# The Memory of Tumult The memory of tumult lingers in the hand, refusing to unclench. This is how we carry the world—not in thought, which can be set down and picked up again, but in the body's stubborn recall, in the tremor of fingers that once gripped something now gone. What is a memory that lives in the hands rather than the mind? It is something closer to a scar—a transformation that has left its mark not as narrative or image, but as altered tissue. The hand that remembers tumult is not the same hand that knew peace. The nerve pathways have shifted. The muscles hold a knowledge they never chose. Consider how different this is from remembering a face. A face can fade, become unclear, be replaced by another. But the body remembers precisely because it cannot forget without ceasing to be itself. The hands that have trembled will always know trembling. This is not a defect in memory; it is memory's deepest truth. There is something almost noble in this—the way the body insists on honesty. It will not let us smooth over what has happened. It will not permit the comfortable story we construct in words. The hands know something the mind wishes to deny or reshape, and they hold their knowledge with a stubbornness that outlasts all our explanations. Yet there is also something tragic in it. We are prisoners to what our bodies have learned. The flinch comes unbidden. The grip tightens when we do not will it. We are haunted not by ghosts but by our own flesh, which lived through what we now wish to revise. Perhaps this is why people speak so often of moving forward, of letting go, of releasing the past. They are speaking to the hands, begging them to unlearn, to become innocent again. But the hands do not listen to such pleas. They have their own memory, older and more certain than any we can articulate in words. And maybe—just maybe—this is a mercy. For in the body's refusal to forget, there lives a kind of truth-telling. As long as our hands remember the tumult, we cannot pretend it did not happen. We cannot build our peace on a foundation of convenient amnesia. The trembling hands keep us honest. They keep us human.

Sometimes, without a word between us, I tell you I love you. Do you know why? Because this very act of saying it—something so many of us cannot manage despite a thousand attempts, a thousand desires, all for the sake of ego—I say it without expecting anything in return. I say it only when I feel the need to; when I don't, I won't say it merely to answer back. Never, even by mistake, do I force the words.

Pretense has never touched my love. What I don't truly feel, I cannot say—not even wrapped in a lie. I simply cannot bring myself to speak such things. I think life is genuinely so brief; we never know when our moment will come. Perhaps this "I love you" will be the last thing I say, or something I wanted to say but couldn't—and then the regret would stay with me forever. So I say it suddenly, just when the feeling overwhelms me completely.

Perhaps I always want to say it, but our moments don't always align. I don't call you at random hours—that doesn't mean I don't long to hear your voice. Usually I let you know before I call. Sometimes I don't, and when I don't, it means my heart has fled beyond my reach. In those moments, I simply must see you, must speak to you even for a minute. The ache is that unbearable.

But now I've learned to accept that restraint too—you taught me that. In one way, it's been good. A person doesn't learn without constraint. We need it for self-control. Yet at the end of the day, we are all human, and expectations take root regardless. Our brains are wired that way. There's nothing we can do about it.

Alone, perhaps we can learn to live on ninety percent, but that remaining ten—we cannot. When even that ten remains unfilled, suddenly the ninety feels worthless, hollow. In that ten percent, people grow afraid, terrified, and refuse to let anyone in. Yet whoever we do let in—they wound us, cause us pain, carve wounds so deep we bleed endlessly. Living with such scars is agony. This ten percent of incompleteness saturates the rest of life with incompleteness itself, shattering that ninety percent we so painfully learned. If we could somehow scatter the broken pieces and fly away, even briefly, we'd find our freedom. And then no other thought comes—only this one, circling endlessly.

One day the body's strength will fade, skin will sag, movements will slow...yet still that ten percent of incompleteness will fill the mind to bursting. That ten becomes the mind's hundred percent—what it loved all its life yet could never truly claim. Then one day, sitting in memory's easy chair, remembering that ten percent of incompleteness over and over, it will dissolve into a vast void from which there is no return.

Learning to live on this ninety percent has taken me fourteen years—since my older sister's wedding. My brain was immature then; it couldn't bear the blow. Nervous tension was born, its measure only growing with time. From there I accepted it: this is my life's way, forever. But acceptance makes living so much easier. There is only one mantra for learning to live: learning to accept.

# The Expiry of Time

I tried to call the delivery boy today, only to find the call wouldn’t go through. The IVR tells me my balance validity has expired. I check the balance—there’s plenty of money there—yet the call still won’t connect, because there’s no validity left. I smile to myself and think: there was a time when validity never ran out; it was the balance that would vanish. Now the balance doesn’t vanish; it’s the validity that disappears. What strange play time makes! Is there truly no one left for me to call?

For many days now, I’ve been recharging only to watch the validity slip away.

Ah, what an emptied-out person I am! Does everyone, someday, become this hollow?

There was a time when I was the brilliant student, an expert at sports, beautiful, smart, meticulous, tomboyish—known throughout the neighborhood by a dozen such titles. Boys couldn’t even keep up with me at badminton. No one knew much of my elder sister. They didn’t even know my father had another daughter. Now when my elder sister comes visiting with her husband and children, people assume my father has only one daughter who returns to his house. The other daughter—the one who exists—no one remembers her. That daughter is me.

What strange play time makes…what play, indeed!
Ah, what a void I have become. When I look at myself now, such sorrow fills me.

I think: whoever succeeds in family life—that person alone is truly successful in the end. All these successes in between are merely noise…just noise, nothing more, nothing at all. Today I am a person living by grasping at the memories of that noise.