Instructions on how to play - Cross off all those that apply. The first player to complete a required pattern, typically a full row, column, or diagonal, must shout “Bingo!” You will win once your card is verified.

1. Clutched a one-way boarding pass to a foreign country as if it’s a winning lottery ticket, then craved the familiar comfort of steam wafting from the morning coffee in your childhood bedroom every single morning.

2. Wanted to call him, nearly died from the inner war waged. Played a thumb fight over the contact name with yourself, but, having learnt your lesson, refrained.

3. Told your journal things you couldn’t tell your mother.

4. Each morning, stared at your reflection in the mirror at 5 am, not even fully awake, and tried to swallow the ugly question, the perennial feminine plague of asking am I beautiful and hearing yourself say no. Maybe if you got a rhinoplasty…

5. Forgotten to eat dinner for a fortnight, and breakfast too, and lived on a steady IV of hazelnut iced americanos and the eternal promise to do better the following week.

6. Played eye tag with a handsome stranger on bus number 152 across the width of the Han River, then pressed the STOP button at Nodeul Park Station when he cautiously approached, announcing to the driver, but especially to him, that you preferred to leave it at non-verbal tension. Thought about the way sunlight danced on the back of his neck for the rest of the day, blinking fiercely at the memory to swat it away.

7. Made a to-do list and then laid down in bed. Lying down was not on the list.

8. Shopped on Chinese fast fashion apps and tried to offset the environmental damage with swiping your card at unmanned vintage stores, never once considering that not buying new clothes to fill the void is an option.

9. Only yearned for a boyfriend when it was time to take the trash out.

10. Listened to Mondays by Ethel Cain 337 times this week alone.

11. Preferred the labels selfish, bitch, and spinster to doormat, wife and mother.

12. Based your belief systems on astrology and antibiotics. Nothing more, nothing less.

13. Gotten the potent, sinking feeling that your inherent reticence is read as rudeness, but it’s too late to rewire the cables now.

14. Watched the number on the scale drop and felt guilty and proud. Seen the hair lost in the shower and felt sick and scared.

15. Still haven’t managed to quit the nicotine, or the animalistic desire to be understood. Can’t decide which is the bigger vice.

16. Hated to be witnessed trying. Craved automatic, seamless perfection in every attempt at existence, whether it’s ordering food in a foreign language or walking down the street without tripping over your own feet.

17. As an introvert, gotten exhausted from playing Superman every time you leave your house. Now you stay in, reading fiction. The cape looks better hanging in your closet, anyway.

18. Found relief in knowing that if all this doesn’t work out, you could always go work on a matcha farm in Japan in exchange for housing and meals. Or you could die early.

19. Spent a disproportionate amount of time hoping Taylor Swift would just write a fucking sad album again, before hitting shuffle on The Tortured Poets Department. A good muse makes for a bad lover, and a good lover makes for a bad muse. It’s the oldest story in the book.

20. Perceived your Instagram through the eyes of the man you love. Perceived your Instagram through the eyes of the best friend you no longer speak to. Perceived your Instagram through the eyes of your newest follower. Deleted the app off your phone.

21. Gotten bangs for the third time in a decade just to feel something.

22. Wondered if your mother will ever forgive you for not getting married. Done nothing to improve your odds.

23. Seriously considered hiring an Etsy witch. Desperate times…

24. Wondered if he ever looks up at the moon and feels like howling like a dog at God. Wondered if he even believes in God. Wondered how many coffees he drinks in a day, how he looks dreaming, when the last time he cried was, whether his shoulders hurt from the responsibility of adulthood, if he still believes in the goodness of other human beings or if his cynicism has won. Never texted first. Never asked.

25. Wondered if the nauseous pit in your stomach from October 2024 will ever go away.

26. Said oh, okay. Said it’s all good. Said oh my god, chill. Said it doesn’t matter.

27. Asked Claude how to quantify grief. Is there a formula I could write in Excel?

28. Read the instructions on how to use the fire extinguisher in the hallway word for word every time you wait for the elevator, which is a metaphor for how you live your life.

29. Felt nothing for a year. Felt everything on a Tuesday afternoon in the neighborhood cafe.

30. Seesawed between your desire to be free and your desire to be loved as you do the dishes.

Bingo.

It was ages ago, but I still remember my first day at kindergarten, aged three. Perhaps because my mother laughs softly when she tells the story ever so often, reminding me that I clung to her knees and wailed until she peeled me off like a piece of lint and deposited me inside the classroom, where I suddenly went quiet, but only because the other kids were staring.

Since then, I’ve enrolled in one high school and three colleges, one of which was in New York, so the moment my eyes opened I soothed the bubbling anxiety in my heart for my first day as a student at Seoul National University. You’ve done this before. This time, however, my Mom wasn’t there to drop me off, so I rode the roller coaster of terror alone through my morning shower.

Getting dressed was easy. Doing my make-up was easy. Making coffee and scarfing down a banana was easy. But then, it slowly dawned on me that I’d need to put money on my transport card if I wanted to take the bus. I’d never done either of those things in this country before, postponing them till the last minute when they became a need, and trusting that some undisclosed reserve of courage would appear to propel me into the fluency required to accomplish tasks that seemed simple in theory but impossible if you had a toddler’s level of proficiency in Korean.

The cashier in the neighborhood convenience store eyed me suspiciously as soon as I walked in and offered him 50,000 won in cash and my themed custom transport card, which has pictures of crying hamsters and reads, in Korean, ‘The world isn’t easy, but it’s okay. I’m not easily fooled either.’ An apt metaphor for this moment. Clasping my hands, I tried to speak with my eyes, hoping he’d understand the universal language of desperation. He did, and asked how much of the money I wanted to load on the card, to which I pressed a red nail into the crisp bill. “Geu-geo-da.” All of it.

A few impatient clicks later, he nodded profusely at me, which is the Korean way of saying, the job is done, now get out of my face. I wasn’t entirely convinced, and prayed all the way to the bus stop that the money was actually on the card and hadn’t vanished into his imagination. If I got on the bus, and my card didn’t work, all the passengers would think, look at this idiot. How on earth did she get into the country’s best university? She can’t even pay for her fucking bus ride. I’d have to climb off shrouded in a red hot veil of shame.

The truth is that the first time you do anything, it’s always scary. Your brain wants to pick the path of least resistance, and it tries to protect you by catastrophizing, urging you to bypass the obstacle in its path. Unfortunately, sometimes, the only way out is through.

At the time of writing this, it’s the third week of class and I’ve taken multiple buses, to multiple neighborhoods, made transfers in the dead of night, and grown to love the efficient air conditioned crawl through the city. I look forward to the ride, plugging in my earphones and people watching from a majestic blue window seat, Naver maps murmuring in the background. It only costs 1,500 won ($1~) to get anywhere in the city, and that’s an incredible deal.

But the first time the bright green bus pulled up in front of me, I bit my lip and felt my heart somersault in fear. For a split second, I observed other passengers and tried to embody their nonchalance as I tapped my card - and the meter pinged, whew! - before turning in the direction of the seats. None were empty. It was 8 am and just like me, everyone and their mother was headed to university. Four stops of acrobatic balancing later, I climbed off and inhaled oxygen for the first time.

There it was, what is famously referred to as Sha gate. A giant triangle, representing the first consonants of the university’s name, shaped like a key. Since the school’s motto is veritas lux mea, or truth is my light, the key is a symbol of unlocking the gateway to knowledge. Poetic, right?

This silver structure towers over you on a picturesque, tree lined, sun drenched street that would make for the perfect opening scene of a movie. It feels important and cinematic to cross it each morning, and often I’ve shoved my hand into my pocket, afraid it’s going to raise itself in salute.

Sometimes I’ll go on a long walk in the neighborhood at night, when the daytime scenery that’s familiar suddenly looks entirely different in dark mode. I lose my bearings often. But then I see Sha gate in the distance, lit up against indigo sky, and feel immediately comforted. If Namsan Tower is Seoul’s beacon, then Sha Gate is mine.

On campus, each college has its own buildings, with cafes, football fields, tennis courts, lawns, and libraries strewn conveniently in between. The language center, which I am a student of, resides next to the business school, sports center, and the university’s very own art museum. The only catch is that everything is perched on hills, so either you’re panting your way up a steep slope or gravity is doing your knees a favor and sending you hurtling down without effort.

When I made it up the stairway that leads into the language school, the two buildings opened into a massive central courtyard, and Rory Gilmore’s nerdy, gritty spirit woke from hibernation in my head. In a month from now, I decided, I’d watch the leaves change on campus, and I’d be acing my classes. The next time I filled my transport card, I’d have the entire conversation in Korean with the cashier. And the bus system would be my bitch.

In that first week, class was new, but so was everything else -

Going to Daiso to buy household items and feeling my face light up like a 100 watt bulb when the cashier asked, “Do you speak English?” YES, AND THANK YOU, AND I THINK I MIGHT LOVE YOU, SIR.

Learning that there are five types of recycling Korea demands of its residents - transparent plastic bottles, colored plastic bottles, plastic wrapping, metal cans, and paper. Food waste goes in designated yellow plastic bags but must not contain liquids, so you have to drain everything into your sink first. Whatever’s left over belongs in the general waste category. Get it wrong, and there’s a monetary fine plus public shaming - you might go to drop off your trash and find your photo plastered near the bins, courtesy of the 24x7 video surveillance.

It takes some getting used to, that nagging feeling of CCTV everywhere, a third eye always watching you, but maybe that’s why the city feels incredibly safe to walk through at any time of day or night. In Seoul, I’ve never had to have my head on a swivel the way I did in New York, where violence was to be expected and prepared for. If the price to pay for the carefree feeling I get here as a woman is being watched as I dispose my rubbish in six labelled bins, then just tell me where to swipe my credit card and take a picture of me in my pajamas. I’ll pose.

Ordering off Coupang, Korea’s speedy answer to Amazon, which I have to navigate by putting every screenshot through Google translate when the windows change on my app. This is a tough nut to crack, because I need what is called an Alien Registration Card (ARC) to order anything online. And it takes a month to get one, but the thought of buying and lugging household items through the mountainous city on my back makes me want to projectile vomit. Instead, I talk to everyone about Coupang like an obsessive maniac, discovering that if you do your shopping on your laptop, then check out from your phone, an ARC isn’t needed. When my first order goes through, I squeal in pure elation.

Engaging with my classmates, who are from Turkey, Spain, France, Mongolia, China and Cambodia. We break the ice through the telling revelations of our rising signs and MBTI’s, but the small talk makes my brain hurt (can you tell I’m an INFJ?). Engaging with the three teachers, who are all patient ladies with gentle spirits, coaxing us through the Korean alphabet, Hangeul, like bottle feeding newborns. When we invent and misspell words, my favorite teacher says, “Nice try!” She explains that this is her style, to extend kindness to someone who’s trying, instead of immediately defaulting to pointing out a mistake. Spending time under her watchful gaze makes the four hours pass by without a single glance at the clock, that’s just how incredible she is at her job.

My first time ordering at the cafeteria kiosks and learning how the system works, which items have giant portions (I nearly die from trying to finish my donkatsu), and which counter to return your empty plate at.

I live in a single person, university assigned dorm room atop a hill, and the climb up the steep slope wrings my lungs like wet laundry. At least the water pressure in my bathroom is good, putting my aching muscles at ease each night. In the face of constant challenge, my brain latches onto these simple, familiar consolations.

It’s all Sisyphean. A big part of me aches to let go of the boulder, watch it roll down the hill and away, to return to the familiar comforts of my bedroom in India, where I didn’t need to feed myself, figure out how the washing machine works, or jailbreak each niche app without a Korean phone number. A lot of it, I get embarrassingly wrong and then reroute or loophole my way to a solution. My first week is spent unpacking, organizing, and setting up routines that my neurodivergent brain is being ripped to shreds without, the unfamiliar novelty of every task grating against my spirit. In the journal I write religiously each morning, you’ll find a singular thread running through every entry - I want to go home.

But three weeks later, I’m still here. And I haven’t missed a single day of class, have turned in all my homework, and just scored 100% on last week’s quiz.

Slowly but surely, I cross out each scary first. This euphoria of accomplishment, small as it seems, is deeply satisfying, and I’ll chase it for a long time. There are moments of weakness, alienation, and loneliness strewn through the story I’m telling you, but there is also joy, a newfound sense of independence and a tin of freshly opened confidence.

When Friday rolls around, and my classmates propose a celebration for surviving our first week by feasting on Korean barbecue and singing some karaoke (noraebang), I say an exhausted but excited yes.

If you enjoyed this essay, you can read the previous installments here and here. If you’re wondering what the hell I’m doing in Seoul, you can read the origin story of this adventure here. As always, thank you for reading!

Seoul Station is abuzz with passengers, rolling suitcases across platforms, glancing periodically up at the screens to find their train numbers and departure times. Girls run into the open embraces of men clad in military uniform , tourists buy last minute overpriced souvenirs, and convenience stores turn a profit from selling gimpab and americanos to those who are prioritizing fueling for their journeys ahead.

From this train station, the possibilities are endless - you could go anywhere in the country up to the 38th parallel, or to the southern seaside city of Busan (부산), which I proudly read off the signage and locate my train to on Platform 19. In Korea, everyone seems to move in an orderly fashion, lining up for escalators, always standing to the right if stationary, and never pushing against you. Koreans like their space, and so do I. The only caveat is weekday rush hour in the local subway systems, but we’ll get to that horror film later.

Like India, the country is a peninsula, surrounded by ocean on three sides - the Yellow Sea to the west, the East China Sea to the south and the East Sea to the east. On world maps, the East Sea is usually labelled the Sea of Japan. (I’d strongly recommend you don’t call it that when speaking to a Korean, since Japanese imperialism ravaged the country’s resources in the 1900’s). However, unlike India, where a train ride from the northern Himalayas to southern Kanyakumari would take you four scenic days and godlike patience, the train ride from Seoul to Busan requires only three hours. Korea is a geographically small country, with fast, clean and affordable public transit.

I spend the train ride reading more of Bourdain’s book, perusing the small Hangeul font in the train’s magazine, and watching hundreds of mountains pass in green blurs through the window. A taxi takes me from Busan station to Hotel Commodore, which is famously the filming location for the drama, Crash Landing On You. It was my gateway drug into Korean media, the first show I ever watched that sucked me into this fascinating world of storytelling and language.

It hits me in the car, with the radio playing, how far I’ve come. Not just in kilometers, but in risk taking ability. It’s a five year circle, from watching Hyun Bin play a soldier in love on the screen of my iPad in the pandemic, to walking into the place where the cameras must’ve once been. The hotel is dimly lit, oozing with atmospheric history, and a grand chandelier in the circular lobby. The outer facade represents late-1970’s commercial Korean architecture, repeating rows of narrow windows framed by concrete pilasters in green, red and brown. In the show, it served as the hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea.

From my room, I watch the sun set over hundreds of green rooftops and the lights of Gwangan Bridge, this city’s beacon, turn on. My eyes flutter with exhaustion and I fall in slow motion into the pillows, succumbing to sleep.

The next morning I saunter into the lobby and am met by a chirpy woman with a short bob who looks like she means business. “Are you Neha?” she asks, springing off her chair as soon as our eyes meet. I nod and we shake hands, and she doesn’t let go of my palm, tucking it under her forearm instead. “I’m Fiona,” she tells me, smiling in a way that would put even a spooked deer at ease, “Your guide for the day.”

We walk - now hand in hand - out to the idling car. The driver is a woman, too. RELIEF! I say hello in Korean, immediately energized by our all female trio. She takes her hands off the wheel to wave with both, beams in greeting, and without missing a beat, says, “Hello. I am Taylor Swift.” I can’t help but laugh. “What?”

“Taylor Swift,” she says again, in crisp English, “You can call me Taylor.”

These are the western names they’ve chosen to make it easy for tourists, and it saddens me a little to think of them accommodating their identities for English speakers, even though I’m the outsider on their turf. When I inquire about their Korean names, however, they get shy and awkward, so I let it go, and instead play along with Fiona’s inquiry about why my skin is clear and glowing. “I don’t have a boyfriend,” I say flatly.

This joke earns open laughter, and whatever ice existed between us is now thawed. For the rest of the day, we will never have an awkward moment again, jumping from dating to Indian food to our favourite Korean actors, who Fiona refers to exclusively as “my first/second/third” husband as soon as I bring up a name.

Our first stop is Haedong Yonggungsa Temple, a Buddhist place of worship built into cliffs overlooking the ocean. The entrance has a long line of life sized rock sculptures, representing the twelve animal zodiac signs. Fiona proactively pulls up Chat GPT and reads me the traits of the rat sign, which represents my year of birth, 1996. Independent, stubborn, self critical and strict - it all checks out.

Along the picturesque hiking path that leads to the temple, we come across various versions of Buddha statues. There’s one whose belly you must rub if you want to get pregnant, specifically with a son. Another is a grantor of good results in the country’s most challenging exam, the CSAT, which determines which college you get into. Another is meant to attract massive amounts of wealth. I rub this one profusely.

As we descend, I can hear the sound of waves crashing into rock like atmospheric background music. There’s real zen in this place, and when Fiona asks if I’d like to attend a small service led by monks, I kick off my shoes and secure a mat at the back of the room, despite my mostly atheist beliefs. If God is listening, what should I pray for, confess to, beg forgiveness for? Hands clasped, I ask for bravery for myself and the good health of everyone I love.

Then we make our way to Ahopsan, a forest of sky high bamboo trees growing in close proximity, sitting on nine peaks (ahop= nine, san= mountain). I haven’t watched it, but this is most famously the filming location for the Korean drama, The King : The Eternal Monarch. Taylor explains the plot on the way, taking breaks between her sentences only to hurl laden expletives in regional dialect, or satoori, at slow moving middle aged men who won’t let her merge or cross the road at snail pace, their pot bellies hanging out and their hands clasped behind their back. I love the way she pronounces ahjussi, and find myself snickering along to her passionate self-dialogue.

Our conversation never stops, curiosity a constant and reciprocated effort. Fiona has a six year old daughter, who I spot smiling brightly at the camera on her phone’s lock screen. I already know she’s a wonderful mother, and that her gritty spirit will embed itself into her daughter’s personality.

For an afternoon pick me up, we drive to Gallery Yedong, which is home to a gushing fountain at the entrance of a hanok cafe. I order a hazelnut cappuccino and banana pastry, and feel my blood cells dance in joy at the sugar rush. Koreans always top their coffee with a generous heap of cinnamon, and don’t shy away from using real sugar in almost every dish. I find Fiona and Taylor waiting for me at one of the picnic tables, and they insist that I share in their snack of homemade tuna gimbap. I get a sudden urge to live in Busan forever, because the people seem kinder than anywhere else I’ve been.

In the evening, we stroll through the narrow lanes of Gukje Market, where passionate vendors sell food, clothes, souvenirs and homeware. And it’s all extremely affordable. In my broken Korean, I manage to order japchae (glass noodles) and the owner of the food stall pours a generous helping of gochujang into my bowl when I mumble, “I like spicy food,” and then gives me some sikhye to help with the fact that my tongue is on fire and my nostrils are exhaling fumes. The malty, gingery taste helps bring me from fiery hell back to earth.

She’s been running this stall for 50 years. It’s hard to believe she’s 70 years old, and points to a building at the far end of the market. “I bought that one,” she tells me, pride evident in her wrinkled but twinkling eyes. “If you work hard, you can do anything.” I bow as deeply as is possible, picturing her as a young woman, arriving early and cooking the same dishes every single day, feeding strangers, staying on her feet for long hours. There is no complaint or struggle in her voice, as if more than her livelihood, the work of running her business has become her identity. When I pay in cash and our hands brush, her skin feels soft and moisturized, but I don’t have the right language to ask what hand cream she uses each night, despite knowing she must be diligent with her routine.

The market, I find, is dominated by women-run small businesses, packed in close proximity. Inside a handmade souvenir shop, I float toward a light blue hand-fan with jasmines drawn on its edges, which the owner says she stitched herself. When I go to pay for it, she wraps it into a matching blue cover, and attaches a traditional Korean knot to its edge. “This is for good luck,” she says, and I only understand the word for luck, which is haeng-un.

Busan is a warm city, both in temperature and sentiment. A permanent, sandy wind blows through its wind tunnels permanently, so slick your hair back or prepare to suffer all day. It rains at the most inconvenient time, but rain is romantic if you’re a romantic like me. If you’re lucky, you live close to the beach, and get to witness the meeting of the blues from anywhere - tranquil sky kissing raging sea.

When I bid the city farewell early the next morning, clutching a coffee from 7Eleven and shaking my head at the cashier’s compliments about my eyes, I feel strangely attached to it despite the criminally short time I’ve been here. There’s a slowness to this city you won’t find in Seoul, where everyone looks permanently stressed and moves with a zombie like gait and never makes eye contact with you. If Seoul is glittering, distant Manhattan, then Busan is like good old Queens, where the bodega guy will be the first to tell you if your boyfriend came in with another girl.

And me? Gosh, I guess I’m Brooklyn, sandwiched between these two extreme temperaments, struggling to fit into a mould that isn’t yet shaped like me.

As my vacation draws to a reluctant close, and I fly across the Han in the direction of my dorm, the veil comes crashing down and I realize university starts at 8 am the next morning. I don’t own a blanket, haven’t bought groceries, and my hair is greasy. The impending existential crisis takes ahold of my cerebrum, and reality sets in like a bad dream. So much for avoiding responsibility, for choosing to live in a dream for a week.

A heavy and dark silence greets me when I push open the door to my dorm room, as if it’s been waiting for me to set my bags down before it sinks its teeth into my fragile sanity.

On the hour-long taxi drive from the airport to my hotel in Insa-dong, I finally feel the butterflies unfurl their wings in my stomach. A humid and summery monsoon is dying a slow death in the city, and the sky is a blanket of light grey, threatening to open up with rain any moment. My eyes are heavy with sleep, but my brain is alive as it takes in the tinted windows of clustered skyscrapers, the parallel bridges that connect Seoul’s buk (north) and nam (south) to each other, like a string of over thirty ribbons strung tightly to each side of the Han River. The river divides the country’s capital into two almost equal halves, and real estate prices vary based on how close you can live to a view of this majestic, glittering body of water.

It seemed like a smart idea to throw myself into this adventure by pretending I’m a tourist for a week, so I’ve planned an itinerary that will serve as a soft initiation into Korea. Maybe the city will go easy on me, and we’ll acclimate to each other quicker if I see a majority of the best sights it has to offer before I start classes next week. The first thing to do is, obviously, make a trip to the convenience store.

I dump my massive bags in the hotel room, clean and wake myself with a scalding shower, and set off in search of the iced coffee that’s famed online for being slurped by influencers standing outside one of the city’s hundreds of 7-Eleven’s. Banana milk, a packet of Cantata iced hazelnut americano, and a cup of ice are bought, mixed and enter my bloodstream. As promised, it’s fucking delicious, and I don’t think I’ve gone a morning since without picking it up in lieu of my morning beverage. Like a moth drawn to the glowing white light of a convenience store, I buy it at odd hours of the day, craving the familiar hit of oozing milky sweetness and bitter coffee.

In the evening, I stroll through an Olive Young branch at Dongdaemun Plaza, panicking only at the billing counter when I look down at my basket, where I’ve collected a small pharmacy’s worth of skincare. It’s too late to put half of it back, and somehow I’m convinced I need every single product. I blink away the guilt and swipe my credit card as the ethereal-looking glass-skinned cashier bags my items at the speed of light.

The night ends at Cheonggyecheon stream with tuna gimbap and some reading of Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential before lugging my shopping back to the hotel room. Anthony’s self-deprecating humor is medicinal, even though the dozens of couples with their bodies latched to each other like lock and key don’t make it easy to forget that I’m on foreign land, tongue-tied without expertise in the language, overstimulated and entirely alone. Jeez, I can hear Tony chide, shut up. You chose to come here. And the wiser part of me knows he’s right.

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There was a time I believed in 5-year plans and climbing the corporate ladder. In my twenties, I clawed and cried my way to the summit of the “perfect” life I was taught to want: higher education, an important, respectable job, a south-facing apartment in the fancy neighborhood of a big shiny city, and the eternal safety of a maxed-out retirement plan. Constantly postponing joy to a future that never arrives (but they conveniently skip over that on the Perfect Life brochure).

Sometimes it takes arriving at the peak and digging your flag into the summit to realize the dream you worked hard for is…no longer your dream. At least, that’s what happened to me. By age 28, I accomplished everything on my vision board and then thought – Damn, is this it? Every day for the next forty years? What if I want something else?

Call me a masochist, but the only natural response to the constant hum of dissatisfaction I started to feel in New York was to burn this ideal life to the ground. What I wanted out of forging a corner for myself in the toughest city in the world was unshakeable courage, which is the only thing I brought back with me when I left. That, and a gorgeous burgundy Sam Edelman coat with a fur collar. My intuition told me I’d need both those things again, in some new corner of the world.

The woman who shot out of the cannon at the end of my New York adventure was unrecognizable. That’s why acclimating to India again after 4 years of being away created friction. My hometown was and had always been a smaller mold, one in which I had to squeeze to fit. Still, my oldest friends, childhood bedroom, and sweet parents welcomed me back with open arms. Home was peaceful and comforting, and I cocooned myself into a much-needed time of hibernation. I slowed down after a decade of endless sprinting. My mind and body were fried and broken, and needed to heal before I played Sisyphus again, shoving a boulder of my own choosing uphill.

In summer this year, I developed the persistent itch to take a big risk.

Now that the five-year plan way of doing life had become obsolete, I wondered what I still believed in. Perhaps, in pivoting. If we were all going to end up dead, I wanted a life that looked like a beautiful tapestry of different chapters rather than a long, drawn-out loop of the same day on repeat. If you paused the loud opinions of societal expectations for a brief second and asked the little girl in me what she really wanted, she’d never craved a mortgage or marriage or mundanity, but instead, travel and adventure. A fresh perspective, an impossible challenge, a delicious story - these have always been my vices.

Like everyone else, I’d discovered Korean dramas in the pandemic, and they’d offered me joy, comfort and laughter for several years. I fell in love with the winding stories, imperfect characters, earnest dialogues, and atmospheric cinematography. My favorite form of escapism opened a magical doorway to this East Asian country I’d previously never given much thought to. Little did I know, this gateway drug would lead me to its shores in the future.

I watched so many dramas that my ears perked up upon hearing the language in my daily life. When I sat beside a group of girls in my favorite ramen restaurant in Midtown, my brain latched onto their words about someone’s troublesome boyfriend. A mother-daughter duo inside an art exhibit in Dubai marveled at the architecture while we waited in line, and I surprised myself when I understood them through unintentional eavesdropping.

One weekend, I sat down and learnt the 24 characters that make up the language, sounding them out until I could read the script. Being able to read words gave me the same feeling of childlike wonder and smug satisfaction that doing the New York Times crossword or solving a sudoku does. Once I started, I couldn’t stop, and being able to understand the words on my screen turned into my favorite game. Like a gurgling stream, the language rushed into my brain, and sometimes a Korean word would arrive on my tongue mid-conversation with non-Korean speakers.

My frontal lobe, which I’d spent years hammering into obedience and filling with Microsoft Excel shortcuts and hundreds of financial formulas, had always been naturally wired for words and language. I’d spent so long stubbornly denying it. I wanted to feel alive again, the way I had when I first arrived in New York.

In the last decade, Korea had taken over not only my Netflix home screen and skincare cabinet, but also the whole world. Curious about how a country that achieved independence in 1945 (around the same time as India) had climbed so quickly out of poverty and a history of occupation, transforming itself into a soft culture superpower, its delicious cuisine and beautiful boybands impossible to ignore, I began to deep dive into its history, geopolitics, and literature. The books were just as fascinating as the shows I loved, and Korean literature became my new hyperfixation. Female authors like Han Kang, Hwang Bo-Reum, Cho Nam-Joo, and Shin Kyung-Sook colored my days with their vividly written complex characters. But I was still reading English copies, and I wondered what subtext was lost in the act of translation.

Enthralled with its media, books and cuisine, for the first time, I allowed the question to creep up - Could I live in Korea?

Apparently, there were quite a few ways to do it, but the most obvious path was getting into a reputed program to study the language. My curiosity led me down internet rabbit holes, YouTube videos and Reddit threads.

Similar to the American Ivies, there were three top universities that offered this course. Locals abbreviate them to SKY - Seoul National University, Korea University and Yonsei University. As I scrolled through their websites, my heart leaped when I saw the campus of Seoul National University. Almost instantly, my dream took root.

With its grounds spread over a steep mountain named Gwanaksan on the southwest of Seoul, and a reputation for being notoriously hard to get into, this is Korea’s #1 university.

The admissions window opened in two weeks. I scrambled to gather all the documents that would prove my worthiness, wrote a killer statement of purpose, crossed my fingers and applied. If SNU would have me, I’d go. I wanted the best or nothing, and I wasn’t going to settle for anything else.

Four weeks later, I paced in dizzying circles through my bedroom until the time acceptances went out. Promptly at 1:28 PM, the email arrived -

I WAS IN!!!!

But anyone with an Indian passport knows that the time to rejoice only begins when you get your visa. And to get a visa, you have to grovel with the Consulate, tolerate the mind-numbing incompetence of travel agents, prove your financial worthiness with bulletproof bank statements, and negotiate like a motherfucker with the Universe. Even then, the decision depended entirely on some overworked foreign relations officer who held my mental sanity hostage for a fortnight.

My keenness to actually move expanded with every passing second, but I pressed down on it. Instead, I mentally braced for disappointment. In my journal from the three weeks of waiting are dramatic, hyperbolic, Plathesque sentences - “If I have a lifelong enemy, it’s the senseless purgatory involved in waiting.” “God, why would you dangle the fruit in my face if you didn’t want me to have it?” “Give me my passport back, and relieve me of my misery.”

7 days before I had to leave, the Consulate finally greenlit my path and gave me permission. That’s when I finally allowed myself to quietly soak in the warmth of relief, and called close friends and family with the good news. Since then, I’ve been scurrying to prepare to move countries with one week’s notice.

My flight leaves tomorrow, 1st September. It’s a one-way ticket.

I’ve signed up for 6 months at SNU, but who knows what this adventure holds? Despite being naturally wired as a cynical glass-half-empty woman, I’m consciously trying to practice gritted-teeth optimism.

None of this will be easy. In fact, seeking out struggle on purpose has emerged as a core value of my life. The more odds that are stacked against me, the harder I want to work to bend the world to my stubborn will.

I picture: tired eyes and late nights in the university library. Early morning bike rides with music blasting in headphones as I fly down the length of the Han River. Trying food I’ve never tasted, a crash course in the rocket science of chopsticks, absorbing the implicit nuances of cultural etiquette through observation. The repeated but rewarding embarrassment of trying to be understood in a foreign tongue. Meeting expats who took the risk, like I did, and speaking to locals who may find my pronunciation more comical than endearing. Watching the seasons change from autumn’s orange rust to winter’s pristine white to spring’s light pink.

At least there’s comfort in knowing I’ve arrived on foreign land once before and made a life from scratch in New York City. That former self I built now lives in my bones, cheering me on.

In Korean, there’s a word called seolleom (설렘) which means the fluttering excitement you feel before something wonderful happens. In English, the closest rhyme is pronounced solemn, which means serious and heavy. It’s only appropriate to say my mood has oscillated between the two sides of that bilingual pun all week. I’m excited but antsy. Optimistic but afraid. Smiling and sparkly-eyed, but also sad and hesitant.

This is our new, shared adventure, so I hope you’ll stick around for the stories, which I’ll be documenting on Inhale, Scream. I’m doing a little exploring before classes start in a week from when I land. I’d better go figure out how the hell I’m going to fit a large chunk of courage and my maximalist closet into that baggage limit. Wish me luck, or as they say in Korean, hwaiting (화이팅)!

My guilty pleasure right now is cracking the spine of a book I didn't know I was going to love, and it turns out so deliciously good, I sacrifice my nightly sleep to eat my way through it. Behind blinking eyelids, my pupils beg for rest, and it’s almost 6 am when I finish Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-Sook. The dull headache I’ll carry around all day is just the price I’ll have to pay. My parents still joke that I came out of the womb holding a library card. A nervous, skinny kid with an appetite for stories, and it’s only now that I see that they were the ones who built a large library into the living room and left the TV out. I still curl up in the same way on the couch, cradling a book against my forearms. I still leave pencils and bookmarks everywhere. I still fold down the corners on the good pages.

This is the month I discovered Ethel Cain’s music. Naturally, all my algorithms have bent to the will of my Google searches and all the girls on TikTok say that this is the kind of music that finds you in the throes of feeling. For a while, you excavate your emotional landscape to songs like Crush and Waco, Texas, and Sun Bleached Flies and then, when it’s served its purpose, you put it away. I don’t know what it says about me, but these songs have been promptly added to my regular playlists. Maybe I’m always at the mercy of my feelings, and I don’t mind that. It’s what makes the writing good. Most of the time, I’m a professional at containing the monsters in the enclosures of my body. They won’t lunge at you, unless you give me a reason.

Summer has always been my least favorite season, something to do with the way clothes stick to your back, armpits pooling with sweat, the harsh glare of sunlight that threatens to age my forehead (you’ll have to excuse my broken vanity, I’m a woman).

Despite the inconvenience they bring, I’m always waiting for the unruly July thunderstorms. Here they are now. The sky a blanket of cashmere grey, nature’s anger rolled into strikes of lightning, the brown noise of rain slapping into concrete. The blue curtains in my room bellow against strong winds as an invitation to get out of bed, so I throw a sweater over my head and step out into the balcony of my bedroom. Droplets of rain cling to my skin, and sometimes, they soil my neat handwriting in the journal I’m exactly halfway through. But aren’t the unreadable ink blots a memory, too?

One of these days, I’ll look into your beautiful face and laugh into my palm, a small table and a singular candle between us, knees bumping into one another’s under the surface like a petty crime no one wants to own up to. But we’ll recognize its nameless warmth. The metal in us that’s been spinning frustratingly, sans direction, will quietly align to its magnetic north. Like, oh. So this is why. Everything is obvious now.

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A/N - Many of you are here from my early Instagram days, when I used to write about my long term boyfriend, AJ. I never told you what really happened between us when we reconnected in 2023. This is that nearly decade long story, its rise and ultimate demise. I left all the details in because it’s my tale to tell and I also don’t give a fuck.

If there’s one essay worth subscribing for, I’d say it’s this one.

When a man you’ve only met online pulls up in his car outside the cafe you agreed to meet him at for a first date, throws open the passenger side door, and says, “Get in,” you’re supposed to hear your mother’s anxious voice in your head and refuse. Don’t take candy from strangers. Don’t talk to men. Come straight home after school.

But I’m nineteen and defiant, so I tune her out, smile as I slide in next to him, my heartbeat steadily speeding up with the danger and naivety of young love. “Where are we going?” I ask. “You’ll see,” he tells me, and merges confidently with moving traffic.

Like me, AJ is a writer. A few months older, enrolled in a computer engineering degree, unnervingly gorgeous in his photos. A mutual friend thought we’d get along, and I know within minutes that she was right.

Of all places, we pull up to the mall in my suburban hometown. A crowd of homeless children surround us, tugging at my pant legs and asking for loose change, which I don’t have. I’m trying to swerve past them, when I look up and see that he’s pulled out his wallet, and emptied it into every reaching hand. He smiles nervously when our eyes meet, then says, “I’m not trying to impress you.” I’m impressed anyway. Over time, I’ll learn he has a habit of rolling down the window at red lights, handing out chocolate and water bottles to kids everywhere. He does it without thinking.

Over the course of two years, we fall in true love, or as naively true as love can be at that age. He rides his roommate’s motorbike from across town to pick me up. We drink cheap beer and spill over in secrets. He writes me an email every single time we meet, filling an inbox with microscopic observations, music recommendations, reassurances after arguments. We name our children one night, even though we’re still children ourselves. He interrupts my cockiness by shutting me up with kisses. With everyone else I’m a touch-me-not plant, and with him, I bloom like bougainvillea in summer heat. He’s my best friend, and no one else in the world comes close.

We break up because he moves to a neighboring city for his MBA, and can’t balance both – setting his new glittering world up and being my boyfriend. He slowly moonwalks out of my life, until one day I burst with accumulated waiting, and say, “I deserve better. If you can’t give it to me, then leave.” I mean, fight for us. But he lays down his weaponry, as if he’s relieved I’ve finally figured it out. “I’ll come back for you when I’ve made something of myself,” he tells me, “Give me 5 years.”

But I’m not the kind of woman who waits, so I channel my momentous grief into accomplishment. In 2020, I move to New York for graduate school. In 2021, he’s dating someone else. His girlfriend hates me, and I’m smug in that knowing. In 2022, he calls to say, “Nothing feels like what we had.”

In February 2023, I wake to an email. “Can I call you? Something’s been on my mind for months, and I just need to talk to you.” It’s a frigid winter in New York, the kind that reminds you just how cold it can really get when you’re touch starved. Understanding starved. Familiarity starved. With my resolve weakened, I say yes.

Out comes a confession, in nervous but thoughtful sentences. Would I be willing…to try again?

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“Weren’t you bored?” my mother asks on the phone. She’s back from a week in Scotland, and filling me in on the details of her trip.

The entire week she was gone, it was pouring rain. So naturally, I’ve spent my free time curled in odd positions on the sofa for an hour each night, Apple pencil twirling in my fingers, a scalding peppermint tea perched within reach, eyes flying through the absolutely unbelievable stories documented in the Facebook exposé titled Careless People on my iPad.

No. Boredom didn’t occur to me. My books were excellent company.

This year I logged on to Goodreads bright and early on January 1 and set an ambitious goal - read one book per week, i.e. 52 books in 2026. We’re halfway through the year, so I owe you a check in.

At 27 books completed, I’m perfectly on track. Reading is easily the best part of my day. Over the years, I’ve come up with a list of guidelines to aid my habit.

HOW TO BECOME AN AVID READER :

These rules will help you stay consistent and ensure this hobby is enjoyable, not burdensome -

1. If You’re Not Loving A Book, You’re Not Obligated To Finish It

   Being a “good reader” doesn’t mean having to crawl your way through something that’s clearly not to your liking. I always give an author 50 pages to convince me to care, and then if I’m still not feeling the story or writing style, I ditch the book halfway without feeling any guilt. A book that captures your interest is much more conducive to keeping you consistent with the habit of reading than a book you’re struggling to get through.

2. You Have Free Will, So You Should Set Up A Reading Syllabus

   Each year, I choose a theme I’m going to hyper fixate on and try to consume as much of that genre/subject as I can. Now that I’m out of school, but still adamant about staying a lifelong learner, setting my own reading syllabus helps replicate that feeling of excitement I always got at the start of an academic year.

   In 2023, I read feminist literature and it changed the way I view the patriarchy forever. In 2024, I read a lot of business memoirs like Shoe Dog, the story of Nike and Glossy, the story of beauty brand Glossier (they make my favorite perfume on Earth). The theme for 2026 is Korean literature. I won’t punish myself for reading outside of the theme, but it’s nice to look back on a throughline that ties your knowledge of a subject together.

3. Balance The Palette : Easy fiction + Focused Non Fiction

   As someone who’s been reading for a long time, I usually read multiple books at once. It helps to balance some heavy nonfiction with some light fictional novels.

   Right now, I’m reading a book on the history of Korea by Michael Breen, and it requires my sharp attention because it’s quite academic and filled with facts I want to remember. I spend 30 minutes over morning coffee when my brain is fully awake and seeking stimulation to make my way through one chapter daily. At night, I need something light to help me fall asleep, so I picked up Hwang Bo-reum’s Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop, which is a novel with simple language about a woman in Seoul who quits her job and ends her marriage to fulfil her lifelong dream of opening a bookshop (goals).

4. Take Your Reading Everywhere With You

   45 minutes at the nail or hair salon? A long commute to work? The boarding gate at the airport? My book is going wherever I go, and you bet I’m pulling it out even if I have to wait 10 minutes while my phone stays purposely hidden away in my bag. 80% of my reading happens on my iPad, but luckily a physical book weighs close to nothing. I never warmed to audiobooks (and my subway hot take is that listening to a book isn’t considered reading, sue me) but if that works for you, then all you need is your phone and headphones. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

5. For Some Added Whimsy, Write Book Reports

   Nothing detailed. Just a one pager on what the book was about, but more importantly, what it made you feel. Any quotes you loved and highlighted. I set up that tradition this year, as a way of retaining knowledge and sharpening memory. I want to be able to revisit my reports and see why something affected me deeply. I usually write these in my journal, but I also have a highlight on Instagram where I post bite sized reviews.

6. Fuck The Status Quo, And Curate Your Own Taste

   It feels like everyone and their mother is reading John Steinback’s East of Eden right now. Maybe I’ll get to it someday, but there’s no point feeling FOMO for not having checked it off my list. Whether you like hot smut or Russian philosophy, we’re all readers of equal measure. Don’t let the booktokers convince you that your taste is inferior or unimportant. You don’t have to conform to the pressure of “essential” reading. You can stay open to recommendations, but curating your own unique literary taste is much more important than bending to the internet’s demands.

7. Tell Your Friends What You’re Reading! Ask Them What They Are!

   I’ve always wanted to read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but it felt like a pretty big undertaking. So I asked my best friend to read it with me. Last week we both bought different translations and we’ll wade through it together, discussing our thoughts as we go. Reading is primarily a solitary habit, but you can make it a social one. Join a book club (I like Library Science and Service95). Ask your friends what their favorite books are. These days when I meet someone new, I ask them if they read. If they say yes, I ask them about their favorite book. It breaks the ice much quicker than traipsing through weather or work, and it’s sweet to see people inevitably light up when they talk about why they love what they love.

Ultimately, being a reader is being alone but never lonely. The perfect books have somehow found me at the exact moments I most needed them. I find myself tearing up and giggling within the expanse of a single chapter so often. I tend to highlight like a madwoman.

It’s strange how 26 letters can be arranged in infinite ways, how they can be strung together by someone you’ll never meet, who lived at an entirely different time, and somehow you’re sitting there holding the exact vocabulary for a complicated feeling that was previously inarticulable.

You can’t convince me that’s not an underrated form of magic.

PS - Are you reading anything lately? If you are, please tell me about it in the comments!

If you’re looking for recommendations to get you out of a reading funk, you can find my reviews on Instagram and Goodreads.

I also curated a list of truly life changing books here.

It makes me sick to my stomach to announce that I have a crush. Have had a crush for months, and not in the classy, grown up, meet-cute way where you lock eyes at a house party and then go home and nonchalantly text your mutual friend, “Who was that guy in the black button down? He was cute,” and your friend texts you back his name and tells you he was also asking about you after you left.

No, there’s nothing classy about how I have a crush -

I turn into Gollum from Lord of The Rings. I turn into my 13 year old self before she was able to fill out her bra cups. I churn through the Taylor Swift country discography at disturbing hours of the night, when sleep won’t come. Teardrops On My Guitar is on loop as we speak, in fact. I leave my friends deeply uncool, disturbing texts to wake up to (bless them). I map out a character analysis and personality enneagram that doesn’t exist. And I project every romantic fantasy ever invented onto my victim, while doing nothing to actively pursue a real connection.

Why?

Because a crush is a beautiful, disgusting thing. It’s complete lack of information. A mystery to solve. A fantasy you can invent with no limit. The single greatest thing about crushes is you can melt into them entirely alone. Unrequited obsession means no feelings are involved, or hurt. And perhaps that’s why I enjoy it so much, because even dissolution feels safe when it’s happening only in my mind, where I’m the narrator and the leading actress and the audience.

Throughout my evolution from shy, awkward teenager to shy, awkward adult, unrequited crushes have always been my forte. I’ve filled journals with complete distillations of men I’ve never spoken to, written anthologies of poems and left them like breadcrumbs on the internet. Funnily enough, I acquired my first real boyfriend because he thought the poems on my Instagram were about him, and he used the ego boost to ask me out. I told him much later that his suspicions were incorrect, and his face crumpled in disbelief.

A part of making having a crush an enjoyable experience is choosing my target well. Geographically inconvenient, if possible. Barely any information available on the internet (the less I know, the more I can project). Never entertain or encourage conversation, because you don’t want to be perceived, and then spend 3-5 business days in the neurosis of how they perceived you. Always pick someone who’s genuinely impressive, because it’s free, silent motivation to get your life together.

Recently, H got me into astrology, and I found out I’m a Pisces Venus. For context, a Pisces Venus is a romantic idealist. We love the fairytale romances, we fall in love selflessly, we believe in soulmates and twin flames. A Pisces Venus falls for potential, and what is a crush, if not untapped potential? This is my Olympics, baby.

I’m sorry to my newest victim, who’s blissfully unaware that I’ve already envisioned different versions of our life together before we even speak. In my expansive brain that absorbs information like a sponge does water, there’s a sparkly binder full of facts that were never checked, just deduced, like Sherlock Holmes would - you must like your eggs sunny side up, because you turned your nose away when they served them scrambled at the buffet. You must be a night owl, because you always arrive ten minutes late, with bags under your eyes. You seem like you have an emotionally available mother, because there’s a cheerful disposition to the way you enter any room - humble, but deeply convinced you belong in it, never surveying for temperature, the way I tend do.

I’ve already built my expectations of you so high, already smoothed over every loophole in our ten act play, already given you your lines, that if we do encounter each other, it will prove useless. Who can live up to the expectations of a woman who’s already built an airtight script and hates straying into any other probability? I gave you no room to breathe, or be yourself. And I know that.

So instead, I’ll do the kinder thing and spare you the performance review. I’ll keep my pride, yearn like a mature person on the internet behind a paywall. The juicy, specific details will be spelt out, but undetectable.

What could I tell you about him that wouldn’t give away too much, but still tell you everything that earned me my affliction?

He’s retained his childishness, which I find endearing beyond common sense. He’s older than me, but not in the creepy Lolita way - it’s a respectable age gap. I’m in a position where I can observe him, so we cross paths often, but we’ve not yet spoken. He has a peculiar sense of style, practicality woven into spontaneity : khaki trousers, Solomons, oversized vintage sport t-shirts. It’s like he tried really hard to look like he wasn’t, and my ovaries churn like sugarcane stalk when he laughs, dripping a glass full of joy into my mouth. I stifle my own contagious chuckles, desperate not to be caught. Long eyelashes, an unfair and easy amiability that makes you jealous as first because you want to be on the receiving end of his fist bump. He looks better with his hair messy, hates umbrellas and chooses raincoats or getting drenched to the bone, and is so smart it hurts. Not conventionally attractive, but I’ve always liked the oddballs, the ones with unique features that could only produce harmony on one face, like a pretty little fuck you to the beauty standard.

I like him so much better in my imagination, where it’s safe to let the monsters out. But how dare I break character, jump out of my own elaborately crafted armor? How dare I sacrifice my precious ego in the humiliation ritual of finding true love? How dare I claim I want to be known, when all I do when it happens is run?

Last week I found a dusty, limited edition hardcover copy of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice on my parents’ bookshelf. On the first page, there’s a note in my Dad’s untidy scrawl. He gifted it to my Mom for their first wedding anniversary (may this kind of love find me).

This immediately made me pause and reflect on the hundreds of books I’ve read. As the kid who slipped away from the crowd, always had a novel weighing down her bag, and earned her stripes (-6.5 myopic vision prescription) from staying up after bedtime to devour the last few pages of a thrilling mystery novel, reading is quite literally my religion.

Recommending books to anyone is a nuanced art form, one I take seriously. But the books I’m about to recommend to you are the kinds that changed my atomic structure. Years later, the characters in them still swirl up in my head, vivid and sharp as ever. They’ve made me a better woman, a more educated feminist, and a corporate weapon.

Let’s get into it.

1. Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner

   

Have you ever felt entirely seen and therefore terrifyingly tender from it? This memoir is that. I read it in one night, eyes swollen from lack of sleep and tears. The next morning, I handed it to my Mom and bit down on the apology I knew I owed her, but I wasn’t sure for what.

Mothers are genetically programmed to want what’s best for you, but you’re convinced that only you can know that. You want to be nothing like them, but you’re scientifically made of the same material they are. It’s a relationship that’s both tensile and fragile at once, and I’m convinced no amount of writing will ever encapsulate it. If anything comes close to accomplishing the impossible, it’s Crying in H Mart.

2. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

   

In a writing class I took years ago, the instructor read my essay and said, “Where’s the rest of your house?” I asked what she meant, and she informed me that my writing was dropping the reader off at the front door, instead of letting them see the chipping paint on the walls, the messy bed in which I slept. I brushed it off in the moment, but when I read The Bell Jar, I understood exactly what she meant.

The Bell Jar has now been reduced to signaling the Sad Girl aesthetic, but I believe it takes delusional courage to publish a book as raw as this in the 1970’s. Plath’s portrayal of mental illness, shame, love, New York, affluence, marriage and friendship is so candid, you almost feel like these are secrets you shouldn’t be privy to.

There’s an acute self awareness in her writing that I’ve always aspired to emulate. She bites into herself before you’ve solidified your own critique of her choices, and cackles back from the page, asking, you thought I wouldn’t go there? Bitch, I just did.

3. Nice Girls Don’t Get The Corner Office, Lois P. Frankel

   

In my New York days, I was performing the humiliation ritual of running my thumbs over titles in the Self Help section at the Barnes and Nobles on 5th Avenue one evening after work when this book beckoned me with its bright pink highlighter spine.

Back then, I wanted a corner office, a bigger salary, and a promotion every year. Most of all, I wanted to be taken seriously at work. But I was also a painfully shy, obedient girl who’d been raised to do her work diligently and stay coyly out of everyone’s way.

Nice Girls earned me my first promotion at 25 and had me wishing I’d found it at 22 instead. Who knows what I could’ve negotiated if I’d had this kind of weaponry in my artillery?

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Sometimes I feel like I’ve been pretending my way through thirty years of life. Wearing a costume that doesn’t come off : a giant sign on my forehead that says, “PICK A ROLE AND I WILL PLAY IT.”

The court jester stares back at me in the mirror, cackling at her own joke, but the audience is deathly silent, judging me from the safety of their seats, the lights in the theatre turned down and the spotlight burning only into my eyes. I’m spiritually and emotionally naked for everyone to watch, and the critics will give my performance one star in their reviews tomorrow : “Promised everything, gave nothing.” “An unconvincing act.” “A spectacular waste of an evening.”

It’s just a string of purgatories happening at once - my gnarly luteal phase has its claws around my throat, a sprained back makes turning over on the pillow result in chronic pain, and I’m waiting for an answer from somewhere I’ve sent an application to, so all my fragile self esteem is riding on receiving a yes.

But in the age of instant gratification, who loves waiting on transformation? I want to change my life into something unrecognizable, and all of it has to happen right now. I want greatness delivered to my door like an Amazon Prime package I ordered at 9pm from bed, with the promise it’ll arrive as I’m brewing my coffee the next morning. That’s not enough hours, so the respectable thing to do as a raging perfectionist is give up and do nothing.

The demons in my head are making it worse by not shutting up. They’ve called a meeting to discuss every mistake I’ve ever made and I’m at the head of the table, agreeing with their analysis.

I’m looking at my life as a series of misplaced bets in a Vegas hotel lobby, the machines glowing my shame back at me. I walked in with $100 and left with nothing. Every bet I placed was wrong, my judgement sucks, and I shouldn’t be allowed to play without supervision.

I’m standing in front of a mirror, looking at myself after a shower, all the lights in my room turned to maximum brightness. I’m going over my list of things I’d change, tweak, tuck, fix, prick, and tone before I can finally accept I’m pretty.

Being in the luteal phase is no joke. It’s -

a) Taylor Swift writing her own ego death that is This Is Me Trying.

b) Sylvia Plath sitting under her fig tree, unable to choose a fruit to bite into, but the waiting makes all the produce smell of rot and fall at her feet, unused.

c) Fleabag in that church, saying, “I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I’ve been getting it wrong.”

Except all three are happening at the same time, and all I can do is suffer in quiet violence as my own body produces a hormonal hellhole of hysteria. All I can do is wait for it to pass, as the priest promised, sans the guarantee that it will. He didn’t say how long it takes.

Please don’t tell me the magical cures - don’t you think I’ve tried them all? Played different music. Done a Billy Blanks taebo workout, throwing well aimed fists into the air. Eaten my way through every self help book. Filed away expensive hours of therapy. Bled myself dry into the pages of a journal until no space was left for words. Gone on a run that drives my heart rate up in the tropical downpour of my hometown. Gotten out of bed at 3 am to write out a life manifesto for a rebrand of my life. I’ve called a friend, taken every self diagnostic test on the internet, checked CoStar for signs of retrograde among the planets, tried to swallow the pills the doctors prescribe.

The dirty feeling persists, sticks to me like grime I can’t scrub off. It’s a hedge maze with changing paths, so I’ll never find my way out, no matter which direction I choose. It’s a phantom pain in a tooth that looks healthy from the outside. It’s a tumor that feeds off my insecurities, and it’s multiplying as we speak.

The call comes from inside the house - my hormones, pointing their well aimed arrows at me. I feel like a troll under the bridge, ugly and unlovable. It’s already a full time job to manage the curse of noticing everything, but during this week long window, every inflection is amplified against my will :

A change of tone can feel like the world ending. A loud noise will have me releasing the blood curdling scream I’ve kept trapped in my lungs. Stepping on the scale is a costly mistake I’ll make everyone regret, but I want to eat everything within my sight, and not move a muscle in my body. I want to cut everyone off and start a new life, but I am so lonely on my island of isolation. A grey fog of stupidity hangs over my head, so I can’t think objectively. I’m completely zapped of energy, devoid of worth, and perpetually annoyed at the impossibility of everything I attempt. Everything is tinged with a shade of deep blue sadness, and I shake in sobs on the bedroom floor when I hear Maggots for Brains by Olivia Rodrigo.

Then, late at night, a primal fear creeps in and paralyses me : what if this isn’t just a temporary phase, something that dissolves by next week? What if the luteal phase is just my worst self, projected like an X-ray against the bright white of hospital lighting? If the monster emerges from within me, if the call comes from inside the house, if all my flaws are obvious in my reflection…then isn’t the monster just…me?

This essay about a friendship breakup is one of my most read pieces, so today I thought I’d write its antithesis. The people who choose to stay matter more than the ones that disappear without warning, anyway. If you enjoy it, share it with your best friend.

***

Once, I was pacing in blind pain through Central Park after a gnarly break-up and regretting every choice I’d ever made. It was the feeling of losing not only love, but also losing faith in my discernment. Had I really chosen wrong again? Could I ever trust my radar for men? H said on the phone, “Are you seriously going to let that wet wipe change how you view yourself?” Hearing a man described as a grocery item meant for single use before it’s discarded made me keel over in laughter, and I clutched my stomach, my cause of tears turning from uncontrollably sad to uncontrollably humored.

We met over Instagram DM’s in 2019. I’d try to find you the first message we exchanged, but we’ve sent each other 10+ reels every day since, so that information is buried too deep in some Meta data center for me to attempt to access it. You’ll just have to take my word.

Instead of whatever we said then, I’ll tell you why we’re best friends and will be for as long as we’re alive : in many ways, we’re very different people. Emotionally, we don't operate the same way. We process differently, react differently, need different things in a crisis. Still, our Venn diagrams overlap in perfect symmetry for what matters - morals, integrity, humor, effort.

For our second time meeting in real life, we lived together for 10 days straight and took ferries, flights and trains across Italy and London. During that trip, she pulled me to a stop on Portobello Market and pointed to a vendor selling forever friendship bracelets, the kind that they weld to your hand and you can never take off. It was a no brainer. While the sweet Turkish man measured the circumference of our wrists, he made amiable small talk, and H spent the entirety of the conversation hyping me up to a stranger I’d never see again, pitching him my writing as “the modern day Sylvia Plath minus the oven.”

At the end of our vacation, just before I took the train to Gatwick, I hugged her inside the station. “That was too short,” I chuckled. She laughed her full unbridled laugh as strangers passed by us in a blur of different directions, and then tracked my location all the way to the airport, sending me a slew of constant communication until I was sitting safely at my gate.

I don’t think we tired of each other’s company despite both being introverts. There was comfortable silence, an album of many flattering photos, countless glasses of wine, and a ton of bird watching - pointed eye contact upon seeing an objectively beautiful man.

Over the last seven years, we’ve written each other long, winding emails, sent voice notes with no time limits, been each other’s personal stylists over FaceTime, and stayed on the phone for hours with no regard for time zones between India, London and New York. No subject is too big or small, and no thought requires the constant filtering I attempt with nearly everyone else.

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I left $150,000 on a table at Bryant Park once.

That was what my managerial role at a fintech startup paid, my name printed in black lettering on a desk that overlooked the Empire State Building. It was a great job. It allowed me to rent a luxury apartment in downtown Brooklyn, buy a nice bottle of wine every Friday night, swipe my credit card on any chic outfit I saw and wanted to immediately dress my body in. And only came with a tolerable amount of misery. A first generation immigrant daughter’s dream, the one my parents used at parties as fodder to earn their I raised my kid well gold star.

Then one morning, I woke up, walked into the CFO’s office, and said, “This used to be my dream once, but it no longer is. I have to leave.” She started to cry, and I’ll admit my eyes stung a bit too. At Bryant Park Cafe, we clinked wine glasses over lunch as we said a reluctant goodbye. I pretended not to notice her mind already in motion about who to hire as my replacement, while I told her how much I'd appreciated my time at the company

Three months later, in October of 2024, I left New York, my apartment, my friends, and my whole life, the one I’d built from scratch. I had arrived with something to prove, and I was leaving with the receipts that I had. On the 14 hour flight home, I drank champagne and told myself the cliché was true - If I had made it in New York, I would make it anywhere. That was my band aid for a bullet hole I didn’t want to assess the damage of.

Like dirty laundry, this pattern is strewn shamelessly across the floor of my life, but I don’t let anyone close enough to really notice it. In the wake of my self destructive path are Bharatnatyam classes I stopped attending, a guitar with a snapped string that I never picked up again, arguments that started to go in circles, 500 half written drafts of essays I’ll probably never publish, a friendship I abandoned instead of asking whether any of it was worth saving, parties where I’ve registered the shortest distance to the glowing exit sign as soon as I walk in, girls I stopped knowing because they were no longer relatable, my hometown, an apartment in Bombay, another job at the Big Four, and of course, a string of men who never received responses to their double texts.

Leaving is like training a dormant muscle - the more you lift, the easier it gets. I do it so often, I don’t even get sore anymore.

Let me present my alibis for why I’m a professional bolter : Astrologically, I’m a Sagittarius Moon - I need expansion and freedom like a horse needs a grassy open field to run wild in. As an oldest daughter, I hate to leave my house but I thrive most at an airport gate on the way to a foreign land alone. I’m decisive and brutal with choice - never rereading my old journals, never turning over my shoulder once I’m walking away, swatting at regret with a sportsman’s precision. It took many years of silent obedience and enduring before I decided the better thing to be as a woman is unapologetically selfish.

From somewhere deep inside my mind, an honest judge calls bullshit on all of the above. They’re shitty excuses I feed myself to feel better about my choices, to make endings sound like fate instead of fear, to tighten my grip on the narrative like the writer I am.

In The Bolter, Taylor sings, ‘as she was leaving, it felt like breathing.’ I caused a six person lineup inside the Times Square subway station when my AirPods delivered that lyric into my brain on the way to work, because I stopped walking. Either Taylor Swift and I were manufactured in the same factory, or she lives in the walls of my bedroom. You pick.

But there’s a problem with the Bolter mythology. It’s designed to sound romantic and glamorous when it’s actually quite sad. It assumes leaving is always the brave thing when leaving is just cowardice dressed up as someone else for Halloween -

I’d rather not start because what’s the point if it’s not going to be exactly how I want it? I label this “my perfectionist tendencies.”

I’d rather walk away first based on my brief suspicion than let you abandon me, and prove I was right about you all along. I label this “fearful avoidant attachment.”

I’d rather Irish exit the networking event, the party, or the wedding than admit nobody’s spoken to me in 10 minutes, and my ego needs some ice for its bruising. I label this “socially awkward introversion.”

I’d rather leave the six figure job and my favorite city than stay long enough to discover my ceiling. I label this “a graceful exit.”

Weigh the odds of any difficult situation, and you’ll somehow arrive at packing your bags and fleeing the scene like a well trained assassin. It’s infinitely easier to be the one who speeds down the driveway and rides off into the sunset, the one who isn’t trapped in the quicksand of expressing their weakness. Easier to say, “it’s fine, fuck it, whatever” when I mean, “it’s not, that hurt me, this sucks.”

I’m a bulletproof bunker, by which I mean I’m so afraid of getting hurt I never even step into the game. Am I a bolter, or just a coward?

When you think about it, aren’t they the same thing?

We were waiting at the bus stop that evening. Silence, the kind when two people have been riffing off each other over dinner for the amount of time it takes to realize that the person across the table, the one you’ve met three times and never touched, might be your soulmate or a long drawn out ego death. It’s early enough, so I assign 50-50 odds. It’s time to head back, I announce, when the owner casts a nervous glance in our direction, and I sense his exhaustion instantly.

You offer to take me, I decline politely. “Then how will you get home?” you ask, and I point across the street at the lonely bus stop. “My chariot should arrive in a few minutes.” The compromise is you’ll wait with me, and I’ll text you when I shut the door to my apartment behind my back.

It was my decision to stand closer than what the rulebook recommends, to measure centimeters and bridge them with my body. You let me, you seem slightly pleased. Fluorescent light glimmering off the streets, pavement a drenched dark grey from a slight drizzle earlier in the evening. Your pointed gaze is a complex petri dish, and if my microscope reads the ingredients correctly, there’s a mix of curiosity, fear and bemusement in it.

I hate being looked at, because it feels like being seen, except the chardonnay swimming through my bloodstream makes me courageous, and you make me feel pretty without explicit commentary. Eye contact is a swordfight, and not breaking first is the only way to win. We never call it what it is, but we both know what we’re doing here, and it’s all slightly overwhelming and absurd. It makes my brain quiet its uproar for one glorious second, and an involuntary laugh tumbles out of my mouth.

FUCK.

It’s only for a moment, but your fingers find mine in the dark. Looking for the switch in the dark room of me - you want to know what turned the laugh on, you want to save that information for later. How did you know I let my hand hang limply outside my jacket pocket, in case you wanted to hold it?

It’s all I’m willing to give tonight, but there’s no rush. Intimacy isn’t ever about touch, it’s about intellects colliding so surprisingly well that you can’t help but confirm the feeling is real by reaching for something tangible. For you, right now, it’s my fingers.

For me, it’s sensory explosion against my will, fireworks set ablaze in my nervous system. You squeeze my palm gently, and I’m trying to scan your face for intention, but it’s hard to do when every atom I’m made of is devoted to not flinching. Two wrong moves in succession? I’d never see you again. So I think - Don’t move. Don’t tremble. Don’t withdraw. Don’t run. Don’t ruin this.

It’s gone as quickly as it happened. A moment of wanting, expressed without asking for reciprocation. I find your decisive self assuredness sexy. Bright lights from the arriving bus flood my eyes as it grinds to a halt and I blink to refocus my pupils.

No, wait - Pause there. Rewind to 10 seconds ago. Replay that scene.

But real life doesn’t have any of those buttons. “Bye,” I say flatly, but my lips are stretched into a curve against my will. I don’t look back to check on you, just proceed to pay the fare and find a vacant seat.

On the surface, I tend to grit my teeth. Fold my arms across my chest like armor. Brace for eventual, inevitable disappointment. Wear too much black. Never unpack my suitcase. Practice my poker face, unless you know how to read the foreign language in my eyes, panic passing like a shooting star before a still night sky replaces it.

Body language? It’s sarcasm that rolls off my tongue and exaggerated eye rolls. A nihilistic joke to glide over deeper meaning, even though meaning is all I care about. Play cricket with compliments, always batting. Hide my muchness behind stiff shoulders, my acute neurodivergence behind a nice outfit. One wrong move, and steel grates slide into the air, a means of protection designed not to keep you out, but to keep me in.

I read your microscopic inflections, even the ones you thought nobody noticed. I pretended, even when calculus equations were churning at dizzying speed through my cerebrum, a jury was ready to vote on eleven different ways to address your simplest question. When I walk into the function, my thermometer reads its emotional temperature, recalibrates accordingly. You might call it all evil manipulation, but I prefer the term intelligent villainess, please and thank you. Where’s my Oscar for best actress at playing it cool?

The ride home is nothing much, just 36 minutes until I’m tucked into bed. A window, a familiar song in my ears. Like tiny whirlpools, a dozen questions start swirling up in the quiet.

Did you stand there until the driver pulled away? Did I imagine the electricity in our exchange? Did it matter to you, the way it mattered to me? Did you flex the tendons in your fingers, touch your face to see if it was the nip in the air or just the weight of the moment that made you go numb? Did you have to rack up some nerve before you reached, or was it natural? I’ll never know, or dare to ask, or deliberate any further.

Underneath it all, I’m a woman who could eat. A poet with her pen always wielded, can’t help it. A black cat who’d relax in your lap, let your knuckles stroke me as I purr from my stomach. Since I was a little girl, I’ve been looking for the pin of true love in the haystack of heartbreak, a flashlight strapped to my forehead, a taunting clock in everyone’s voices - they want me to hurry the fuck up. I get close to giving out, but I’ll never stop hoping to find it, even though no one guaranteed its existence.

The clue is three words, eight letters, but do you even like doing crossword puzzles? My desire is obvious, but printed in cyanotype so it’s invisible until held against sunlight, revealed only over time and effort. All this armor is akin to peeling an onion - adds to the flavor of the food, but makes your eyes burn. Do you like a song for the beat, or do you read between the lines of lyricism?

Where should I hang up my thousand selves, does your heart have the closet space for them? An emotional fool disguised in pretty metaphors, a court jester who claps first because it tends to evoke applause from her audience. Dressed daily for a funeral, but red actually happens to be my favorite color. I just don’t know if it’s too jarring, so I keep it contained like the contents of a mystery subscription - socks, nails, hair clip. My muchness, in digestible doses. Pills you can swallow with ease and breakfast, until it spills out without consent, like that laugh I couldn’t swallow before it emerged. Slipping through the chinks, betraying my carefully constructed exterior.

And to think all you did was touch my hand. If you saw what was under the knives, swords, guns, words, and thirst, you’d leave the country and change your phone number. Don’t blame you, fair enough.

Look at me, a house on fire, standing outside myself in handcuffs, clutching the matchbox. I keep the beast of wanting on a tight leash, and never admit I've been starving for years.

Sam Altman’s latest interview, where he said, “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter,” had my eyes rolling to the back of my skull. Touch some grass, Altman.

Can I hear some commotion for good old curated taste? Taste, which is built with time and curiosity, from reading physical books at the local library, conversing with your friends over dinner and drinks, watching niche 90’s movies and TV, attempting to learn a new language, splurging on a spontaneous trip to bow to deer in Nara Park, Japan, because you were craving an escape? Most importantly, what happened to sparing a moment to think about how it all makes you feel? Or does Sam think I’m going to ask my chatbot that, too?

Gen-Z seems to be taking offence to this brave new world we’re already in, the same way I am. You may have noticed a spike in physical reading, the massive comeback of journaling, and an affinity for outdoor hobbies like run clubs to meet new people. Those are all tiny but mighty rebellions, and thank God for them.

I watched this viral video of an entire graduating class booing so deafeningly and collectively at the commencement speaker who said, “AI is the next industrial revolution,” that it made her lose her train of thought. She started up again (ugh), saying, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” and was met with loud hoots and cheering. That gave me a sliver of hope.

Or this brilliant scene from one of my favorite shows, Hacks, where the lead character calls the advent of AI “technological rape.” The finance bro in the Patagonia vest doesn’t know what hit him when she announces she hates AI because of its forced inevitability, where people aren’t given a choice, because it’s happening whether anyone likes it or not. There’s no unsubscribe button. There’s no option to opt out.

As a Chronically Online Woman, I’m scrolling through internet alleyways past my bedtime when I stumble upon an acquaintance’s blog. It’s filled with dead giveaways. The flowery writing, the m-dashes, the talking in loops. Oh, I think, you forgot to list your co-author.

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A/N - This is the first essay I'm sending to paid subscribers. Thank you for being here!

When I’d finally decided to leave New York, my mother flew 24 hours from India to help me pack up my apartment - and life - before it was all just a memorable story told through my camera roll. Somehow, she’d sensed that to me, this was a seismic event, and wanted to hold me upright as it happened. “I’m fine,” I kept repeating, as we took apart the furniture and I avoided her gentle gaze.

One chilly October evening, I took her to the 40th floor of the building, from where you could see the entire Manhattan skyline, a glorious sunset behind it. It was a panoramic Monet painting, orange and glimmering, the kind of opulence that makes you stop, stare and forget to exhale.

“You should be so proud of yourself,” she said, “You did this on your own.”

We sat on a bench, sipping from the coffee mugs we’d brought upstairs. “But you’re lonely, aren’t you? All this, and you’re so lonely you want to come home?” I swallowed the rising lump in my throat.

I’ve always been lonely, Mom. A lonely child. A lonely adult. My brain’s inner workings sometimes felt so tedious and excruciating, I had stopped sharing them with her a long time ago. There was a part of me she didn’t have access to, and never would.

“It’s not the loneliness,” I told her, “It’s just time. It’s good to know when to leave.” She nodded, lips pursed. I knew she didn’t agree with my decision, but I refused to abate her worries, tired from overcompensating, from taking on responsibilities that weren’t mine.

As a child, I would fall asleep in her bed, rubbing my small feet against hers under the covers. She was a strict parent, inadvertently the bad cop in the room, never coddling me. A 98 in Biology earned the question, “Where are the other 2 marks?” I stared at her, wondering if I’d ever be good enough, why the expectation was always academic perfection. But she defended me fiercely when a teacher jokingly said, “Neha is so thin, I fear she’s going to fly away.” My mother slammed her fist on the desk, and glared back. “I don’t want any commentary on her body. She’s perfectly fine the way she is.”

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I’ve written 99 free essays since I started Inhale, Scream. Partly because I can’t stop writing (really, I’ve tried) but also because I love to share my writing with YOU.

It’s a way for all of us to feel less alone, to say, “My friendship breakup sucked too and someone GETS it,” or “I have this debilitating crush and it’s driving me crazy.”

To me, good writing is like a Taylor Swift song - someone has had this experience before, and found a way to voice your exact thoughts in a pretty and palatable way. That’s what I like to do with my writing.

Inhale, Scream is, and always has been, a one woman show. I am the founder, author, editor, curator, and publicist for it. I brought it to Substack because it’s a website that helps writers get paid for their writing, without a middleman. And that’s pretty cool.

But I also care that you get what you’re paying for. So let me break it down.

WHAT DOES A SUBSCRIPTION COST?

$5/INR 450 a month.

WHAT WILL YOU GET AS A PAID SUBSCRIBER?

• Weekly essays on womanhood, self-identity, modern dating, pop culture, friendship. No subject is off limits, actually.

• Non-fiction personal essays like this one and previously unpublished fiction essays.

• “How-To” Guides on journaling, life organization, moving countries, becoming a better writer etc.

• Travel Guides including restaurants, museums, and planned itineraries.

• Curated Recommendation Lists of books, TV, movies & podcasts to sharpen your intellectual appetite.

• Full access to all previously paywalled essays.

• My eternal appreciation!!!

WHAT WILL YOU GET AS A FREE SUBSCRIBER?

• Occasional essays

My first paid essay arrives in your inbox on Sunday. It’s about mothers and daughters, silence and fighting, love and resentment, distance and longing.

Thank you for your support! <3

NC

Summer in India is crates of alphonso mangoes arriving straight from the farm, their heat still trapped between beds of straw. The air feels muggy and still, rarely letting up for a breeze. I sweat through my flowy t-shirts when I go on a walk, only doing it for the promise of an ice cold shower after. My hair will frizz up no matter how many products I use, so I keep it pressed obediently into a claw clip. The sound of air conditioners in every house in the neighborhood add a perennial hum of brown noise that I’ve now learned to ignore. And then there’s the sun, brazen and merciless, making the concrete under my feet emanate fumes.

The real sign of summer, though, is the gulmohar tree outside my balcony, slowly going from dark green to a fiery, flaming orange, making me pause with my phone pointed up to capture its seasonal glory. I ignore the ticking seconds on my Apple Watch that remind me I haven’t finished scaling a kilometer in under 10 minutes, and inch closer, craning my neck, pressing a palm into its bark, paying it compliments in my mind. You’re beautiful. Maybe the little girl in me who spent entire lunch breaks scaling the branches of trees in the school lawns instead of making friends is still alive and kicking, her empathy now pouring out in more sociable silence, where it’s safe from being misconstrued.

The children - the ones who don’t yet care about being sociable, like I do - are off for summer vacation, riding their bikes and taking dangerously sharp turns on the corners. Climbing the monkey bars, screaming in cacophony at one another, twisting their bodies this way and that on the swing set, their unbridled laughter filling the air. There are competitive games of cricket, tennis and basketball, the courts always occupied by groups of teenage boys, sporting jerseys of their favorite teams, as if life hasn’t yet whittled down their competitive edge with a career, bills and comparison. They must think high school is the toughest time of their lives, and when they ask me “if I really like Arsenal,” when we bump into each other, I laugh and keep the secret for their sake. No, I say. This is my friend’s jersey. I know nothing about football. Sorry.

After I’ve finished the 8 kilometers I walk each day, like a ritual, like a necessity for staying sane after staring at screens and numbers for ten hours, I retreat to the dark, empty park at approximately 9:30 pm. It’s all mine now. The swing set is empty, and I place my body into its cradle, swinging for a few minutes, willing the breeze to cool me off. Then, buzzing with endorphins, I trace my way home.

It’s finally my favorite time of the night - Long shower. Moisturizer on my whole body. Face glazed with creams. My hair in a loose braid down my back. Fresh linen pajamas. A scented candle burning, filling the room with jasmine. The lamps turned dim. Peppermint tea on my nightstand. Muscles aching from the weights I lifted, but the magnesium I swallowed and a night of sleep will fix that. It’s the care of yourself that no one witnesses that matters most, a soft reminder that you’re worthy of it, even sans audience.

The day was spent working, logging endless hours at my desk, storming through meetings, emails, spreadsheets, research. My mind is sticky from the effort and focus, but now I’ve been released from the prison that pays my bills. Now, my creativity turns on, like a lamp slowly but surely flickering to life in the basement, after being kept off for too long.

I turn to my journal, the one place where rigidity and control doesn’t matter, like it does everywhere else. The neatness of handwriting, the flow of my coherence - they bow out behind the curtains. The palatability of the thoughts I spill here belong only to me, and they emerge in haphazard and ugly ways, moving faster in my mind than my hand will on the smooth paper. It’s a way of emptying, almost religious to a woman who hasn’t been able to press pause on her internal monologue since the minute she learned the language to express it.

Tonight, I want to log what I’ve learnt about trees on the page -

Gulmohar trees are called flame trees. They’re actually native to the Madagascar islands, but travelled oceans and settled into India, stubborn proof that beauty can migrate and still find a home. Petals float down to the ground, an expanse of scarlet confetti at my feet. The tree needs dry soil and harsh heat to survive, which is a metaphor I can’t help but relate to. When in full bloom, the trees actually work overtime to hide their leaves, so that the flowers have more space to thrive in their vast, orange umbrella form.

Here it is, the seemingly slow life I wanted. Not too long ago, it’s what I begged the Universe for. A time I get to talk to trees, take long winding turns through my neighborhood, sit in bed every night and bleed in ink. A time I get to call H and not notice it’s been 3 hours since we first said hello, because our conversation snakes from silly to stimulating, swinging wildly from politics to crushes. A time I make my coffee in the morning and have the ease to sit in my balcony, drinking it in silence interrupted only with birdsong and swaying greenery in every direction.

Soon it’ll be time to rip it all to shreds, to grind my heel down on the accelerator, to rev the engine, to turn into a workhorse again. My ambition will require squeezing more out of me than 24 hours allow. I’ll be up earlier, go to sleep later. With no husband or children tying me to anything, I can just take my courage as company and get on a one way flight. When the anxiety erupts into the margins, a swarm of bees with what if questions, I smile to myself. You’ve done this before, remember? You’ll figure out how to do it again.

This time, I wonder if I’ll ever come back home. It’s the not knowing that brings anticipatory nostalgia swirling up to the surface, the reason I paint this picture of my Indian summer, trying to capture its vivid details in journals and routines and photographs. I feel compelled to record its fleeting beauty before it all dissolves.

You’re delusional to your own detriment. You stay up late at night, running fingers through the knots in your hair, trying to cast your net on stars that are so far out of your reach. You hope like the Nile. You yearn like a naive nineteenth century wife waiting for the war to end, a photograph of her lover on her bedside table, even though he may step on a minefield and blow to smithereens any second, even though he may never come home. You feel things you’re too ashamed to tell the page, and yet it’s the only place you come to confess them in well worded metaphors. Where else is there to go?

You watch a man christen a bright spot on the moon with his late wife’s name. Carroll. She used to save lives in the ICU, but passed in 2020 from cancer. That was the extent of her orbit. Cancer doesn’t check your karmic score, takes whoever it likes. All of it makes you sob, endless tears soaking your pillow - The name of the crater, the unfair illness of a stranger, the enormity of love that’s still left behind for her. Now it’s memorialized forever. Carroll Wiseman is the bright spot on the dark side of the moon. I’ll think about her every time I look up at nighttime.

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On the red eye ride over from New York, lodged between a window and a handsome, talkative Italian man who tells me he does software sales and visits his grandmother in Bellagio every fortnight, I realize that I’ve got a long day ahead, and eventually cut off our generous wine supply and wish him goodnight. He disembarks before me, but not before he slips a receipt with his name and number on it into my hand while I’m packing my things. “In case you want to hit up some local spots,” he says. I’d forgotten what European men are like, so despite being caught off guard, I smile and mouth grazie as he disappears into the line of people ahead of me. I’m almost positive he has a girlfriend waiting at home.

It’s already afternoon when I attempt to reacclimate in Malpensa airport - I go in search of a bathroom to do my make up and get a strong, scalding cappuccino to battle the time difference. Getting the visa was a separate nightmare, but here I am, ready for an adventure. H’s flight from London lands in two hours, so while I wait, I observe and investigate the different ways we could get into the city (bus, taxi, train), text my parents that their daughter is alive and well, and fire off some work emails before the weekend starts.

I’m waiting by the sliding doors of arrivals when H arrives, and many excited squeals of greeting and an hour long bus ride later, we drag our suitcases down the street where our Airbnb is supposedly located. The host has sent a particularly detailed video that sends us in search of the lockbox that contains the keys to our residence, but we’re both eldest daughters. We make a determined, competent, efficient team.

Finally inside the double doors, we’re greeted by pale yellow walls and a courtyard that leads to a clanky elevator, and on the second floor, we find a decent sized apartment with one incredible highlight - a Juliet balcony, overlooking a long and charming street of Italian architecture.

It’s almost dusk, pink tinged sky visible at the end of the horizon, so we shower quickly and head out on foot, two girls on a mission to find three things : gelato, white wine, and tiramisu.

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