You probably want to know how it ends.
Whether we got back together. Whether she chose somebody else. Whether the families came around. Whether love, in the end, won.
I don't know.
I'm not being coy. I genuinely do not know, I will not know for a long time, and I have stopped organising my life around finding out.
If you came here for the resolution, this is the chapter where I disappoint you on purpose. Not out of mystery — out of accuracy. I am twenty-something years old and in the middle of it, and any ending I wrote for you right now would be a thing I made up to make you comfortable.
plasticity
I do this for a living, sort of, so let me use the vocabulary I actually have.
A material under load does one of three things. It springs back — elastic, no memory, nothing learned. It breaks — brittle, all at once, usually without warning. Or it deforms and stays deformed, carries the load in its new shape, and does not fail.
That third one is plasticity, and in every materials class it gets taught as a kind of damage. Permanent deformation. A part that will not return to spec.
I have come to think it is the best thing a material can do.
i can't change my face. i can't change my race. i can't even change the crack in my phone case. so: my reaction. my interaction. my sense of action. plasticity. the material doesn't break. it takes a new shape and keeps the load.
the three things
I cannot change what happened. I cannot change what two families believe, or what she decides, or what somebody I have never met does next, or whether any of this ever gets a second act.
my reaction.
my interaction.
my sense of action.
That is the full list. Everything else is somebody else's variable, and most of my suffering in this story came from trying to apply force to variables that were never mine.
what everything taught me
This looked like a story about a girl for about eight chapters. It isn't. She is one teacher in it, and not the only one, and it would be unfair to her and untrue to me to make one person responsible for a transformation this large.
What taught me what
India taught me goodbye. My parents taught me that people can do an enormous thing quietly and never mention the cost. A dog taught me the difference between wanting and needing. Engineering taught me that constraints are what make a system work, and that failure is data. She taught me what it is to be known. Losing her taught me what I had actually been holding. And God became the thing all of them started pointing at, rather than one more item on the list.
the two sentences
Everything on this website lives in the space between two sentences.
A seven-year-old, in a car, in Hindi, proud of himself:
And a man, fifteen years later, having finally understood what he asked for:
Lord,
take the stone.
arrived?
arrived? not yet. thinking helping existing changing holding anchoring navigating growing enduring still becoming.
I am not going to write a conclusion, because a conclusion would be a lie about the state of the thing.
I used to believe strength meant becoming impossible to hurt.
I now believe — provisionally, revisably, on the days I can manage it — that strength means staying soft enough to love again after you have the evidence about what that costs.
I get that wrong regularly. There are weeks where the stone is genuinely appealing, where it would be so much more efficient, where I can feel the old architecture offering itself.
So far, I have not gone back.
still becoming.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.