Vartika's World

Just like you didn’t mean to burn the toast, life sometimes surprises you with outcomes you didn’t plan for, no matter how carefully you thought things through. You just have to go through life without a manual and figure things out as you go. Burnt toast has a bitter taste, much like the tough experiences in life that leave an unpleasant mark and linger longer than you'd like. But there is still a silver lining. Such experiences make you a wiser person. If it won't be bitter, you won't pay attention next time.  Even when burnt, parts of the toast can still be eaten. Similarly, even when life feels messed up, there’s usually something salvageable or a lesson to carry forward. You always have to look at a situation with a problem-solving approach rather than a victim approach because a victim mindset will only take you so far. The smell of burnt toast might snap you out of autopilot just like life’s “burnt” moments can jolt you into awareness and make you reconsider your pac...

The seasons keep changing outside, but in my room, it is always late September. A strange, stretch of time: neither summer nor yet winter. Just a long inhale that never gets to be exhaled. There’s only one portal to the outside world: a tiny window. It lets in slivers of light, moments of wind, just enough to remind me that the world is still alive. Just enough to keep me informed that it moves on with or without me. What about the door, you might ask? The door is not for me to use. It’s too much of an opening. Too much air, too many possibilities. Too much exposure. If I opened it, the fragile insect that’s been growing inside me for some time, that secret, that feeble trembling being, might not survive. This insect is strange. It keeps me sane and drives me mad at the same time. I don’t know if it’s my conscience, or my soul. But I do know this, it throws a new tantrum every day. And oddly, each tantrum gives me a reason to live just one more day. It thrives in the dampness of autu...

Lipstick smudges in the corners of the wilted pages of my favorite book tell a love story. One I ache to step into, to breathe its air, taste its grief, and suffer the horrors of actually living as a possible human being. My own life feels like that of a stone with a pulse, unmoved except when I live vicariously through the fictional souls crafted by real people whose own lives, weren’t enough to satisfy the tragedy of being human. So I’ve rented an apartment in fiction, tucked away in my head. I live there like a tenant, paying rent in illusions, wallpapering the walls with borrowed dreams to hide a void too vast and too dark to step into.