We have all grown up listening to captivating tales and enchanting stories that always seem to end in joy. Yet the deeply conscious part of our minds wasn’t present in those childhood days, where we only saw bees that surrounded every sight and butterflies in every direction. We couldn’t realize the reality behind those nursery rhymes, comedy jokes, poems, and stories that were never meant to be only happy.

After all those days passed like a sudden blink, I find myself wondering — how could the teller’s eyes not be soaked in tears? How did the presenters show only one side of the tale without guilt? And yet, it all seemed better back then, because the people in those stories were meant to be inspiring, hope-filled, and uplifting, so we could face what was coming without confusion.

Perhaps we have all imagined ourselves as the most devoted and brave hero in our own battles. I still do. But reality sometimes reveals a harsher phase, where some are destined to remain behind the curtains, where no eyes can reach.

Every story has two sides.

It came to me late — that the soul eventually begins to cross paths with the darker side of the stories we were always told. They are not meaningless, but now I feel people lack the courage to explain why those unkind parts were hidden. Somewhere along the journey, supported by fantasies that once felt real, we trusted characters that seemed fearless, and the only force that guided us was belief itself. But things turned south. What once felt honest began to feel false and unreal. And I realized — the ones behind the curtains… were us.

After all, the truth remains: every person carries their own story. But what if a story forgets to include the person living it? What if someone becomes a stranger in their own narrative?

We’ve heard that every soul has a role in someone’s life, even the smallest one. But what about the person who is left in the background of every story? What if the story fails to recognize his presence?

Some of us only exist in the background of every story — 
Likable but not lovable, Needed but not wanted,
Present but not included, Observed but never truly seen.

And this slowly expands its meaning in every direction. But why? Maybe because one forgets to play the right role. Or perhaps the value of his life becomes less than the weight of his absence. A person may lie awake at night trying to answer these questions that feel morally unclear.
Can anyone truly escape this state?

At times, some come close to the truth written behind this confusion and understand why every story has two sides: one visible, and the other hidden.

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Sometimes the hardest thing is not chasing what you want, but surviving the moment when it finally comes close to arrival.

We humans always tend to dream of things we haven’t accomplished yet. Certain thoughts constantly pull us toward what once seemed impossible. However, when you begin to feel closer to what you truly want, a strange fear emerges from deep within. The mind feels drowned in a sea of anxiety instead of relief.

Maybe it is because your options begin to narrow, leaving only one gate open. The doors you once tried to open as alternatives to your desire suddenly feel like compromises — even losses. And when the picture before you begins changing the framework of your personality, an unfamiliar fear takes shape.

Dreams often feel safer only when they are distant.

Unfulfilled potential still leaves room for fantasy, whereas reality demands something far more vulnerable: involvement of the self. Getting what you always wanted means the parts of your life connected to it must also change in ways you may not be prepared for. Your identity shifts. Your excuses disappear. Responsibility arrives — and you still do not know how the world around you will react.

People often say they fear nothing. But sometimes the fear is not about success itself; it is about exposure and visibility. It is about the expectations that come with achievement. It is about reaching a final destination that still feels incomplete inside.

Every achievement carries a hidden grief. Perhaps because dreams are so concrete in our imagination that fulfilling them means choosing one path while quietly letting go of countless others.

Every beautiful change contains loss.

In the end, it all comes down to one realization: joy can feel uncomfortable when a person is used to surviving rather than living. Perhaps we must learn the art of receiving — with all its beauty and struggle. The mind resists unfamiliar happiness. When it is not accustomed to the path you have chosen, it creates fear, sensing danger even in the very thing you once prayed for.

Indeed, the real art lies in growing alongside the life you asked for.

Not every closed door is fear, and not every hesitation is wisdom either. Sometimes true healing lies in allowing yourself to be embraced by the very thing you once only knew how to long for.

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Fear of Arrival was originally published in Pen With Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Can we ever open the curtain of happiness?
When we aren’t ready to endure its delicacy

Can we engulf gratitude,
When the heart won’t stop complaining in its attitude?

Can I transmute into someone I always avoided?
Or bloom in a garden where I’ve never been invited?

Can I adore the imperfections of the moon,
When I don’t seem to admire the star’s tune?

Can I still perceive in the dark when my candle starts to flicker,
A time when my dreams fracture quicker?

Can I just skip some more hours I never want to experience?
Or sit beside a window that only offers winds of silence?

Will I be able to sleep peacefully once,
Without noticing the unseen ceilings at a glance?

Will my dreams follow me without hesitation,
Or will they abandon me where I don’t belong in isolation?

Can I ever truly live a resolute life in my own company,
Or exist pretending life’s fragile harmony?

While breaking apart from the things I don’t deserve,
Can I heal from the knife that intercepts my nerve?

Will I be able to trust with a heart that knows betrayal so well,
Or a mind desperate to escape its rumor-woven shell?

Can I enter someone else’s story as an intruder?
When does my own story demand my attention as its truest reader?

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I’ve heard people say,
“Being hurt continuously through life makes you feel no pain anymore.”
Is it true? Is the person heartless now, maybe? But the body’s sensitivity is still there — the mind. A person’s consciousness never leaves until the very last moment when death approaches. So why does pain stop hurting?

How much do we truly know about another person’s hurt or pain?
How can we measure it? Is there any device or instrument to quantify it?
We can measure blood pressure, heart rate, and body temperature. But even science and technology have proven inadequate to measure the amount of pain — not physical pain, but the kind that slowly destroys you from within.

So how can somebody else survey the depths of your inner self?
By the words you say? Or the raging feelings you express aloud?
Does it really make a difference to you?
Does it heal the broken parts of yourself?

It can’t. You remain with it. Over time, the only thing built within you is courage. Courage to overcome it — or to bear it? To me, it still doesn’t give anyone enough patience and strength to feel it twice, or to acknowledge it silently again. Oversensitive people might say, “The obstacles injuring me can never be removed,” yet they continue life anyway, because even small things strike them suddenly.

Though this doesn’t mean that enduring pain has become easy or that it is no longer a burden. Just some words turn heavy, some actions sharp, some expressions deep, and some dreams meet sudden denial — or maybe expectations scatter. Facing such moments feels like an incident, but they don’t change you at all unless you truly feel them.

The only way to move forward, then, is not only to bear it unwillingly, or to just let it be the past, or to release everything you’ve faced onto others. The art is to absorb it silently, to inhale it without exhaling. No matter how conflicted we become inside, there is beauty within it. To capture those painful moments along our memory lane without disapproval or rejection is the true art of healing. Not in the sense of forgetting what hurts you, but to protect others from it — for maybe the world out there wouldn’t be able to face what you felt and understood.

It’s true: eventually, you’ll become hardened from holding it for so long, and you might grow tired of it all — but the one who has learned to stand with it is like an old tree trunk holding the weight of its vast canopy without complaint, because its roots have already grown deep beneath the earth, invisible, hidden, and unnoticed — just like we hide too.

In the end, the pain does not vanish, nor do we gain the ability to confront every hardship. Yet something inside shifts: from hurting others in response to your own pain, to quietly burying it where no one can reach it. You live simply, seen through the eyes of others. And still, you realize: you have become stronger. To me,

The finest souls are those who gulped their pain, avoiding making others taste it.

These souls are hidden and rare, but they exist. They quietly mark our flaws, helping us reflect on how far we’ve come — for nothing… with nothing.

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The Swallowed Pain was originally published in Pen With Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How do we usually pass our crucial moments?
Can we really capture the unusual feelings with just one click?
Can the picture hide something that was once felt deeply?

These thoughts often question the crucial memories we try to preserve in the form of a picture, but we forget that only colors, shades, and presence are recorded, never the things that actually made the moment whole….

Many of our collections and albums of childhood are conserved that way. And yet, we actually find quiet satisfaction by looking at them and imagining ourselves alive within just a single ‘picture’. It often happens to me that, seeing a portrait, whether in hand or virtually, I can no longer feel that same longing I once did while living that moment. Perhaps it just exists only in our memories, not in different illustrations or pictures we used to carry along.

So, what is the purpose of carrying a camera to places that are worth living in the present moment rather than encapsulating them to be just remembered or shared?
Some of those moments serve us as a blissful form of healing therapy. Though we tend to disregard them while attempting to capture them to feel alive later on, overlooking the beauty meant for ‘now’.

What an image or your old photo tells you…. is just about the time when you were present, or maybe the difference between your version now and then. In the end, you just see visuals that are visible to everyone around you, rather than the things that could only be sensed and felt by you.

Still, we focus on what is everlasting and could be timelessly carried — a photograph. Not what that feels like, a soft and gentle, sudden touch of breeze — completely temporary. Just like — life is ephemeral.

Photographs we carry along don’t matter,
A part of true sentiment we carry — 
Is always worth living with…

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Photos clicked — Moments skipped was originally published in bloody sweet writers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How loneliness reshapes the soul?

And there I sat, alone, with walls that echoed and a floor exhausted by the stomping of feet. It was a time that reminded me there is a quiet beauty in moments we spend alone — when nothing feels entirely right or wrong. These are the moments we share only with our soul: with the mind that wanders nowhere, the heart that listens, and the imagination that dares to dream.

I’m used to daydreaming in such moments of quietness — we all are, though. And the rest and peace I borrowed from the window beside me taught me something about what I used to do. I never realized what dreams truly are — something that needs light to come alive, or a mind that needs moments of stillness to wander through them and reflect on their meaning. It is in these drifting moments that we begin to awaken to a deeper reality — one that exists within ourselves, not the version of us shaped by others. That was one of the things I realized at that time.

We always seek refuge from loneliness in the warmth of others, don’t we?
Yet I wanted to wander through the inner thoughts that keep calling us — thoughts we so often ignore. But why? Maybe because we don’t make time to reflect.

I now understand that to connect with our dreams truly is to recognize ourselves as part of someone else’s dream as well. In that realization lies dignity. It reveals how easily people lose themselves in worlds they create — worlds born from imagination and sustained by daydreaming. It’s a truth people rarely talk about.

Moments continue to pass without warning. In tranquil solitude, I felt an ache hard to describe — not a desire to escape, but a longing to undo everything that once felt important. Such moments often feel richer than any euphoric high or melancholic low. When we live within the worlds drawn by our own minds, we are not escaping reality — we are learning to see it through a gentler, more hopeful lens.

A sudden truth came to me as I sat breathing in the still, frozen air — through the example of flowing water. I imagined that water flowing through the soul is often interrupted by stones of thought — doubt, fear, memory, expectation. Yet the true art lies not in removing the stones, but in allowing the water to keep moving — to splash, to bend, to persist — while still flowing in the right direction.

Every wave longs for the shore. And when the journey finally ends, it does so not in resistance, but in surrender — dissolving quietly into the waiting sand.
Perhaps that is where we all arrive in the end — not broken, but absorbed, without noise.

This is what I realized when I finally dived into what my inner self was asking of me — when I saw the self I always had, but had forgotten.

I believe these moments we spend alone are deeply important to the soul we carry. We need them. Yet when life places stones in our path — obstacles that leave us feeling lonely — we try to escape instead of facing them.

For some, these moments of loneliness become endless because they never learn how to live through them. Not to flee them — but to understand them.

I struggled often, and yet I stand here. Where many hidden parts of life once remained buried, they are now revealed — in silence. Not naturally, but through effort. I learned how to strive, how to dig deep, and how to uncover the things we often overlook — even as we pass through them without ever asking why, how, what, or when.

Thank you, Rishita Sharma💗, and Sriram Yaladandi, for this thoughtful challenge on the Publication Quirky Rants.

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I have always feared fragmentation, haven’t we all? We always try to keep ourselves orderly, our identities unified, and our stories whole and consistent. Even the word “breaking” often terrifies us. Yet we often forget that the fragments we carry actually make us who we are. They are the lost parts that we sometimes undermine in the game of life. Loss divides us, time changes us, and diverse experiences scatter the parts of us we once carried.

Still, I wonder a question that sparked curiosity within me: even after life breaks us into different versions, why do we continue to exist and live as a single being without withdrawing those fragments?

Perhaps there is a strange beauty in broken things. I optimized that a cracked wall tells the story of the storms it survived while still carrying its purpose. I once found a torn photograph that still carried the faces it once held and gave life to. And a shattered glass that continues to absorb and reflect light in ways that a perfect surface never could.

In the same way, our lives remain intact in the meaning they hold. We are shaped by the moments that divide us — grief, failure, heartbreak, experience, memory, and trauma. Yet all these broken elements still belong to the same person.

Identity is not as solid as we imagine. The child you once were, the person you are today, and the person you may become tomorrow are never the same. Time breaks the self into different stages. Experiences fracture our certainty, and memory preserves scattered parts of what we have been. Despite these divisions within the soul, we still tend to call it “me.”
It is because you are not waiting to become whole — you already are, in your scattered form.

Nothing in reality is truly unified. Mountains crack, stars explode, civilizations collapse, and people change. Yet existence continues to create meaning through these breakings.

Being broken-apart is not a flaw but a condition of survival.

You don’t need to fix every broken piece of yourself; you are complete. Just like when I saw a broken mirror. At first glance, it seemed ruined, but when I looked closer, the sunlight fell across its broken surface, and it perfectly reflected the sky, the light, and the person looking into it. In that sense, it is still complete, even though it exists in pieces.

So you don’t need to be fixed to be worthy or complete. You only need to accept yourself, which is the beginning of healing. This acceptance challenges the belief we often hold — that being whole means being flawless. Instead, imperfection itself is a part of completeness.

Just remember, even if you feel hurt, fragmented, or imperfect, you are not defective. Your existence is still whole and meaningful.
A true friend once said to me in my most wounded phase:
‘You are complete even in pieces.’
And it finally touched me as I understood.

Sometimes a thing is most complete not when it is untouched, but when its fractures become part of its history.

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You are complete even in pieces was originally published in Pen With Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Answers end conversations, but questions quietly continue living, somewhere in the dark.

The mind questions everything that fails to touch our sensitivity the way we expect. Yet questions aren’t just merely to be answered; they are meant to exist somewhere between the mind and the soul. We carry certain answers with us through time, but sometimes we forget to place the missing piece of the puzzle where it truly belongs. Often those answers come from our inner perception _ something that we refuse to believe and hesitate to trust. Instead, we seek confirmations from people and circumstances.

I believe answers are just temporary shelters, and questions are like the endless roads that we presume to walk. No answer is truly final, because every answer somewhere carries the seeds of another question. And with each question, another path appears among these endless roads. In this way, the journey we call life becomes more complex, more concentrated with meaning.

In a way, I suspect, not all questions demand a theory or explanation to answer them. Some just need to exist. They remind us of what we once thought, what we think now, and what we continue to assume. Sometimes an unanswered question feels safer than an unsatisfying answer _ answers that reveal bittersweet truths, or expose the quite intrusive patterns within us.

Just as humans question, the universe has its own ways of probing and wondering. There are moments when we ask questions and nature seems to whisper its answers softly, though they require a deeper kind of listening. At other times, it feels as though the universe is being asked. How often do we think of questions like,
‘Does time heal the universe, or simply record its passage?’ or
‘Could the sky be a mirror reflecting our consciousness?’ or
‘Are we discovering the universe, or is it revealing itself to us?’

Maybe humans exist so the universe itself can ask questions.

Do we actually ever wonder about the purpose of stars? Are they silent witnesses to our existence, or storytellers of it? We rarely speak about the possibility that the universe might question our presence, or that the signs we overlook might already contain the answers we seek.

So ask yourself one question: do we really pay attention to what is never said? At certain times, it’s better to leave certain questions unanswered, so they remain alive within us. Every answer carries an understanding that can feel heavy and complicated for the soul to hold.

We do not always ask questions simply to receive answers, but so that their presence may be recognized.

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Is the Universe asking us Questions we can’t hear? was originally published in Pen With Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It was quiet after a long time, when I peacefully closed my eyes, rested my soul, and switched my brain off. Yet even in the stillness, a restless and overactive part of me remained awake that only possessed unreal thoughts _ a kind we call imagination.

Resting with my eyes closed was more like switching dimensions, stepping into a world we wish to live in forever. My eyelids fluttered open in an illusion that was way better than the reality we likely face every day. We refer to this experience as dreams. However, these aren’t merely the dreams we witness.

Ever felt a connection to being suspended in the middle? Just like a droplet of water before it hits the soil. The fact that it knows it is being pulled by the gravity that turns into something we call rain. The moment of lingering in between thoughts that even you fail to understand, it’s not just a vision of our minds, it’s an unknown essence of being alive, perhaps somewhere beyond here. And I felt something similar.

It wasn’t absolute or real in any way, but there was something in that dream that deeply touched my soul and resonated in a very familiar way. I asked myself, was there something left unresolved? This question kept me conflicted inside until I realized, it’s an element that stays amidst the stillness and whispering winds. Somewhere in our minds that we know but can’t reach.

I once dreamt about wandering beneath the silent canopies of trees in the woods. I found myself spending time collecting flowers, thorns, Pinecones, and resin in the basket. This scene directly pushed me to observe all that in our lives. And I found that connection. We continue to live by surviving diverse emotions and moments that fill our memories and time. Among them is joy and affection seen as flowers, pain and suffering as thorns, hope and potential as pinecones, and resin as the silent healing of the tree, much like the quiet strength we grow after pain. It all slowly gathers in the basket that we carry through life.

And, at last, I grasped the understanding that quietly unfolded. That we drift through existence, gathering what life offers.

We often dream of escaping reality, yet forget to explore it while being alive.

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The Basket Of Life: A Journey Through Dreams was originally published in Beyond Lines on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I covered miles, waiting for that cold breeze to slip through the window beside me. Everything moved outside, yet I felt the stillness of a corpse. A cold siren rang constantly within my soul, like the silent waves of sound that linger after a moment of mourning.

My feet remained frozen as I stared at every tiny detail outside. I kept gazing, without knowing why. I felt my veins swell beneath my skin, as if the burden of traveling were too heavy to bear. All vehicles rushed by, as if they were chasing something more crucial than the peace of moving with the air.

Eventually, the seat began to give off its warmth, and I sat there with thoughts no one could understand. The feelings and sensations of others were somewhat apprehensible, yet far from grasping a tremor of my own. I was experiencing something I could hardly comprehend. I suspect it was the perception of having to bear the burden of traveling so far.

On this journey, my only confidants were my eyes and a processing brain. How long and unsettling a journey must feel, with a mind that can not stop analyzing unnecessary details, and eyes that cannot cease gazing at the unnoticed threads of a random cloth.

Consequently, the weariness and the expense of travel began to take hold. I could not resist my mind, which grew conflicted after observing the lives of many people out there. I couldn’t get off, and I’m assuming things that may not be real. Yet, with the same inner exhaustion, a wave of quiet and a tide of tranquility silently splashed through my soul. And still, I felt it. These moments are often the ones we forget to cherish and truly feel.

You just need to look around — you are surrounded by them.

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Through Still Windows_ A Motionless Journey was originally published in Pen With Paper on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.