There is a strange gentleness in a dream just before it becomes real.

For a long time, it is allowed freedoms it will later lose.

It can stretch itself into impossible sunsets and wide, unbroken windows. It can place you in cities whose names you still mispronounce, through winters you have never felt, into small cafés you only ever find by accident. In dreams, money is rarely urgent. Neither is time. Neither is the washing waiting somewhere in the background of real life.

And then, without much warning, the dream is given a date.

After that, it changes its nature.

It begins to ask for things.

Forms.

Choices.

Certainties.

It starts to sit with you at the table, interrupting breakfast thoughts, waking you in the night with questions you had not yet learned to answer. A dream with a date becomes something else entirely—less airy, more insistent, almost responsible.

Ours has been turning practical for a while now.

We have packed, unpacked, and packed again. We have stared at images until unfamiliar places began to feel like memories we have not yet lived. We know the shape of roads we have never walked, the tone of skies we have never stood beneath.

We have begun to imagine mornings there.

And I think that is the most intimate form of hope—to picture an ordinary morning in a life that has not yet begun.

Not the dramatic things.

Just the kettle boiling.

A window half-open.

One of us still asleep.

The other standing in a room that does not yet belong to us, watching a day begin in a language we have not yet learned to hear.

Our dreams have not stayed still.

I don’t think I understood before that they were allowed to grow with us.

I used to believe dreams were things you either reached or lost.

But some of them are patient. They evolve quietly, the way people do.

What once felt essential becomes less important. What once seemed small begins to matter in ways you cannot easily explain.

A quiet home.

Work that feels like it belongs to you.

A table that is never quite empty.

Enough ease in life to be occasionally unwise.

Journeys that change you slightly.

Slow Sundays that ask nothing of you.

A kitchen that learns your habits without being told.

A life large enough to surprise you, and small enough to hold.

And perhaps, one day, voices in rooms that are still silent.

Perhaps many things we have not yet learned how to name.

The older I become, the less I am drawn to dreams that only look impressive from the outside.

I want the ones that feel like something from within.

And maybe that is what it means to grow alongside someone.

Two separate imaginations begin far apart, and slowly, almost without noticing, they start to borrow from each other.

His dream begins to carry pieces of mine.

Mine begins to make space for pieces of his.

And then there comes a point where you can no longer remember who first imagined the window, the journey, the life you still talk about late at night.

It stops being mine or his.

It becomes ours.

Of course, there is a foreign country in all of this.

When I say foreign, I know I am already imagining the wrong things.

Airports. Maps. Currency. Weather that behaves differently.

But foreignness, I think, is far more ordinary than that.

It will be in not knowing which bread to choose.

In standing in front of a machine and not yet understanding what it wants from you.

In hearing laughter nearby, understanding the words, but missing the shape of the joke.

In the first cold evening when everyone else seems dressed for a season you have not yet learned.

In missing something simple from home and realizing distance has quietly made it precious.

There will be days when being new feels like a gift.

And days when it feels like effort.

I think I am ready for both.

There is something almost indulgent about a place you do not yet know.

It has not had the chance to disappoint you.

It has not become ordinary.

Every street still holds the possibility of becoming your favourite.

Somewhere there is a corner we will pass a hundred times before we ever truly see it.

Somewhere there is a view we will one day stop noticing.

Somewhere a stranger is living a completely ordinary day, unaware that they will later exist in our stories.

And that makes everything feel beautifully unfinished.

And still, beneath all of it, there is the question of home.

I have been turning that word over in my mind.

Home.

We often give it to buildings too easily.

To cities, rooms, childhood spaces, familiar roads. And yes, they matter. Some places enter us so deeply that years later a smell or a certain light can return us to them without asking permission.

But over time, especially when you love someone for long enough, the word begins to loosen its boundaries.

Home stops behaving like geography.

You notice it in small, almost invisible ways.

A hotel room feels less foreign when he is in it.

A wrong turn feels less unsettling when you are both lost.

In a crowded place, you find his face and something in you settles without explanation.

You have not arrived anywhere new.

And yet, you are not lost either.

Perhaps that is why starting again somewhere else feels less frightening than it should.

I am not going into the unknown alone.

I am going with the most familiar part of my life.

Him.

And there is a kind of quiet relief in that.

Not the loud, cinematic kind of comfort.

Something softer.

The knowledge that in a room neither of us has ever slept in, one of us will still reach for the light.

Soon, the country we have been imagining will begin to correct us.

And I find I am looking forward to that.

The streets will not match the photographs exactly. The weather will have moods no one warned us about. Things will cost more than expected. Plans will fail in ordinary, unremarkable ways.

The dream will gather imperfections.

And I hope it does.

Perfect dreams are beautiful, but they cannot be lived in.

A life needs texture.

Shoes left by the door.

Receipts forgotten in pockets.

Small disagreements over directions.

Late dinners.

A favourite cup that slowly becomes part of the day.

A bad evening carried home and made lighter simply by sharing it.

These are the things that will make a place ours.

Not arrival.

But repetition.

We will leave pieces of ourselves there slowly.

A memory attached to a street.

A birthday tied to a room.

A joke that belongs forever to a corner we will forget the name of.

A difficult winter.

A generous spring.

And one day, without noticing, we will know where things are without thinking.

And perhaps that will be the moment we have truly arrived.

There is a quiet arrogance in dreaming, I suppose.

Two people look at an enormous world and decide, almost gently, that there must be a small part of it that belongs to them.

A place for their mornings.

Their mistakes.

Their ambitions.

Their future selves.

And then they begin to search.

I find that strangely tender.

Not because everything will unfold exactly as imagined.

It won’t.

Some dreams will take shape.

Some will shift.

Some will be replaced by desires we have not yet learned to recognize.

But we will continue to grow around them, as we always have.

Together.

That is the part I trust most.

For now, there is still a thin distance between imagination and life.

The plans are still only plans.

The streets are still photographs.

The window is still something we speak about rather than see.

And the people we will become there are still waiting somewhere ahead of us.

Soon, all of it will become ordinary.

And I hope it does.

I hope that one day we are standing in a kitchen, distracted by something small, surrounded by a life that would astonish the people we are now.

And perhaps we will not even notice.

Perhaps one of us will be making tea while the other speaks from another room.

Outside will be the country that once felt foreign.

Inside will be the quiet accumulation of years.

And among all those ordinary things will be the dreams we carried across—

changed again,

softened again,

still growing.

As for home,

perhaps I have misunderstood it all along.

Perhaps it was never behind us.

Perhaps it was never ahead of us either.

Perhaps it was never a place at all.

Perhaps, all this time,

it was simply the person

I was making the plans with.

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Sadhna Mishra Bhagi - Medium

The Country Ahead of Us was originally published in ILLUMINATION on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I work in technology, which means I am professionally encouraged to be optimistic about the future. We speak easily of innovation, intelligence and transformation. There is always a new tool about to change everything, usually demonstrated by someone who looks extremely pleased that a machine can now write an email.

I share some of that excitement. I would hardly work in this field otherwise.

But there is a peculiar experience in watching the technology of the future encounter women and, with all the knowledge of the internet at its disposal, fall back on some remarkably old ideas.

In 2024, UNESCO tested several generative AI systems and found that women were far more likely to be described in domestic roles. One model placed women in domestic situations four times as often as men. Female names were associated with words such as “home,” “family” and “children”; male names with “business,” “executive,” “salary” and “career.”

I read this while working in technology myself.

There is no dramatic conclusion to draw from that. Mostly, there is irony.

You can spend your day discussing systems, solving technical problems and contributing to an industry supposedly building tomorrow, while the technology itself studies yesterday and decides that the executive is probably called John.

One must appreciate the situation.

The easy reaction is to say that the machine is sexist. But that lets us off rather too easily. A machine has no mother to resent, no marriage to be disappointed by, no private conviction that women are naturally better at taking minutes during meetings. It learns from what we give it.

And what we have given it is us.

Our books, photographs, news reports, advertisements, search histories, hiring records and accumulated habits. The evidence of what society has valued, whom it has promoted, whom it has photographed behind a desk and whom it has photographed beside an oven.

This is why I keep returning to something the computer scientist Joy Buolamwini calls the “coded gaze.” Her own interest in algorithmic bias began when facial-analysis software failed to detect her face. It worked when she put on a white mask. Later research by Buolamwini found striking differences in how accurately commercial systems classified different faces: error rates were below one per cent for lighter-skinned men and reached as high as 35 per cent for darker-skinned women.

What stays with me is not only the statistic. It is the image of the mask.

A woman sits before a supposedly intelligent machine, and to become visible to it, she must cover her own face.

There is something terribly familiar about that, even outside technology.

Women have spent a great deal of history adapting themselves to systems that were not designed with them in mind. Change the way you speak. Change the way you dress. Be more assertive. Not that assertive. Smile. Do not appear weak. Do not appear threatening. Fit the system, and perhaps the system will recognise you.

The mask is simply a more literal version.

This is where conversations about bias in AI become interesting to me, because they are not really conversations about machines. They are conversations about what we consider normal.

When a system associates leadership with men, it has not discovered a law of nature. It has noticed a pattern in history. The danger lies in allowing historical patterns to acquire the authority of prediction.

We already know what happens when institutions say, “This is simply how things have always been.” Technology can make the same argument without using words.

That is particularly uncomfortable in hiring.

For years, women have been given the same reassuring sermon: merit will win. Work hard, earn qualifications, gain experience and prove yourself. Of course, there are several footnotes. Be confident, but not intimidating. Ambitious, but pleasant. Visible, but never attention-seeking. Speak up, but perhaps not so much that you become difficult.

Then we introduce systems trained on historical employment data and ask them to identify the sort of person who has succeeded before.

Before. It is such an innocent word.

But who was allowed to succeed before? Who was hired before? Who was promoted, mentored, given difficult projects, forgiven for mistakes and described as having leadership potential?

The past is not useless information. But neither is it an impartial judge.

This is the part of the AI debate that interests me far more than whether a chatbot occasionally says something offensive. Bias becomes most powerful when nobody feels personally responsible for it. A person can be questioned. A manager can be challenged. But when a decision comes from a system — a score, a ranking, a recommendation — it acquires the clean appearance of objectivity.

Discrimination looks much more respectable with a dashboard.

Then there is the question of beauty.

In 2024, there was an actual beauty pageant for AI-generated women called “Miss AI.” The contestants were not women but digital creations, judged partly on beauty, partly on technology and partly on social-media influence. Claire Leibowicz of the Partnership on AI observed that the technology world seemed to be introducing people to AI-generated images through something they already knew they liked: beautiful women.

I find the whole thing almost too perfectly absurd.

We built machines capable of generating practically anything the imagination allows, and one of our ideas was to invent women who could enter beauty contests without the inconvenience of being real.

No bad skin day. No ageing. No complaints about working conditions. No opinions unless someone writes them.

The perfect woman, at last: entirely programmable.

That is a joke, but only partly.

AI did not invent impossible beauty standards. It merely arrived in a culture already well stocked with them. The generated woman is often young, smooth-skinned, symmetrical and improbably proportioned. She inherits the same narrow fantasies women have been negotiating for generations, except now those fantasies can be produced endlessly and instantly.

And then there are deepfakes.

I do not want to make them the centre of this essay, because the broader problem is larger than deepfakes. But they are difficult to ignore precisely because they expose the ugliest end of the same question: who controls a woman’s image?

In 2023, fifteen-year-old Francesca Mani discovered that boys at her school had used AI to create fake sexually explicit images of her and other girls. She later said, “When that happened to me and my classmates, we had zero protection whatsoever.”

That sentence is more disturbing to me than any dramatic warning about artificial intelligence.

Zero protection whatsoever.

The technology was new enough to amaze people and apparently new enough to confuse institutions, but the humiliation landed on very real girls.

This is why the familiar advice given to women online feels so inadequate. Be careful what you post. Keep your account private. Protect your photographs.

But Francesca Mani did not create those images. The girls did not consent to them. A woman no longer even needs to undress to be exposed.

At some point, surely, responsibility must move away from the woman being visible and towards the person choosing to violate her.

That seems obvious when written plainly. Oddly, society has spent centuries complicating it.

Still, I resist the temptation to make AI the villain of the story. It is satisfying to imagine a sinister machine corrupting society. It is also convenient.

The machine did not invent our obsession with women’s appearances. It did not invent the association between men and authority. It did not invent discrimination in hiring or the humiliation of women as entertainment.

It found abundant examples.

And perhaps that is what makes this conversation worth having. Artificial intelligence holds up an awkward record of what we have repeatedly said, shown and rewarded. Sometimes the reflection is crude. Sometimes it is almost comic. Sometimes, as in the case of girls discovering fabricated sexual images of themselves, it is devastating.

But it is ours.

Joy Buolamwini has argued that it is not too late to “unmask AI and protect what’s human in a world of machines.” I like the choice of the word human. Not efficient. Not advanced. Not intelligent.

Human.

Because perhaps the important question is not whether AI can become more like us. It is whether, in teaching it to become like us, we can resist passing on every prejudice we have inherited.

I work in technology. I still believe in it.

But belief should not require obedience, and optimism should not require blindness.

The future will not become fair simply because it is new. A new system can carry an old prejudice very efficiently. A machine can process more information than any person alive and still arrive at a remarkably stale idea of what a woman should be.

The machine has read the room.

The more uncomfortable question is whether we are prepared to admit what was written on the walls.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to stay connected, you’re welcome to subscribe and stay awhile. ❤

Sadhna Mishra Bhagi - Medium

The Machine Has Read the Room was originally published in ILLUMINATION on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The fire had passed before the dawn,

And left the hills with nothing on

But blackened stones and branches bare,

And smoke still hanging in the air.

I thought the field had lost its name,

That nothing green could follow flame;

Yet near a stump, beneath the gray,

One tender shoot had found its way.

No boast it made, no leaf unfurled

As though to prove itself the world;

It only rose through ash and rain,

And quietly began again.

The forest keeps what fire has taught:

That loss is not the end we thought.

For under earth, where roots endure,

The scorched may sleep ; and still be sure.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to stay connected, you’re welcome to subscribe and stay awhile. ❤

Sadhna Mishra Bhagi - Medium

Scorched was originally published in No Time on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is something deeply unsettling about a country where millions of students prepare for one examination while the adults responsible for conducting it prepare for press conferences.

The recent protests surrounding Sonam Wangchuk should not be reduced to another political spectacle. Whether one agrees with his methods is secondary. The larger question is why education in India has reached a point where a hunger strike becomes a vehicle for demanding institutional accountability.

The crisis is no longer about a single examination.

It is about trust.

Every year, nearly two million students dedicate years of their lives to preparing for NEET. Families empty savings accounts, children spend their adolescence inside coaching centres, and entire households revolve around one date on the calendar. In return, students expect one thing ; not guaranteed success, not preferential treatment, but a fair contest.

That expectation is not unreasonable.

It is the bare minimum.

When allegations of irregularities emerge repeatedly, governments cannot respond as though they are managing a public relations problem. They are managing a crisis of confidence. Institutions do not survive on authority alone. They survive because people believe in them.

That belief has been steadily eroded.

A mature democracy demands accountability from those in charge. Leadership is not merely the privilege of inaugurating projects and celebrating achievements; it is the responsibility of answering for institutional failure. India once had leaders who understood this distinction. Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned as Railway Minister after a train accident, not because he drove the train, but because he believed public office carried moral responsibility.

Today, accountability has become a political inconvenience.

Everyone investigates.

No one resigns.

Everyone promises reform.

Nothing fundamentally changes.

The result is predictable. Students lose faith not only in examinations but in the institutions that conduct them.

Yet it would be equally dishonest to pretend that the problem ends with the government.

India’s education system has become an assembly line for two professions. Every year, lakhs of students are funnelled towards medicine and engineering while countless other careers remain invisible. Parents, schools, coaching institutes, and society all play a part in sustaining this fiction. Children are rarely asked what they are good at. They are told what is respectable.

The consequences are written in rising anxiety, depression, burnout, and an education economy worth thousands of crores.

Failure has become an industry.

Success has become a lottery.

The protests themselves deserve reflection.

Citizens have every right to demand accountability. Democracies need protest. They need uncomfortable questions. But every movement also carries a burden: to protect the legitimacy of its cause. The moment an education movement becomes a stage for unrelated ideological battles, partisan grandstanding, or fringe rhetoric, it hands its critics an excuse to ignore the students it claims to represent.

The issue is too important to become another episode in India’s endless political theatre.

Students deserve better than being reduced to hashtags by social media, vote banks by politicians, and consumers by coaching companies.

Education is not charity.

It is not a campaign promise.

It is the first contract between a Republic and its young citizens. The Republic asks for discipline, honesty, and hard work. In return, it owes them transparency, competence, and fairness.

That contract is breaking.

And when a nation teaches its brightest young minds that politics matters more than merit, it should not be surprised when those same minds begin looking for a future somewhere else.

India does not have an education problem.

It has a political problem that keeps producing education crises.

Until leaders begin treating every examination failure as their own failure; not merely an administrative inconvenience ; students will continue paying the price for mistakes they did not make.

The future of this country should not depend on who shouts the loudest in Parliament.

It should depend on who studies the hardest in the classroom.

Today, that no longer feels like a certainty.

And that should frighten every Indian.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to stay connected, you’re welcome to subscribe and stay awhile. ❤

Sadhna Mishra Bhagi - Medium

The World Cup no longer enters our house through the television. It now reaches our house through two mobile phones.

It glows in the palm. It follows my father from room to room. It sits with my brother at the edge of the bed, at the dining table, in corridors, beside half-finished cups of tea. The match has become smaller, but the noise around it has not.

From another room, I hear my brother cry out.

There has been a missed chance, a bad pass, a foolish foul, or one of those offences known only to men who watch football closely. I do not need to see the screen. The sound tells me enough. Hope has risen. Hope has struck the post. Hope has been denied by a referee.

My father and brother watch separately, yet together. Each has his own screen, his own angle, his own delay of a second or two. Sometimes one shouts before the other has seen the goal. Sometimes celebration arrives in stages: first from the bedroom, then from the kitchen, then in the form of rapid footsteps and an urgent explanation.

The explanation is always beyond me.

There is talk of shape, pressure, width, transition, high lines and low blocks. Men are said to be between lines, behind lines and running beyond lines. A player may be praised for creating space, though the field seems already full of it. Another may be condemned for not seeing a pass that my brother, lying sideways on a pillow, has seen perfectly.

It is a grave business.

My father studies the game with the fixed attention of a field commander. My brother watches with the certainty of a man who knows what should have been done and exactly when it should have been done. Between them, whole systems rise and fall. Managers become fools. Defenders lose discipline. Midfields collapse. Nations suffer.

To me, it is mostly thunder without rain.

I understand the score. I understand when a goal has been missed because my brother’s cry changes shape. I understand when a team has lost because the house becomes quiet. Beyond that, their language reaches me in fragments, like military orders heard from a distant hill.

Yet the intensity is plain.

These are men who may let ordinary disappointments pass without a word. A delayed payment, a bad day, an insult, a worry — such things are borne in silence. But let a striker waste an open chance and sorrow finds its voice.

Football permits what life often forbids.

It permits outrage without shame, hope without caution, and grief without disguise. It allows my father to care openly. It allows my brother to pace the room. It turns a small screen into a field vast enough to hold pride, fear, memory and blame.

The winner takes it all, they say.

The cup, the anthem, the photographs, the name that survives.

Perhaps that is true on the field. In the house, things are divided differently.

The winner takes the trophy. My father takes the argument. My brother takes the injustice. I take the cries that travel through the walls.

I may never understand the false nine. I may never know why a full-back must invert, or why a team with most of the ball can still be accused of doing nothing with it. But I know the sound of belief when it bursts from a room. I know the silence that follows defeat. I know how two men, each bent over a small screen, can be carried together into a stadium thousands of miles away.

The screen has grown smaller.

The game has not.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to stay connected, you’re welcome to subscribe and stay awhile. ❤

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This might be my most time-consuming, relentless piece of work yet. I went back through every Taylor Swift album in order, listening not only for how her ideas about love changed, but for the versions of myself I could hear changing alongside them. What began as an essay about Taylor Swift became something far more personal: an excavation of the beliefs we carry about being chosen, being known, heartbreak, language, performance, and the quiet work of learning what love can / cannot do for us.

I have rewritten, cut, reconsidered and returned to this piece more times than I can count. Perhaps fittingly, it refused to be finished easily.

I was never a true Swiftie.

This confession will cost me little, since I have never owned a friendship bracelet, never searched an album cover for hidden numerals, and could not, under examination, account for every man, scarf, cardigan, doorway, December evening, or shade of red that has passed through the Taylor Swift universe.

But her music found its way into my life anyway.

Not all at once. That would have been too much like conversion. It happened gradually. A song entered because someone sent it to me. Another remained after a long drive. One returned years later, altered by nothing except the person listening to it.

There are songs I remember because of where I was when I heard them.

Others because of who I was.

That distinction matters.

The songs do not change, but we do, and sometimes returning to an old song is like finding a letter written to a former self. You recognise the handwriting. You remember the urgency. You are slightly embarrassed by the confidence.

So when Taylor Swift married, I did something I had never done before.

I went back and listened to the albums in order.

Not shuffled. Not the greatest hits. Not the songs an algorithm had decided I might tolerate.

The albums.

I wanted to understand the distance between the girl who wrote about Romeo and the woman who reached marriage after nearly two decades of publicly changing her mind about love.

I also wanted, though I understood this only later, to measure my own distance.

I began with Taylor Swift and was surprised by how young longing sounds when you are no longer young enough to trust it completely.

The first album is full of watching, waiting, wondering whether somebody will notice. I recognised that girl immediately.

Most of us have been her.

There was a time when I believed being loved would solve the particular mystery of me. The right person would arrive and, by choosing me, confirm that I had been worth choosing all along.

At that age, attention can feel like evidence.

A glance becomes significant. A message is read several times. A three-minute conversation acquires the textual complexity of Hamlet. We are very generous with meaning when we are young.

Then came Fearless, and the balcony appeared.

Romeo arrives. The father disapproves. There is danger, pursuit, a ring, a rescue.

Listening again, I realised I no longer found the fantasy foolish. Adulthood can make us smug about the innocence we have survived.

But there was something tender in that belief that love meant recognition.

Someone would see you.

That was the miracle.

Not merely look at you, but understand you. Find something in you the rest of the world had missed.

I understood the seduction of that idea because I had lived inside it too.

For years, I confused being chosen with being known. I thought strong feeling was proof of deep understanding. I thought if someone returned, they must have realised my value. I mistook attention for intimacy more than once and called it fate because fate sounded better than poor judgement.

We improve the language as we get older.

The mistakes are often the same.

By Speak Now, the girl was no longer content merely to wait. She had things to say.

There were confessions, accusations, apologies, declarations. The fantasy was no longer simply that love would arrive, but that the right words might still save it.

This may be the album I understood most personally.

I have always believed too much in language.

I have believed that if I could explain myself clearly enough, no one could misunderstand me. That if I found the exact sentence, I could repair a friendship, end an argument, make a person see what they had done, or persuade someone to become what they had already demonstrated they were not.

Writers are especially vulnerable to this delusion.

We imagine there is always one more paragraph.

One more clarification.

One beautifully constructed message after which the other person will put down their phone and think, My God. She was right about everything.

Life has rarely been so cooperative.

Still, I do not regret learning to speak.

Before we understand that language has limits, we must first understand that silence does too.

Then came Red, and suddenly the songs felt more familiar to me.

Love was no longer rescue.

It was weather.

It burned, flooded, disappeared, returned. Memory became sacred. Objects became evidence. Pain became proof.

That was a language I knew.

There were years when I believed the people hardest to forget must necessarily have been the most important.

I no longer believe this.

Some people remain because they were unfinished. Some because they hurt our pride. Some because we never received the explanation that would allow the mind to close its little ledger and go home.

And some remain because we preferred the story to the person.

I have done this.

Give me a silence and I have made mystery of it.

Give me inconsistency and I have called it complexity.

Give me absence and, with sufficient loneliness, I have been perfectly capable of building a god.

Pain is persuasive. When something wounds us deeply, we assume it must have been deep.

But a splinter may occupy the whole hand.

That is one thing I wish I had understood earlier.

By 1989, the castle had disappeared.

The city lights came on. Love became fast, stylish, uncertain. People left before morning, returned against better judgement, and behaved as if expecting less were a form of freedom.

I recognised this too.

There is a stage after heartbreak when we become terribly clever.

We rehearse indifference. We learn to laugh first. We insist that we are enjoying the moment, which sometimes means we are too frightened to ask whether the moment intends to remain.

There is dignity in independence.

There is also a loneliness that knows how to dress well.

Then came reputation, and love moved indoors.

The world outside was noisy, hostile, invasive. The beloved became a refuge. A private room. The one person with whom you could close the curtains and let everyone else speak.

I understood the fantasy immediately.

There have been times when I wanted exactly that kind of love. Not merely companionship, but escape. Someone with whom to resign from the world.

Let them misunderstand us.

Let the gates close.

We have each other.

It sounds romantic because, for a while, it is.

But no human being can be an entire country.

No person can provide the sky and the border, the language and the law, the refuge and the reason for living. To ask someone to become the whole world is to burden love with a geography no heart can sustain.

Sooner or later, you have to open the door.

The world remains.

More inconveniently, so do you.

When I reached Lover, something shifted.

Love wanted a house.

Not a castle. Not a hiding place.

A house.

That distinction moved me more on this listen than I expected.

Castles are designed to impress strangers.

Houses must survive mornings.

I began thinking about how much of our language around love is devoted to extraordinary moments. Proposals. Weddings. Anniversaries. Grand gestures. Crossing oceans. Choosing forever.

We speak much of finding someone with whom to grow old.

We speak less of finding someone with whom to spend an ordinary Tuesday.

Yet Tuesdays are where most of life is kept.

Can love survive daylight?

Can it survive repetition?

Can it endure after the party, when the chairs must be stacked and the glasses cleared and someone has put the forks in the wrong drawer again?

A person may cross oceans for you and still refuse to wash a cup.

A person may promise forever and be unbearable by breakfast.

The older I become, the less interested I am in love that performs beautifully under exceptional circumstances.

I am more interested in what survives the ordinary.

Then came folklore and evermore, and for me this was where the songs became more adult in a way I understood deeply.

Love no longer had one version of events.

Two people could live through the same relationship and carry away different histories.

You may remember abandonment.

They may remember escape.

You may remember how much you gave.

They may remember what your giving demanded.

You may both be sincere.

That is the difficulty.

When we are young, we like our sorrows cleanly arranged. One person loved. One person failed. One stayed. One left. One heart was pure and the other guilty.

Life rarely provides such orderly casting.

Sometimes both people tried.

Sometimes both failed.

Sometimes nobody lied, and the truth was still insufficient.

This was perhaps the hardest lesson of my own adulthood: not every ending comes with a villain.

Some things end despite tenderness. Some people hurt each other without intending to. Some relationships fail not because they were false, but because truth alone cannot always save them.

An ending does not travel backwards and abolish what was once real.

Winter does not prove there was no summer.

Then came Midnights, and the mirror appeared.

For years, the question had been: Who will love me?

Then: Who hurt me?

And finally: What if I am in the story too?

It is no small thing to discover yourself as a character in your own disasters.

Not the sole villain. Certainly not always the guilty party.

But present.

Capable of fear. Vanity. Anxiety. Pride.

Capable of staying for the wrong reasons and leaving for worse ones.

Capable of asking another person to heal an injury they did not cause.

Capable of loving and still being difficult to love.

I think growing older means becoming less innocent in your own autobiography.

You stop being merely the girl at the balcony.

Sometimes you were the locked gate.

By the time I reached The Tortured Poets Department, I heard something more exhausted than heartbreak.

I heard language discovering its own limits.

The girl from Speak Now had once believed in saying the thing.

Now came the harder knowledge that some things can be said perfectly and still change nothing.

No beautifully constructed sentence can make another person become what they are not.

No metaphor can repair incompatibility.

No amount of analysis can convert loss into justice.

One can write beautifully about the fire and still be burned.

I wish I could say I learned this easily.

I did not.

There are things I have explained long after explanation ceased to be useful. Conversations I have replayed. Messages I have rewritten in my head. Moments I believed I could have changed if only I had found better words.

But understanding is not the same as healing.

Sometimes the most accurate sentence in the world still ends with goodbye.

And then came The Life of a Showgirl.

After all the bedrooms, balconies, castles, cities, forests, midnight mirrors and tortured pages, the lights came up.

The woman stepped onto the stage.

At first, I wondered what a showgirl had to do with the story I thought I was following. I had been listening for the evolution of love. But perhaps performance had been part of that story all along.

Because so much of being loved, especially when we are young, is tangled up with being seen.

We learn early how to become desirable versions of ourselves.

The mysterious one.

The easy one.

The clever one.

The beautiful one.

The one who asks for nothing.

The one who is never jealous, never frightened, never needy, never too much.

We perform independence when we want reassurance. We perform indifference when we are afraid of rejection. We perform happiness because unhappiness makes other people uncomfortable.

Sometimes the performance becomes so convincing that even we forget there is a person underneath it.

That is the strange thing about becoming good at being seen.

You may still not feel known.

Perhaps that is what moved me about arriving at the showgirl after everything that came before. Not simply the spectacle, but the possibility that a woman may understand the spectacle and still want something beyond it.

To be applauded is not the same as being loved.

To be watched is not the same as being witnessed.

And perhaps growing older means becoming less interested in the person who loves you under the brightest lights and more interested in the person beside whom the lights may safely go out.

And now Taylor Swift is married.

There is a temptation to look at the wedding and say: at last.

At last, the story is complete.

At last, the girl who wrote about Romeo reached the altar.

I resist it.

“At last” is a merciless phrase.

It turns every previous love into rehearsal. Every heartbreak becomes useful because it led somewhere better. Every wrong person becomes a road sign pointing towards the right one.

A woman’s life becomes a long waiting room before the husband arrives.

I do not believe this.

Not every wound is a lesson.

Not every ending is preparation.

Not everything painful earns redemption later.

Some suffering is merely suffering, and one of adulthood’s harder duties is learning not to lie about it.

Nor does marriage prove that love has finally been understood.

Marriage is not the answer to the old songs.

It is another verse.

Perhaps that is what moved me most after going back through the albums.

Not that Taylor Swift once wrote a fairy tale and has now finally achieved one.

Fairy tales end at the wedding because they do not know what to do with the morning after.

Life begins there.

There will be Tuesdays.

There will be silence at breakfast, private jokes, old fears returning without invitation, ordinary cruelties that require apologies, kindnesses too small for newspapers, disappointments, illnesses, triumphs and forks in the wrong drawer.

There will be two people where the world prefers symbols.

And perhaps that is love’s most difficult era: the one without a costume.

I was never a true Swiftie.

But after going back through the albums, I think I understand why the songs kept finding me.

It was not because Taylor Swift knew exactly what love was.

It was because she kept changing her mind about it.

So did I.

Perhaps so do we all.

At one age, we believe love means being chosen. Later, being desired. Then being understood. Then being safe. Then perhaps simply being able to remain fully ourselves beside another person.

I used to believe love should arrive with clarity.

That it would answer something.

That when the right person appeared, the confusion would fall away and all the old mistakes would finally arrange themselves into a sensible pattern.

I do not believe that anymore.

Life has relieved me of several such theories.

I no longer think love explains the past.

I do not think it redeems every wound or proves that every painful thing happened for a reason.

Sometimes we suffer pointlessly.

Sometimes we love the wrong person for too long.

Sometimes we are the wrong person.

Sometimes we learn.

Sometimes we merely recover.

And sometimes, years later, a song begins playing and we suddenly understand the person we once were with a tenderness we could not give her at the time.

That may be what happened to me as I listened.

I did not hear only Taylor Swift growing older.

I heard versions of myself I had forgotten.

The girl who wanted to be chosen.

The woman who thought pain meant depth.

The one who believed the perfect sentence could save anything.

The one who became clever after heartbreak.

The one who wanted another person to become a refuge from the entire world.

The one who eventually understood that no one should have to be.

Perhaps this is what old songs do when we are fortunate.

They do not return us to the past.

They show us the distance from it.

We spend years giving love impossible work.

We ask it to rescue us, vindicate us, heal us, explain our suffering, reward our patience and prove that nothing painful was wasted.

Perhaps it was never meant to do so much.

Perhaps love is smaller than that.

And therefore greater.

A hand reached for without spectacle.

A person who remains after the story has lost its drama.

The quiet knowledge that there is someone beside whom you do not have to perform your happiness or disguise your sorrow.

The older I become, the more I suspect love is found less often in the great declarations than in the freedom to be ordinary.

To be tired without becoming unlovable.

To be silent without causing panic.

To disagree without turning disagreement into abandonment.

To be known not as the best version of yourself, but as the whole inconvenient person.

Perhaps that is why I keep returning to Tuesday.

Tuesday asks for nothing glamorous.

No balcony.

No burning red.

No secret kingdom.

No cinematic rain.

No stage.

Tuesday merely arrives and asks whether two people still know how to be kind to each other.

And then another Tuesday comes.

And another.

The song remains.

The listener changes.

The girl waiting to be chosen grows older. The woman who once mistook pain for proof learns that peace has its own music. The heart sheds one definition and reaches, cautiously, for another.

There is no final era.

No last word.

Only the strange, brave act of believing that after everything we have learned about love — how it begins, how it wounds, how it fails, how it survives — we may still step towards it without knowing what comes next.

You are in love.

Not saved.

Not completed.

Not vindicated.

Just in love.

And for now, perhaps that is all a heart can honestly say.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to stay connected, you’re welcome to subscribe and stay awhile. ❤

Sadhna Mishra Bhagi - Medium

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