What the ocean told me :)
It’s been a week since I got back from my vacation, and the contrast between then and now still lingers quietly in the corners of my day. I’ve always viewed vacations not just as a break, but as an escapade – a pause from the chaos, a chance to feel new feelings, see new lives, and let my thoughts breathe differently. A vacation, to me, is a place to experience, to write, to feel – and often, to heal a little too.
Neel, as always, reminded me to look beyond the familiar lens of pessimism I sometimes carry about life. He sees the world in a different light – and while our writing styles are unlike each other, I often feel that’s the most beautiful part. He nudges me to feel more, but express it less. To simplify instead of amplify.
I want my writing to be like that vacation – gentle, warm, like a hand on your shoulder when life gets too loud. Simple, but not empty. Familiar, but still an escape. These days, reading is for everyone – but writing, especially the kind that feels like a whisper instead of a speech – that feels rare. Maybe that’s why we’ve been showing up to write every day, grammar be damned. No pressure to be profound. Just a few words. Every day. That’s it.
When we went to Koh Samui – money worries aside – I felt like I had slipped into the pages of a Japanese novel. You know the kind: nothing much happens, but you’re deeply moved anyway. A life with routines, meanings, and quiet depths. A slow coffee, a small walk, a passing breeze that makes you think about childhood. That’s the life I’ve always dreamed of. And yet, I contradict myself often – because when I do live that kind of life for too long, I crave movement. Adventure. Uncertainty. Why is that? We talk about it a lot, but the answer never arrives. Maybe it’s not meant to.
This week, back in Chennai, felt like the stark opposite of last week. It’s strange how time moves – fast, but unevenly. We’re all living on the same planet, just a few hours apart, and yet the lives we lead couldn’t be more different. Just last week, we were riding a scooter around an island, finding coffee places and secret beaches. I remember the ocean stretching endlessly, reminding me how small I was – and how okay that felt. I remember reading under the sun, hoping my shoulders would tan evenly, but not caring too much if they didn’t.
I remember singing aloud on the scooter – no headphones, no traffic, no fear – just joy. Just movement. We didn’t have a perfect plan. But we had direction. We were heading to nowhere in particular, and yet it felt like we were going home. That scooter, that road, that version of me – she was happy. She wasn’t chasing goals. She was just… living.
And yet, when I’m back home in Chennai, I don’t miss Koh Samui the way I thought I would. Instead, I find myself loving this life too – the one with routines, with people, with a warm bed and familiar lights. There’s something comforting about returning. About having someone to come back to, and something to come back for.
Bangkok, on the other hand, was a different kind of lesson. That city buzzed. We walked almost 12 kilometers every day – not because we had to, but because we wanted to. We watched people. Locals buying dinner from the night market. Tourists taking in sights with wide eyes and tired feet. It felt like a community inside a community – like the city opened up differently after dark.
Sometimes I’d catch myself smiling at strangers. We didn’t speak, we didn’t stop – but our lives intersected briefly on the same street. Isn’t that wild? That we could walk the same path, breathe the same air, be headed in opposite directions, and still never really know each other? Different journeys, same pavement.
And then there’s the airport – the place where this realization always hits me the hardest. Everyone’s in a rush, some returning, some escaping. Some happy, some heartbroken. But we all gather under one roof, heading toward the same destinations for entirely different reasons.
It always makes me wonder – our destinations might be the same, but our reasons…
Our reasons are deeply personal, unspoken, hidden in the folds of our lives.