Fragments of the Quiet Mind

I woke up at 3 a.m. to go to the CR. Nothing dramatic. No nightmare. No existential crisis—just the bladder doing its biological thing. But on the way back, as I passed through the hallway, I noticed it again. That chair. The one in the corner. Beige. Woven arms. Slightly tilted, as if someone had just stood up and forgotten to fix it. Except no one ever sits there. It’s weird, right? How a chair—something built for sitting—can spend its whole life untouched. Like it was assigned a role and then silently exiled from it. That chair doesn’t serve a function anymore. It’s a fixture. A witness. A relic. And in the half-light of 3 a.m., it didn’t look lonely. It looked… patient. That’s when it hit me. What if it wasn’t just a chair? What if it was absorbing things? Regrets. Thoughts no one says out loud. That creeping, subtle unease you feel when your life is technically okay but still feels misaligned. Maybe that’s why no one sits there. Maybe that’s where those quiet feelings go to...

We were down to the last box. The walls were bare, echoing in a way they hadn’t since we moved in. There’s a strange silence to empty rooms — not peace, not absence, but something heavier. Like the air knows what’s no longer being said. I sat on the floor where the couch used to be. There was a faint imprint on the carpet — the ghost of comfort, or routine, or both. I traced it with my fingers like that would help me remember who I was when I still belonged here. You don’t realize how much of your identity gets stored in spaces — in chipped mugs and drawer handles, in hallway shadows and the way light used to fall at 4:17 p.m. And when you leave, it doesn’t all come with you. Some parts stay behind, hidden in the corners you forgot to clean. The real abyss isn’t the fear of what’s next. It’s this: The stillness between no longer and not yet. Where memory becomes unreliable, and the self starts to blur. Everyone talks about the grief of endings, but no one warns you about the sil...

I sat alone on the worn couch, remote in hand, staring at the familiar opening credits of a show I once watched every week like it was a lifeline. Tonight, the laughter felt hollow, the jokes like whispers from someone else’s life. I wasn’t here to be entertained—I was here to visit an old version of myself, the one who believed this story held answers. Rewatching a show I’ve outgrown isn’t about reclaiming warmth or comfort. It’s about tracing the slow unraveling of who I used to be, like sifting through dust-covered photographs. The characters haven’t changed, but my gaze has—older, wearier, carrying the weight of roads taken and roads abandoned. Sometimes, growing up feels less like moving forward and more like leaving behind a self who was never fully ready to leave. There’s a strange grief in watching those scenes again—not for the story itself, but for the self who once saw herself reflected in it. We return not to revive but to mourn, to honor the ghost of who we were before g...

I saw her on the escalator. She was coming down as I was going up. That small, cinematic distance—just enough time to recognize, remember, and rehearse a lifetime in the space between two floors. Her hair was shorter now, the shade lighter, like the kind of choice you make after surviving something no one clapped for. She looked firmer in the shoulders, like she'd learned how to carry herself after being dropped too many times. More put-together. Less hesitant. But her eyes still had that old flicker—like she could still vanish into her own head mid-conversation. She was with someone. Maybe a partner. Maybe someone passing through. He had the look of someone she trusted with silence. The kind of man who didn’t ask her to shrink her dreams to fit a dinner conversation. I watched him lean in, say something only meant for her. She laughed, and it was soft, real, clean—like she no longer had to apologize for her joy. Then she saw me. Just a second too soon. Her expression shifte...

In a world filled with apathy and where silence lingers long, I wander through memories, each a fleeting song. Trying to bury parts of my soul’s history, Dancing with shadows, lies weave their mystery. The world is apathetic. People are apathetic. Everything is apathetic.This feeling is becoming all too familiar, like I’m a ghost drifting through echoes of laughter long forgotten. It’s an unsettling sensation, as if I’m stuck in a film on a continuous loop. Memories flicker just out of reach, shimmering like distant stars that refuse to align. I’ve buried parts of my past, trying to ignore the fragments that won’t let go. But can we ever truly forget the pieces that define us? There’s a constant tug-of-war within me, a struggle between the truths I confront and the lies I cling to. And what do I do when the shadows I thought I had evaded begin to creep back, whispering the stories I hoped would remain silent? I refuse to disguise the joy that once lit my way, To deny that bliss feels...

It’s difficult to categorize important from junk. When I woke up this morning, I already have a plan on what to do this day, I am going to clean up the room and discard everything that I will no longer need. After bringing home my things from the office, the room was a mess.  Papers here and there, notebooks, books and all sorts of things, like letters from students, small mementos, past drawings and to cut it short, junks that will make me remember.  I believe that I am not a sentimental kinda’ guy, but upon seeing all of these, I realized, I think I am indeed sentimental! (in the first place, why have I not threw them away?) or maybe, I am just concerned because they exerted effort to make these things to give me, so I might as well return the favor by keeping it. Anyway, sentimentality only brings trash. As heartless as it may sound, I can’t afford to keep them anymore as the house is getting crowded and it’s getting filled with trash. So, I need to segregate and c...

There’s this soft, secret voice that lingers in the quiet spaces of my thoughts—memory, I think. It has a way of twisting everything into something prettier, more manageable, more… manageable in a way that lets me live with it. It’s like a song that plays on repeat, and no matter how much I know the lyrics are flawed, they’re still the only ones I can sing along to. I find myself remembering moments that, if I were truly honest, weren’t all that beautiful. The pain wasn’t soft then; it was jagged, cutting through everything I thought I knew. Yet somehow, when I look back now, those same moments are wrapped in this nostalgic haze, like a filter over a blurry photo. I’ll see the cracks in the walls of my life, the broken places that didn’t heal right, but somehow those jagged edges shine like they’re meant to. It’s strange, how memory can romanticize the wreckage. There are stories I tell myself now, stories of what I was, what I could have been, what I once felt. I twist the pain i...