"What would you do if today were the last day of YourQuote?"

"I'd write. YourQuote saved my writing. My writing will save YourQuote."

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At what point does one feel grief? After losing someone to death? After losing someone to time?
After losing someone to someone? After losing someone while we are still in their company? Grief doesn't stem mostly from loss. It stems from arrival too. That of someone scarring, jarring, marring coming
into our lives. Someone not meant for us. Someone who once felt meant for us but doesn't anymore.
Grief of leaving sometimes equals the grief of being left behind: something that makes the grief two-sided instead of one, shared yet unshareable. Grief is like dust. It settles if given time and inaction, residing in presence and absence as much as in the presence of absence and in the absence of presence.

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There's a reason
why there's heart
within the word
hearth.

Our heart
is a fireplace.

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A minute late
but here, at last.
Consider me, please?

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there was nothing left for me to do
and it was all over.

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On airports

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if it is way early, say 5 am, I sit and do Vipassana.
if it is usual early say 6 am, I go for a run.
if it is 7 am, I go for a walk with an audiobook.
If it is 8 am, I skip rope and stretch at home.
If it is 9 am, I sleep some more.

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No matter how much we champion individualism, celebrate independence and self-reliance, believe that we just need to think about ourselves and if everyone thinks and cares for themselves, the world will be a happier and better place, we cannot help but be intricately intertwined in the societal mesh. Interdependence is the quintessence of life, the necessity behind evolution else the weak homo sapiens species would have perished long back.

The biggest proof in this favour is our birth. The fundamental decision of gifting life to us was not ours in the first place, but our parents'. When our existence depends on another individual's choice, how can we then exist without depending on others? Whatever we do, whatever we have, is the byproduct of centuries of interdependent collaboration.

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There's something about long-form which makes it beautiful. Five years of running a startup of short-form writing taught me that the most telling, most original quotable sentences or paragraphs are not what you can come up with just like that, while sitting on an armchair. Instead, you need to arrive at it. Through other words acting as steps, sentences and paragraphs clocking those kilometers and paragraph and chapter breaks as the much needed rest, the quintessential breather for hydration and normalization of breath in between the long wander.

The most hauntingly beautiful quotes are therefore hidden within a book, in between lines that advance an action or reveal character. Rushdie's profound, "Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence," resides silently somewhere in the narrative of Midnight's Children. "The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets," takes the infamous backbench in Arundhati Roy's great story about Rahel and Estha. The short-form, primarily prose, is ill-suited for those who never tried their hand at long-form writing. It'll barely scratch the surface without ever etching a sentence
or a signature that can make it lasting.

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I found I lost you
only when I found you
after having lost you.
Loveless air.

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