can you still sleep there.

small note before this starts, because i know how it’s going to read. i’m not hurt. nobody did anything to me this week, this is not a hint, not a subtweet, not aimed at one single person alive right now. this is me opening some very old files and writing down what’s in them. past tense wearing present tense clothes, which is the only outfit i own.

same old story, no?

where do you run.

that’s the question i’ve been asking since i was old enough to have something to run from. never why does this hurt, never what actually happened, nothing that useful. just: where do i go.

and you always find somewhere. running works, that’s the part nobody warns you about. it works so well that people mistake it for a personality. i can give you the full tour. different city. different sim. different friend group. new work, new gym, new haircut, new 5am routine, a room with a door i could shut. every single one of them worked, and every single one of them felt, for a few weeks, like the answer to a question i’d been carrying for years.

then you arrive, and the actual exam starts, and it’s a different paper to the one you studied for.

can you sleep there?

that’s the whole exam. can you close your eyes in that place and let your body go offline for eight hours. happy is a bonus. productive is a bonus. looking correct in photographs is a bonus with a filter on it.

sleep is the only thing you cannot fake.

you can fake fine. i have faked fine at weddings, on calls, in meetings, at 2pm on a wednesday, professionally, at scale, with a straight face and a joke already loaded. you can fake busy, and you can fake over it, and you can fake moved on so convincingly that you buy your own act for about three weeks. i’m good at all of it. i’ve had practice you wouldn’t believe.

sleep doesn’t take the performance. you can lie down and do a very good impression of a man asleep, but the sign off comes from somewhere underneath your opinions, and the body has not read a single thing you’ve said about yourself.

which makes it the only honest review you will ever get of a place. or a person. or a whole life.

and i have receipts on my own website, so let’s do this properly.

i said i could.

july. i wrote that i slept like a baby, hand on her waist, in her arm, and the loudest head i know went quiet for the first time in years. published, still up, two clicks from here. i can go and read the sentence right now.

right now, i can’t.

so which one of us is lying, july me or tonight me.

neither. figuring out why took three weeks and this entire post.

what i’m actually not moving on from

people talk about moving on from a person. honestly, people have never been the hard part for me. people are moving objects. they change, they apologise or they don’t, they get better, they get worse, they get married, they get boring, they get a job in dubai. a person is a river and you can stop standing in it.

messages are the problem.

i’ve never said that out loud because it sounds too small to be anyone’s actual problem. i’m not stuck on anybody. i’m stuck on files.

i’ve thought about why more than a person reasonably should, and this is where i’ve got to.

a memory is a rumour. every time you take it out and look at it you put it back slightly changed, in your handwriting, in your favour, edges sanded down, and the thing you remember about last year is a copy of a copy of a copy with each generation a little kinder to you. your brain isn’t malfunctioning when it does that. the forgetting is the medicine. we’re built to lose the sharp version on purpose.

a message sits out the entire process. it’s the one piece of your past that refuses to rot.

that chat from four years ago is still at the temperature it was sent at. same words, same order, same time stamp, same nothing after it. you’ve aged, they’ve aged, the city changed, the phone changed twice, and the sentence hasn’t moved a millimetre. you can open it at 3am and take a day-one hit off something everybody else involved finished with in 2022.

which means i was never really remembering any of it. i was re-reading, and only one of those two verbs heals.

i’ve done that re-reading like a lawyer preparing for a case that got dismissed years ago. scrolling up, checking the exact wording, building the argument again, for a court that closed, against a person who has genuinely gone off and made a different life. nobody is in that room. i’m still filing.

the voice you hire

the second problem with text is that it arrives with no tone.

no face, no volume, no eyebrow, no pause before the difficult sentence, none of the thousand small things that tell you what somebody actually meant. it turns up naked. and text without a voice is unbearable to the human head, so your brain hires one immediately, before you’ve even finished the first line.

the voice it hires is yours.

you’re the one reading. in your head, in your accent, at your speed, with the emphasis landing on the word you were already scared of. so every cruel message you’ve ever received, you performed. you cast it, you directed it, you played both parts, and you were unfairly good in the role.

a head that’s been hurt before does not audition anybody neutral, either. it goes with the coldest available reading every single time, because the coldest reading is the one that can’t ambush you later. we do it for protection. it costs the exact thing it’s protecting.

”sure.” can be a person agreeing with you while walking into a lift. it can also be a verdict. same two words, and the difference is invented entirely by whoever is holding the phone. at 3am i’m going with verdict. i’m always going with verdict.

the long ones don’t mean it. the small ones do.

everyone has this backwards, me included, for most of my life.

there are two kinds of messages that hurt.

kind one. the long one.

2am. four hundred words. paragraphs, or no line breaks at all. the kind where you can hear the typing. it names things, it goes for the throat, and it uses the stuff you handed over back when you trusted them, which is the only reason it can aim that well.

that one feels like the end of the world when it lands. that one you read nine times.

and mostly, they didn’t mean it.

heat is not truth. four hundred words is expensive: time, attention, adrenaline, sleep they were going to need for work in the morning. nobody spends that on somebody they’ve stopped caring about. you don’t write essays to strangers. you don’t stay up till 2am destroying a person you’re indifferent to, you leave them on seen and go to bed like a normal human being.

cruelty at that length is investment in a bad state, at a bad hour, with no editor. somebody feeling something enormous with only a keyboard to do it with.

doesn’t make it hurt any less. it does mean i spent years reading a scream as a court document.

kind two. the small one.

“k.”
“ok.”
“fine.”
“do whatever you want.”
“no it’s fine.”
“sure.”

seen at 11:42. nothing after it.

that one they meant.

because it cost nothing. a lie needs a budget, warmth needs a budget, even cruelty needs a budget, and two characters have nowhere to hide any of it. there’s no room in “k.” for the version of themselves they were trying to be for you. it’s what was left when the effort stopped.

the long ones are weather. the small ones are climate.

and then there’s the three dots, which aren’t even a message. someone is typing. typing, typing, stopped, nothing arrives. cruellest thing ever shipped to a phone: proof that a sentence about you existed and got deleted, and you will never see it. you don’t get the text, you just get told that it happened. i have built entire evenings out of those dots.

they didn’t mean it. that’s true and it does not help.

both things are true at once and they refuse to cancel out. i’ve tried. the maths doesn’t allow it.

they didn’t mean it, and it still landed. two separate events with two separate addresses.

intent goes in their ledger. impact goes in mine. when they apologise their book balances, and it should, and i’m glad, genuinely. nothing moves in mine. the amount is still sitting there, still due, and it can’t be transferred across because it was never really their debt.

sorry isn’t worthless. it’s just the correct payment made to the wrong bank, and everyone walks away thinking it’s settled, including me, right up until 3am when the statement arrives.

the constant

now the sad arithmetic, which is the actual reason i sat down.

i’ve changed nearly every variable available to a person. cities, jobs, phone numbers, friend groups, whole versions of myself built and demolished more than once. i’ve been the loud one and the quiet one, the guy who overshares and the guy who tells you nothing for a year.

the answer keeps coming out the same.

when you swap every variable in an equation and the output doesn’t move, you’ve found your constant.

it’s me. getting hurt is the constant.

that’s an ugly sentence to type on my own website with my full name at the top. it sat wrong with me for a while, because it reads like a diagnosis, the kind of thing a man announces right before he decides to become colder, get some hobbies and start replying six hours late on principle.

where i landed instead:

being the constant is not the same as being the problem.

it’s one wire. the nerve that reads “k.” as a full verdict on my existence is the same nerve that read someone bringing pav bhaji to my bedside as a religious experience. i’ve gone looking for the setting that keeps the pav bhaji feeling and drops the “k.” feeling. there isn’t one. the hardware ships as a single unit.

a me that can’t get hurt would be a smaller me with the volume down on everything, sitting in a beige room being extremely fine.

i’d rather keep the wire and get better at reading.

moving on is not deletion

deletion doesn’t work. i’ve tried it in every format available.

deleting a chat relocates the evidence to a place you now have to actively remember not to look at. blocking is louder than replying, everybody knows this. and an empty window where a conversation used to be is a hole with a shape in it, which nobody has ever mistaken for quiet.

what moving on actually looks like, i think, is declassification.

the file stays. the file can’t change, that’s its whole nature. what changes is your clearance. one day the message stops being evidence about you and turns into a thing that happened, in weather, in a year, to two people who were both worse at this then. you read the same sentence and think “yeah, they were having a night” where you used to think “so that’s what i am, then.”

nothing in the file moved. the reader moved.

and it’s slow, much slower than the internet will tell you. it doesn’t happen because you decided on a monday. it happens in the background while you’re busy doing something else badly, and you find out weeks after the fact, usually because you went back and re-read something on purpose to hurt yourself and it just didn’t work.

that’s the certificate, and it arrives as a non-event. nobody prints it, nobody claps.

so. can you still sleep there.

today, no. not yet.

and the place isn’t the problem. it’s the best one i’ve found in my whole life, and i want that written in the same paragraph, in the same ink. i’m not running from it. for once i’m not even looking at the next ring.

i just haven’t stopped doing rounds.

you can’t sleep in a house you’re still checking the locks in, even when the house is safe. especially when it’s safe, because then the checking has nothing to do with the house at all. the rounds are a subscription i took out years ago in a completely different building and forgot to cancel. the building’s gone. the payment still goes out every night at 3am. door, phone, window, door.

my head believed her in july. the head is easy, the head will sign anything.

the body is slower and dumber and unbelievably loyal to old information, still running a threat model built out of messages from people who are not in my life, do not think about me, and would be embarrassed to learn how long their two letters stayed in the system.

and that’s the insult of the whole thing: policy still being enforced by people who left the building.

nobody is standing behind those doors. i know that. knowing it is free and it changes nothing, because the body only accepts one kind of proof, which is time, boring amounts of it, night after night of nothing happening.

so no. i can’t sleep there yet.

but i’m not leaving, and that part is new. every previous version of me had already packed, already had a city shortlisted, already knew which ring to run to next. this one is staying up in the room instead of walking out of it.

i’ll take that.

where do you run?

nowhere. i’m going to lie here and be bad at sleeping in a safe place until one ordinary tuesday it stops being a skill i’m attempting and goes back to being something that happens to me, mid sentence, without permission.

and i won’t be awake to see it happen. the one good thing i’ve chased my whole life is the one thing i’ll have to be unconscious to receive.

---

noticed only after i finished: it’s 4:55am on the 15th of august. i’ve been up all night writing about a subscription i can’t cancel, doors nobody is standing behind, and tax still being collected by an occupation that ended years ago. in about three hours this street will be putting flags up and celebrating the exact thing i’ve just spent two thousand words admitting i can’t manage. i’m awake for the irony and awake for the ceremony, which is one more night of not sleeping in a place that is perfectly safe. hahaha. fine. i’ll take the date as a hint.

jai bajrangbali. happy independence day.

(spoken, not typed. thank you, wisprflow.)