun will heal you within.

but it didn’t-

blood rushed out of me, a crimson river red as regret.

My cries calloused into unturned memories.

I played my pain away,

bones worn like old sweaters, the skin of my fingers wrinkled,

playing, playing,

till my heart burst,

a bursting tomato.

In another world,

wounds learn sunlight

but here,

scorched hands don’t grow gardens,

only smoke

from the places hope used to grow

My New Year’s Resolutions are a testament of how we can tread more softly toward our goal, nourishing our minds with fervor, not fetter.

#1: Let myself exist

We battle the world with a shield of camaraderie and a suit of resilience, worn long through judgmental gazes and skittered remarks. It melts into us, and we become a mold, left to be shaped in the pudgy hands of those who critique us. We carry the weight of their expectations, our shoulders scarred, like a mule’s under a yoke. To not be impetuous in our actions and inured to society’s demands is an art that few know how to conduct. This year, I want to live within my skin, whether it feels like silk or a snare, and to love what lies within. I want to breathe softly in my cherished memories, not those of others.

#2: Stop romanticizing pain

Maybe I’m the only people pleaser, but I admire letting the pain in me fester until I become rotten, untouchable. It’s almost like if someone were to touch my skin, the pain would creep in vines around their skin, and we’d turn into two bodies, a sanctuary for pain, a snare for our consciousness. This year, I want to walk among gardens filled with roses, not chains. I want to breathe air without guilt pressing its thumb against my lungs, drink fresh grape juice, and not think about the vultures circling ahead.

#3: Read to gain perspective, not knowledge

Words give us knowledge. Our eyes feast as the letters gather softly to dance, opening doorways to other worlds. Yet they open our eyes a little wider towards the stories that others hold. We borrow their lives, mourn in their grief, trace the quiet architecture of their struggles in our heads as our fingers dampen the page, flipping fast, like the crisp clicks of a typewriter. In doing so, we gather the strength to become someone else’s armor- to offer a hand to those still afraid to speak.

No one told me it would hurt so much, that it would drain my soul of its sacrosanct love like a dead power bank, blackening it with memories of saucers filled to the brim with cold coffee and the touch of your hand —cold, pulsing with revulsion. All of your love was imbrued in your mind, tortured and bruised until nothing was left. It prickles my mind every day, the atrophy of our love. But now I know, even the prettiest of roses come with thorns.

model : Version 15.10

released: March 2010

modes/systems: daydreamer, writer, reader

Specifications:

functions best with books, decaf tea, and cozy blankets

best at overthinking, crying over fictional characters, and stalking authors on Instagram

Common bugs include multitasking to the brink of collapse, saying “yes” instead of no, and profusely apologizing for things beyond my control

Faults and Errors:

Overheating is often caused by too many social interactions, not being listened to, and having an appalling breakfast

battery percentage may drastically fall due to lack of sleep, school, and annoying people

known for randomly crashing out; the only solution is to offer food and retail therapy

Maintenance Requirements

Can only be recharged with a good book, no social interactions, and comfy pajamas

Do not attempt to fix mood swings with logic and facts - requires slow music and 90s rom-coms.

When the system lags, offer a venting session, preferably with objects that could be thrown around

Warnings

-Will randomly lash out over petty things if pushed around and mistreated

-Will cry over fictional characters and yap about it 24/7, nonstop: one can shut me up, not even myself

-will buy every single book on this planet without thinking twice

Closing Note

-This model is constantly changing but will run best on summer memories, fried food, and 3 hour yap sessions