Tag: memories

The People We Become For Different Places

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There is a version of me that only used to exist in my grandmother’s house. She didn’t know that, of course, but she had met a girl who spoke a little slower, laughed more freely, and didn’t once check her phone at the dinner table. That girl ate two extra rotis without guilt and sat with her legs folded under her on the sofa and didn’t feel even a little bit embarrassed about it. She was softer. She was somehow younger and more herself at the same time. I don’t know where she used to go when I left.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, the way places pull different people out of us. Not fake people, that’s the thing I want to be clear about. Not performances or masks or the kind of code-switching that you do because you have to. I mean something quieter and more involuntary than that. The way a city you love makes you walk differently. The way a room you grew up in makes you feel like your own problems have temporarily lost your address.

There is a version of me that lives in Jaipur and she is more serious, more efficient, more clipped. She knows exactly what she wants from a day. She has tabs open that she will actually use. There is another version that exists only on long train rides, who reads for four hours straight and doesn’t feel even a little bit guilty about not being productive, because what could be more productive than this, the whole city moving past outside the window and a book in your lap and nowhere you have to be for the next seven hours.

The interesting part is not that we change. Of course we change. The interesting part is that every single version feels completely real when you’re in it. You don’t feel like you’re pretending. You feel, if anything, more settled than usual. Like the place has made room for a part of you that was waiting for exactly that kind of permission.

I think some places give us permission. That’s the best way I can put it. My grandmother’s house gave me the permission to be unhurried. A train gives me permission to disappear. A city I visited once gave me permission to be curious in a way I rarely let myself be at home, where everyone already knows what kind of person I am and I have to keep being that.

That last one is the part that gets to me most honestly. At home, wherever home is, you are already known. People have already decided, with a lot of love and some amount of wrong assumption, who you are. And it is not that they are entirely wrong. It is just that you have expanded since they last checked and nobody has updated the file. So you walk around being slightly edited, slightly abbreviated, slightly smaller than what you actually are now. And then you go somewhere new and there is no file. You get to just be whatever you currently are. The whole thing. Unreviewed.

I wonder sometimes if that’s part of why travel feels so good even when the trip itself is objectively average. It’s not always the food or the view or the novelty. It’s the temporary suspension of your own reputation. You get to be interested in things without explaining why. You get to be quiet or loud or completely random without anyone reading it as something about your character. The place doesn’t have a theory about you yet.

And then there are places that know too much and still love you and those are somehow the most powerful of all. Because those places don’t give you freedom through anonymity. They give you freedom through acceptance. Which is a different thing entirely and honestly a rarer one.

I don’t think we ever become entirely different people in different places. I think we become specific parts of ourselves. Each place draws out something that was already there, something that just needed the right kind of light or noise or silence to finally surface. Some places bring out the version of you that knows how to rest. Some bring out the version that’s a little bit brave. Some bring out the version that misses people, deeply and without warning, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

What I’ve started believing is that all of these are real. The girl at her grandmother’s house was real. The person on the train is real. The edited, efficient, serious version at her desk is also real. None of them cancel the others out. They are all just different rooms inside the same person, and the places we go are just the keys.

I think that’s a kind thing to know about yourself. 

That you are more than one thing. 

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

Outgrowing People Without Hating Them

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There is this one person I think about sometimes. We were inseparable for years, the kind of close where you stop needing to explain context because they already have all of it. They knew which version of a story I was telling based on who was in the room. They knew when I said I was fine that I was not, and they knew when I actually was. We had the kind of friendship that made me think, okay, this is one of those. This one is permanent.

And now we talk maybe four times a year. Warmly, genuinely, and then we hang up and weeks dissolve into months and neither of us panics about it. I am not sure when that happened. I have tried to find the moment and I cannot. There was no fight, no fracture, nothing to point to. Just life doing what life does, pulling people into their own separate currents, and one day you look up and realize the distance has become the default.

What I was not ready for was how much I would still love them through it. That is the part that messes with your head. You expect that if something is over, it should feel over. Clean. You expect the love to scale down to match the closeness. But it does not always work that way. Sometimes you can be sitting in a completely separate life from someone and still feel a rush of something real when you see them post about a good day. Still hope that they are okay. Still miss them in that way you miss a place you used to live in, not desperately, but with a familiarity that never fully leaves your body.

I spent a long time feeling guilty about the growing distance, as if I had let something precious slip through my hands by not holding tighter. I kept thinking I should call more, should try harder, should find my way back to what we were. But every time I imagined actually doing that I felt something in me go still, because I think some part of me knew that you cannot go back to who you were with someone once you have both moved. You can only meet each other as who you are now, and sometimes who you are now just does not need the same things from each other. That is not failure. It took me a while to stop treating it like failure.

The thing about people you outgrow is that they do not leave you, not really. They just stop being in your present and start living somewhere deeper. In the habits you picked up from them without noticing. In the songs that immediately make you think of a specific night, a specific version of yourself, a specific kind of happiness you had that you are not sure you have found again in quite the same shape. I still use a phrase I learned from them. I still order the thing at a restaurant that they recommended years ago. They are woven into the person I became even if they are not around to see who that is now. I find that more comforting than sad, most of the time.

What I am still learning is that love does not need a container. It does not need constant contact to stay alive. You can love someone across years of silence. You can love someone whose life has taken a shape you barely recognize. You can love someone and also accept, without cruelty and without drama, that the two of you have become strangers who share a history. That is a real kind of love. It just looks different from the kind they write about.

I think we put so much pressure on closeness to be the proof of love that we panic when it fades, as if the fading means the whole thing was a lie. But the whole thing was not a lie. Those years were real. That laughter was real. The version of you that existed inside that friendship was real and she mattered and she was not wasted just because she is not who you are anymore. You were supposed to grow. You were supposed to become someone that version of you could not have imagined. And so were they. That is not the end of something beautiful. That is actually kind of what beautiful looks like when it is honest.

I have stopped trying to make peace with it in a way that resolves it, because I do not think it resolves. I think you just learn to carry it differently. A little lighter each year. With more grace and less grief, until it becomes one of those quiet, tender things you hold without needing to look at too often. A warmth in the background. Proof that you have been loved, and that you have loved back, and that both of those things counted even if the story did not go the way you thought it would when you were laughing at 2am thinking, this is one of the ones that lasts.

Maybe it did last. Just not in the way either of you expected.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

One Year of #SoulfulSundaysWithDevika

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(a note to anyone who’s ever tried to keep a promise to themselves)

I started #SoulfulSundaysWithDevika on a random Sunday, yes but I had a feeling it would stay.

I didn’t know what it would look like,
or what I would talk about every week,
but I knew one thing: I needed something that would make me show up for myself.

And Sunday became that anchor.

For 52 weeks straight, no matter where I was or how I felt, I showed up.
I’ve been sick, exhausted, travelling, overwhelmed — all of it.
There were days my body said no, but my heart said, “You promised yourself.”
So I kept that promise.

That’s the part I’m proudest of.
Not the aesthetics or the words or the reels, just the simple act of showing up.

Every week.

Some Sundays, the words came easily.
Other Sundays, it felt like squeezing meaning out of a tired mind.
But I did it.
Every single time.

I didn’t create Soulful Sundays to impress anyone.
I created it because I needed one constant. One moment every week where I checked in with myself, sat still, felt things, and let them breathe.

Somewhere along the way,
other people joined in.
Quietly.
Softly.
Reading.
Responding.
Sharing little pieces of their own life back with me.

That part… was unexpected.
And really beautiful.

It reminded me that tenderness doesn’t need an audience; it just needs honesty.
A small circle is still a circle.
A few hearts are still a blessing.

Soulful Sundays taught me that you don’t need a loud life to have a meaningful one.
You just need something that grounds you.

It taught me that discipline can be gentle.
That showing up for yourself every week is an act of love, not pressure.

It taught me that consistency isn’t about perfection. It’s about honouring yourself enough to keep going, even when you’re tired or uninspired.

It taught me that community doesn’t need to be big; it just needs to be real.
That creativity can be simple.
That feelings don’t have to be explained to be understood.
That people will show up when you show up as you are.

The girl who began this didn’t think she could be consistent.
Didn’t think she could create something meaningful.
Didn’t think anyone was listening.

But someone was.
Even if that someone was just me.

And maybe that’s the magic.

As I sit here writing this, I’m not thinking of numbers or reach or “should’ve done more.”
I’m thinking of the quiet Sundays that saved me.
The warmth of familiar names.
The way my heart felt every time someone said, “I needed this.”

I think I needed this too.
More than I ever realised.

So here’s to one year.
Here’s to promises kept.
To starting even when you’re unsure.
To showing up even when your hands are empty.
To the small rituals that hold us together when the world feels too big.

And here’s to you for being here.
Whether you’ve been around since the beginning or just arrived yesterday.
Thank you for witnessing me.
For sharing pieces of yourself.
For letting this space matter.

Lastly, here’s to every Sunday that taught me how to listen.
And here’s to the Sundays still waiting for me.

I don’t know what the next year looks like.
I just know I’ll keep showing up.

That’s more than enough.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

Live While You Still Can

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I came across a post recently that said, “You’re going to be 24 for 365 days. And you could die at 25.” It hit me in a way few things do. We live as if time is infinite, like the people we love will always be there, like our youth will last forever. But the truth is, nothing lasts forever. Not your parents’ voices calling you for dinner, not the same old jokes that once made you roll your eyes, not even the friends who keep asking you to hang out. Everything fades, slowly, quietly, until one day, you realize it’s gone.

We’re always rushing somewhere. Rushing to grow up, to succeed, to have our lives perfectly planned out. But what if the goal isn’t to have everything figured out? What if the goal is simply to feel everything while we can? To laugh even when it feels silly, to hug people tighter, to say yes when your mom asks if you want to sleep beside her, to look up from your phone and notice that your dad’s hair has more grey than before.

We keep saying “next time.” Next time I’ll go out. Next time I’ll visit them. Next time I’ll take a break. But one day there will be no next time. There will just be a moment that quietly slips into never again.

We’re taught to chase success, but rarely to appreciate simplicity. Nobody reminds us that these are the days we’ll look back on. The ones that feel ordinary now. The night you stayed up laughing with your best friend. The morning you woke up to your favorite song. The small moments that don’t seem special until they’re gone.

We hide behind the idea of being too busy or too tired, convincing ourselves that isolation is strength. We call it independence, but often it’s just fear. Fear of needing someone. Fear of being hurt. Fear of being known too deeply. But the truth is, human connection is what keeps us alive. You’ll never be able to love someone at 35 the same way you do at 19. The innocence, the recklessness, the depth of feeling, it’s something that belongs only to this time of your life.

One day, your body won’t keep up like it used to. Your circle will shrink. The messages will slow down. You’ll realize that the version of you who stayed up too late, laughed too loud, and cried too easily was someone you’d give anything to meet again.

So stop waiting for the perfect time. Stop saving your favorite clothes for special occasions. Stop thinking you have to earn rest, joy, or love. You’re alive right now and that’s reason enough.

Life will never pause for you to catch up. The people you love will grow old, the things you take for granted will change, and your own heart will one day long for what it has now. So while your bones are strong, your laughter is loud, and your heart still races for no reason at all — LIVE.

Not just exist. Not just survive. But live.
Say yes more often. Forgive faster. Take the picture. Write the message. Go for that walk. Tell people you love them.

You won’t always be young, but you can always be alive. And that’s a choice.

Because one day, all you’ll want is one more chance to do it all again.

So do it now.
With every part of you.
While you still can.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika

When Time Keeps Slipping

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I don’t know when it started feeling like this. This sense that I am always running out of time. That the hours are rushing past me even as I try to hold them in my hands. I wake up, I go through the motions, and suddenly another day is gone. And I keep asking myself, where did it go? Did I even live it, or did I just watch it disappear?

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much I miss the feeling of endless time. The way afternoons used to stretch forever when I was younger. How I could spend hours doing nothing and it never felt wasted. Now everything feels like it’s slipping through some crack I can’t seal. Even when I pause, even when I tell myself to breathe and be here, the moment is already half gone.

There’s this ache inside me, one I don’t even know how to explain properly. It’s part nostalgia, part fear, part longing. I look back on memories and I want so badly to crawl back into them. Just to sit there again. To feel safe in their simplicity. To not carry this constant weight of time sprinting forward without me.

I try to keep up. I plan, I make lists, I tell myself I’ll use my time better. But even then, it feels like I’m falling behind. Like no matter how much I do, it will never be enough. There will never be enough hours, enough days, enough years. And that thought just makes the nostalgia sharper, because it reminds me that what’s gone is gone, and what’s coming will slip just as quickly.

Sometimes I wonder if everyone feels this or if it’s just me. If other people manage to move through their days without this constant awareness of the clock ticking. Without the guilt of not living fully enough, not holding onto things tightly enough, not being enough for the time they’re given.

I don’t have a neat conclusion to this. I don’t know how to wrap it up. I just know that I feel time slipping away from me. I feel it in my bones. And no matter how much I try to clutch at it, I can’t seem to make it stay.

*****

From my mind to this page to your screen— thanks for being here.

~ Devika