Short essays about the small daily friction— the stuff that isn't dramatic enough to make a story but isn't quiet enough to forget. Read in order, or pick a tag and tumble down.
It's the dad in the noodle commercial. It's never the friend's actual divorce. A theory about distance, another about shame, and an apology that arrived eight weeks too late.
There are forty-one unanswered texts in my phone right now. I am not avoiding them. I am also not not avoiding them. This is the philosophy of maybe, applied to friendship.
The 8:47 auto-rickshaw didn't really say no, but it didn't say yes either, and somewhere inside that ambiguity I had to live for the next eleven minutes.
My phone has been telling me my own name is wrong for three years. I keep correcting it. It keeps correcting me back. Somewhere in here is a parable.
There is a version of me, in meetings, who knows what he is doing. He sits very still. He uses words like "directionally." I do not know him. I keep him alive for the sake of the household.
To a stranger on the metro. To a colleague who took credit. To my father in 2014. To my father in 2023. To the boy at the chai stall who knows my order but not my name.
A small, quiet practice: every time I notice I've been scrolling for more than ten minutes, I put my hand on my own chest. Not as a metaphor. As a hand. It works about half the time.
She does not know. She will not know. I will not be the one to tell her. I have been sitting with what it means to laugh at someone you also love.
I am very good at winning fights that have not happened. I am average at the ones that have. There is no theory here. It is just embarrassing.
In 2019 I told him his haircut was bad. It was not bad. I was sad about something else and I had to put it somewhere. He has not asked for an apology. I have not given one.
It's not the age. It's the obligation. To want a thing. To name the thing. To receive the thing and feel the correct amount about it, on cue, in front of the people who got it for you.
He has known me for nine years. He knows my mother. He knows when I am sick. I do not know his name. I have been too embarrassed to ask, for, now, nine years.