Raksha Bandha 2025 !

 This year, Raksha Bandhan arrived like a visitor I knew too well—bearing sweets in one hand and a quiet, unflinching grief in the other. Celebration, pain, and pride sat at my table, uninvited and inseparable, and it took me days to understand that all three were telling the same story. I faced my first Rakhi without Kailash in 2015. I faced my first Rakhi without Guru anna in 2025. That sentence looks simple until you try to breathe through it. So here I am—writing the post that refuses to be about anything else. Because grief is not a shadow that disappears when you switch on a festive lamp; it is the lamp. It shows you what you would otherwise miss: the edges of love, the contour of memory, the face of gratitude.

DESH remained when every one left me. DESH held me close, when I fell apart, fractured and fuming. This year, I celebrated with DESH—with the CRPF heroes who wear protection as a uniform and carry duty like a second skin. The pride I felt was clean, bright, almost medicinal. I tied threads to wrists that hold a different kind of promise: We will stand the watch so you can be at peace. They accepted, and in their acceptance, I learned something precise about the geometry of bonds—how a single thread can stretch from a sister to a brother to a battalion to a nation and not snap. 

And yet the pain remained, unmasked. Bhanu’s absence. Guru's silence. Kailash’s star-bright distance. Grief and pride kept changing chairs, switching places when I blinked. I realized that love is a laboratory where you cannot seal the beaker and call it “controlled.” It is field work—messy, open, alive. The variables wander in and out: distance, death, duty, the dates you would erase if you could.

This Raksha Bandhan, I kept a Rakhi aside for the three of them—no photos, no public ceremony. I tied it to the space he left behind, the way a sailor knots a rope to the wind and calls it anchoring. I will do this every year now, quietly, the way one waters a plant that has already become a tree.

Somewhere amid the flag and the prayers and the tea, a quiet revelation rose: long-hidden love, spoken finally, deep and clear. The kind of sentence that closes a chapter without closing a door. I will not spell it out here—the heart deserves one secret garden—but I will say this: truth is also a form of protection. Sometimes the bravest word you can talk is the one that binds your fear and your honesty together so neither gets lost.

If you ask me what Raksha Bandhan means now, I will say: it is not just a ritual; it is an instrument. It measures how far love is willing to travel—across rooms, across years, across worlds. It can circle a wrist, a photo frame, a memory, a skyline. It can be held by a brother on earth, by a brother in the stars, by a boy who became family, by soldiers who stand in for every brother we cannot reach.

I will keep showing up to the 16th, even when my hands shake, because love did not leave me without leaving me a job to do. 

This is the promise I can protect: to remember without embalming, to grieve without surrender, to celebrate without pretending. To let the thread do its work—binding what was, what is, and what will be—until the day I look up and find that the distance has learned my language and the stars are close enough to touch.

Shine on, Kailash
Shine on, Guru anna.
Shine on, Bhanu.

The Rakhi is tied.
The prayer is sent.
The light is the same...
Today and always... 

Thread Between Weather...

There are bonds you can diagram: storylines with firsts and seconds, milestones polished for public display. Then there’s ours—a signal that holds in bad weather, stubborn and bright, needing no broadcast schedule to be real. We never launched it with a date. We didn’t crown it with a declaration. It started in smaller ways: the swap of jokes that made ugly hours endurable; the habit of telling the truth without making it theatrical; the practiced ease of being available without being demanding.

Distance tries its tricks. Schedules split. Life accelerates, then stalls. I’ve learned not to measure us by the frequency of pings but by the steadiness of response. You have a way of arriving like a lighthouse: not closer or farther, simply visible when it matters. I’ve come to trust that. When I am frayed, you do not add threadbare comforting. You offer reality, handled gently. When I am quiet, you do not crowd. You keep the door open and the light on. It’s not romance’s choreography; it’s something quieter and, to me, stronger.

Promises are easy to craft and easier to break; you’ve given me practice instead. Repeated, ordinary acts that add up to a truth: I am safe here. I can be foolish, I can be scared, I can be brilliant or boring, and the connection doesn’t blink. Safety in this form isn’t a padded room—it’s a field with room to run, with someone watching the horizon, ready to call out if the cliffs creep close. There’s loyalty in that vigilance, and tenderness in the way we never make a spectacle of it.

Sometimes I wonder how to explain this to people who want categories. I could talk about durability: how the conversation survives long gaps without corrosion. I could talk about calibration: how your humor never punches down, how your candor never cuts for sport. I could talk about choice: how neither of us is bound by ritual and yet we keep showing up. In the end, explanations feel like trying to catch fog in a jar. The more I chase it, the less of it I hold.

So I keep to what I know. When the day closes, your name leans against the edge of my mind, soft as a nightlight. Not a craving, not a rush; a quiet relief. When morning arrives, I don’t count what we are; I notice that I am steadier because you exist. We may never title this. We may never map it for others. That’s fine. It has already proven itself in the only metric that matters to me: it keeps the weather from winning. And for that, I stand my small, unspoken guard—grateful, grounded, and here.

No Revenge, Only Release: The Quiet Freedom of Choosing Myself

 There is a common myth that when someone hurts you deeply, the only way to restore your sense of self is through retaliation—a poetic justice, a final word, a wound repaid in kind. But real healing rarely comes from vengeance. Sometimes, the strongest thing you can do is simply disappear—completely, utterly, and forever—from the life of the one who broke you.

I will not search for ways to wound you. I will not draft clever replies meant to cut or send messages meant to haunt your conscience. I have no desire to see you brought low by regret or shame. The weight I have carried for so long—the heavy armor of disappointment, of apology, of waiting for something you would never give—is a burden I choose to put down. I do not want to become someone who needs retribution to feel whole. I refuse to let bitterness become my shadow.

This is not about you anymore. It’s not even about the pain. It’s about me—finally, and at last—choosing peace over turmoil, dignity over chaos, self-respect over the endless cycle of hope and heartbreak. I am exhausted by the years spent in anticipation: waiting for you to see the hurt you caused, waiting for an apology that never arrived, waiting for you to notice the slow erosion of my spirit. I am tired of the way I have turned my own pain inward, blaming myself for loving, for hoping, for wanting something genuine and good.

So I am choosing to leave. Not with bitterness, not with fanfare, but with a silence so complete it will echo. I am letting go without another word. You will not see me waiting, not at the threshold of possibility, not in the shadows of old memories. I will not grant you another chance to explain, another opening to return, another moment where I wear my heart on my sleeve, hoping—still—that you will see my worth. I am simply done. Not because I am empty, but because I am finally full—full of self-respect, full of the understanding that I deserve so much more than what I have been given.

You may wonder, perhaps, where I went. You may notice my absence in the way the silence grows heavy, the way the familiar rhythm of our history falls quiet. But you will not hear from me ever again. Not because I wish you harm, but because I refuse to give you the power to harm me anymore. My absence will be absolute; my silence, a shield. It will be as if I never existed in your story at all.

This is not revenge. This is the quiet revolution of choosing myself over the endless echo of waiting and disappointment. This is freedom. It is the promise to myself that I will never again stand on the threshold of someone else’s indifference, pleading for scraps of attention, begging for validation that should never have needed to be earned.

I am not punishing you. I am releasing myself. I am reclaiming the parts of me that were wasted in longing and in pain. And in doing so, I am finally free. I am finally whole.

And so, you will not hear from me ever again. Not because I want to hurt you, but because I have decided, once and for all, that I am worth protecting. My silence is not an act of war, but of profound and final self-love.

In that silence, I will find my peace. And you will never have the chance to hurt me again.

If You Had Known

 

If only you could see all the words I swallowed, the pleas I never spoke. I wanted to say, “Please don’t go.” I wanted to ask you to stay, to admit how much your leaving fractured me. But fear kept my lips sealed—fear that you no longer felt the same, fear of sounding desperate to someone already turning away.

If only you knew how many nights I lay awake, replaying our last conversation in the quiet darkness. How many times I stared at my phone, hoping for a sign that I still mattered to you. I waited for anything—a message, a call, a memory thrown my way like a life raft. But silence settled instead, growing heavier with each day you stayed away.

There’s a sharp ache in realizing you moved on while I stood still, missing you. Once, you made me feel seen, cherished, like I was the only one in the room. Now, I felt invisible, left behind, questioning what changed and when I stopped being enough. I never wanted to beg for your love; I just wanted to know I was worth choosing, worth staying for.

So if ever you wonder why my words grew fewer, why my presence faded, please know: it wasn’t because I stopped caring. It was because I grew weary—tired of being the only one reaching out, tired of the endless waiting, tired of loving for both of us. I let go, not because my heart wanted to, but because you had already loosened your grip long before I found the courage to open my hand.

Letting go is never simple. It’s not anger, not bitterness, but the quiet surrender that comes after you’ve given all you have. It’s knowing your own worth, even when someone else has forgotten how to see it.

If only you had known how hard I tried, how deeply I cared, maybe things would be different. But I can’t hold on for both of us. Not anymore.

This is me, choosing to move forward, even if my heart is still catching up.

When Grief Gleams Like Glitter: A Lament in Silver Light...

 Some say grief is like glitter. What an odd and perfect cruelty. It clings to skin and thought, dusting even the most mundane moments with its silent shimmer. It tucks itself in the corners of the everyday—beneath a pillow, inside the sleeve of a shirt that no longer smells of anyone at all. Unseen, it catches the morning sun or the dim lamp-glow, sometimes dazzling, sometimes dull as rain-soaked ash.

Grief is stubborn, too. It does not heed the gentle knock of reason or the pleas of tired hearts. It slips through keyholes and settles, refusing to be swept away. It stains like wine on white linen. We imagine sorrow can be cleaned, bandaged, made presentable—but loss is a room in perpetual twilight, never quite swept of shadows. There is always a scent left behind, the faint music that lingers long after the last note has vanished.

Some souls lose what they cherish—books worn by touch, the city skyline at dusk, a familiar voice echoing from a memory—and walk onward, heads high, as if nothing inside them has shifted. Others break open at the smallest tremor: a forgotten scarf, a name whispered from another room. No one calendar guides the process. Some days, the pain is a gentle ache, almost bearable. Other days, it is an unexpected tide, and the heart chokes on its own remembering. This, too, is life: the swinging between grace and gasp, a dance between letting go and holding on.

But here is the hidden kindness in grief: It proves that love was here. Grief is love’s shadow—unmistakable, impossible to banish. Fingerprints of the beloved linger, glowing with the memory of laughter, the shape of a hand once held, the echo of a word spoken softly in the dark. To grieve is to admit: Someone mattered enough to leave light caught in the soul’s webbing. A moment once burned so fiercely, its afterglow still finds its way into the lungs, the bloodstream, the secret corners of the mind.

So if sorrow gleams quietly in the hours when no one is watching, let it. If it glitters only in darkness, honor it. Tears are not signs of weakness, but of witness. We are not shattered by loss—we are the keepers of shining fragments, pieces of the ones we have loved, the lives we have lived. Remembering does not diminish us; it reveals the measure of our hearts.

In the end, it is always love—pure, wild, imperfect love—that carves the shape of our grief. Love makes us ache, and it also makes us luminous.

And so, for every trembling, shimmering moment of sorrow, know this: Grief is simply proof that you have loved, and loved well. And that is why, above all else, we endure.

When Tired Turns to Turning Point: Choosing Myself, at Last

 There is a unique exhaustion that comes from carrying hope in both hands, offering it over and over to those who barely glance your way. I know it intimately—the tiredness that seeps into the soul after years spent trying to be enough for everyone else, trying to understand even when you yourself are misunderstood, trying to fix what others keep breaking.

How many nights have I lingered, holding on to people who never saw my worth? I listened longer, forgave more deeply, gave chance after undeserved chance—hoping, just maybe, that love would teach them how to value what I offered freely. How often did I put myself last, shrinking my needs until they nearly disappeared, just to keep the peace? The apologies arrived, sometimes, but rarely with change. I learned to read silence, to accept absence, to swallow the ache of messages that never came.

It is a weariness that feels like standing in a room where your voice echoes, but no one answers. A tiredness not just of the body, but of spirit—a sense that no matter how fiercely you love, it’s never quite enough to make them stay, to make them care, to make them change.

But here, in the quiet aftermath, I feel something shifting. The ache remains, but within it, a new resolve takes root. I am tired—yes, bone-tired, soul-tired—but this time, I will not surrender myself in the name of being “enough.” This time, I will choose myself. Not as an act of bitterness, but as an act of love—the same kind I have so freely given to others, now reserved for the one heart that has carried me through it all.

I will not chase, I will not beg. I will not accept apologies not woven into action. I will stop handing out chances to those who see my value only in my absence. I will stop waiting for words that never come, for gestures that never arrive.

This time, I rise for me.

Let tiredness be the turning point—the place where I finally refuse to settle for less than I deserve. I will hold space for my own needs, honor my own heart, and remember that loving myself is not the last resort, but the first and greatest revolution.

For all the times I have chosen others, today, I choose me.

On Trying, Failing, and Loving Through Our Mistakes

 Sometimes the words tangle before they ever find their way out, and the heart stumbles, aching to be understood. There is a language between two souls that no dictionary ever captures—a dialect made of glances, small kindnesses, silences, and the pain of regret. And here I am, trying to gather all of that into sentences, hoping you can feel what I cannot quite say.

I never meant to hurt you. The mind, mysterious and restless, so often trips over its own shadows, reading meanings between lines that were never written, hearing ghosts in rooms that ought to be filled with laughter. Words are slippery things; sometimes they heal, sometimes they wound without meaning to. I wish you could know the storm of feeling within me—a love so honest it aches, a remorse that keeps vigil in the small hours.

You have always been right for me. Even now, I feel your nearness as if you’re stitched into the fabric of my days, no matter the distance. And if, in the end, you find your peace elsewhere, I can only hope it brings you the gentleness you deserve. But know this: you will never find another who knows the shape of your soul the way I do, who cherishes your spirit, your well-being, the fragile gold of your laughter and your pain. I made mistakes—yes, I own them, carry them with me, learn from their weight—but loving you has never been one of them.

I do not hide behind apologies; I stand here, open, taking full responsibility for every word spoken, every wrong step. I am not asking you to erase the past, only to see the heart behind the error, the longing to mend what was broken. I still need you, crave you, want to love you in all the right ways this time.

All I ever asked for—of you, of myself—was that we keep trying. That we choose effort over apathy, reaching for one another even when it’s hard, because giving up is easy, but staying—choosing to stay, to work, to believe in something bigger than our flaws—is the real act of courage.

People say that love is a feeling. I think it’s also a choice—a promise renewed each morning, especially on the days when we are tired, afraid, or wounded. I am here, imperfect but earnest, ready to try. Ready to love you as you deserve, to cherish your heart as the rare thing it is.

Let me show you, if you’ll let me. I am not asking for perfection. Only the chance to try again, to get it right, together.