Marcy woke up feeling afraid. She was caught in a heart-pacing dream so realistic she could feel herself drowning and spiralling down a bottomless tunnel.
It took her a moment or two to realise where she was, what day it was, and what she was supposed to do.
But she didn’t want to get up.
Sometimes even bad dreams keep you in bed. And this was just one of those days.
Marcy didn’t feel like going out today, let alone to work. She needed a day in, closed off to the world, simply to contemplate her existence.
Yet, life continues its regular rhythm regardless of what you decide to do in the morning.
The milkman came early.
But…what milkman?
He left a glass bottle of fresh milk at the door, and she saw him straighten his hat as he climbed back onto his bicycle.
The paper boy skimmed by next, tossing a rolled-up paper on her front porch.
What porch?
Marcy lived on the fifth floor of a nine-storey apartment block in one of the busiest neighbourhoods of the bustling capital city.
Where did she find herself now?
And how on earth had she travelled back in time? And where exactly?
She rubbed her eyes, perplexed.
But as she turned around, a butler appeared, dressed in a creaseless black suit. He smiled a polite ‘good morning’ and announced that ‘breakfast was served in the dining room’.
What dining room? Marcy’s flat was just about big enough for two people to simultaneously co-exist.
What parallel universe was this?
She turned round and found herself at the bottom of a rather large Victorian staircase covered in a royal burgundy carpet. Spotless.
Hand on the bannister, she slowly began to climb, wondering where it would lead. She tilted her head upward and mesmerised as she was by the large crystal chandelier above, she missed a step and slipped…
Marcy fell tumbling down, landing flat on her back.
And then she truly woke.
She had fallen off her bed, wrapped in her blanket like a caterpillar in its cocoon.
The sun was already declaring it was daytime outside, and the construction workers from across the street reminded her of what reality was really like.
There was no butler awaiting to serve her breakfast, let alone a porch to enjoy it on.
Marcy reluctantly washed up, got dressed and made her way outside.
Sometimes the best you can do is appreciate the time you’re in, regardless of the dreams you have.
It’s important to have someone to call ‘just because’. Sometimes we don’t even realise it, but that small ounce of emotional support can make all the difference.
That someone who hears your tone and reads the situation instantly, knowing exactly what to say without needing to ask anything more. The one who can feel when something is off and somewho finds the words to lift your spirit even when you insist you’re ‘fine’ and that there is nothing wrong.
We all need that person on speed dial. The one you exchange memes, reels, emojis, gifs with to get through the hours at work. The one wo checks in when you’re feeling blue, when there’s a full moon, when Mercury is in retrograde, or simply because life happens – and everything in between.
Life feels a little lighter when we have our comfort buddy. It reminds us that we’re not alone in this chaos we’re all constantly trying to navigate.
And that matters. To have someone to give pebbles to and someone who’ll always give them back.
It’s not a straight-out ‘no’, but it’s not a ‘yes’ either. It’s that fragile middle ground. A ‘maybe’ that dangles between two endings A ‘perhaps’ that shifts shape depending on which way your heart leans that day.
Somewhere in between certainty and closure, between hope and acceptance, between staying and walking away — that’s where we often find ourselves. Waiting. Interpreting. Replaying words. Searching for hidden meanings in half-spoken promises.
But how long can you really hold on to something that lives in the in-between?
Is it truly enough to keep you going?
Or does it simply feel safer than letting go – better than having nothing at all?
Is it nourishment — or just crumbs we convince ourselves are a feast?
The truth is, the ‘in-between’ can feel comforting. It doesn’t force a decision. It allows room for possibility. It keeps hope alive without demanding courage. And sometimes, that hope is beautiful.
But sometimes, it quietly drains you.
Because every single thing you feed your mind with depends on how you choose to see it — with the gentle optimism of what could be, or with the quiet realism of what already is and the pain of that defeat.
We can paint a ‘maybe’ in gold and call it destiny.
Or we can see it plainly and call it uncertainty.
Neither perspective is wrong. But one will protect your peace more than the other.
At some point, you have to ask yourself:
Am I holding on because it’s right, or because it’s not a definite no?
Somewhere in between is not always a place meant to stay.
It was too cold to even step outside, so Eva stood by the window, her gaze drifting toward the horizon. Gentle music threaded through her thoughts, matching the winter grey pressed against the glass. Then the light changed. It slipped through the curtains, insistent, almost demanding attention.
The porch, white and brittle beneath untouched snow, faced a sky set ablaze. Orange bled into red, fierce and mesmerising, as though the heavens had caught fire. But this was art, not a crime.
“It’s strange,” she whispered, “how the coldest days hold the warmest goodbyes.”
Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves become the truth.
Or at least they feel like it.
We rehearse them quietly, in the background of our days. We polish certain moments, soften the sharp edges, amplify the tenderness, the hope, the almost. We turn fragments into futures. We take a look, a word, a possibility — and we build a whole world around it.
And sometimes… it’s okay to pretend.
Sometimes pretending is what gets us through. It’s what helps us believe in something softer than what’s in front of us. It gives us courage. It gives us comfort. It lets us sit in the in-between without falling apart.
The problem, though, isn’t the pretending.
The problem is when the version in our head becomes the only version we’re willing to accept.
When the ideal we’ve created — the person, the relationship, the outcome — feels more real than what’s actually happening. When nothing else measures up. When reality feels disappointing, not because it’s bad, but because it’s not the dream.
And then we’re stuck.
How do you get out of your head when your head has built such a beautiful place to live?
How do you let go of something that never fully existed, but meant everything to you?
The answer isn’t really to shut your heart down. Neither is it about becoming cold or detached or suddenly logical. The heart clings so obstinately because it cares. Because it saw something worth holding.
But maybe letting go isn’t about erasing the story.
Maybe it’s about acknowledging it and being grateful it existed.
Thanking it for what it gave you — hope, clarity, desire, proof that you can feel deeply. And then gently admitting that it was a chapter written in pencil, not ink.
Letting your brain take the lead doesn’t mean silencing your heart. It means allowing wisdom to sit beside longing. It means asking, “What is actually here?” instead of “What could this be if everything aligned perfectly?”
Moving on isn’t dramatic. It’s a quiet struggle. It’s choosing, over and over, to come back to what is instead of what you imagined.
It’s grieving the fantasy without shaming yourself for creating it.
We are human. We dream. We project. We hope.
But we also survive. We adjust. We grow.
And sometimes growth looks like stepping out of the story we wrote in our heads… and making peace with the one that’s real.
She walked up and down the sidewalk as if it were the main road of a small village, never in a hurry, always noticing.
She would call out, “Morning, Peter,” knowing he watered his roses before coffee. “Hello, Amina,” who swept her steps at exactly eight o’clock. She knew that Mrs. De Souza napped by noon and that little Caleb raced his bicycle after school.
It takes a village to raise a person, and this one had raised her gently.
In learning their habits, their names, their ordinary days, she had come to know herself, rooted and certain, among them.
Hannah never meant to fall in love with a sport that required yelling at granite.
Yet there she was at the Winter Olympics, standing on a sheet of ice so polished it felt like a held breath, gripping a 44-pound stone like it was a fragile secret.
Curling isn’t loud in the way people expect the Olympics to be loud. There are no skates slicing at impossible speeds, no skis launching off mountains, no choreographed crescendos. There is just the slow exhale of stone over ice. The nervous shuffle of rubber soles. The sharp, urgent choreography of sweep, sweep, sweep.
And the yelling.
“Hard! Hard!”
Which, Hannah would later admit, is not something she ever thought she’d shout in front of millions of people.
She didn’t grow up dreaming of this stage. She grew up in a town where winter meant stubborn frost and driveways that needed shoveling before school. The local curling rink sat behind the hockey arena like an afterthought. The first time she stepped inside, she thought it smelled like cold air and coffee and determination.
She was twelve. Small. Quiet. The kind of girl teachers described as “thoughtful,” which really meant she preferred watching to speaking.
Curling suited her.
Because curling is not about brute force. It’s about restraint. It’s about geometry disguised as patience. It’s about knowing that the tiniest adjustment in angle changes everything forty meters later. It’s chess, but colder. And with better sweaters.
By the time she qualified for the Olympics, people had stopped asking, “Wait, is that the one with the brooms?” in quite the same tone. Now they asked it with curiosity instead of confusion. Now they leaned forward when she explained strategy — how sweeping reduces friction, how communication can bend outcomes, how the house is both a target and a metaphor.
The morning of her first Olympic match, she woke before her alarm.
The village was quiet. Snow pressed softly against the windows. Somewhere down the hall, a door clicked shut. Hannah sat on the edge of her bed and felt something strange: not fear exactly, but the weight of being seen.
She had spent her life working in a sport most people didn’t notice until every four years. And now here she was — visible.
On the ice, the lights were brighter than she expected. The arena hummed. Across from her stood athletes who had practiced the same muscle memory thousands of times. Everyone looked composed. Everyone had trained for this exact silence before the slide.
Her first throw was cautious. Too cautious. The stone drifted wide.
She felt the mistake bloom in her chest before it showed on the scoreboard.
There’s a particular kind of loneliness in individual error within a team sport. Even with three teammates beside you, the release was yours.
Between ends, her skip leaned in.
“You don’t have to be perfect,” she said. “You just have to be brave enough to adjust.”
And that — more than the drills, more than the early mornings — was what the Olympics gave her.
Adjustment.
In the third end, Hannah threw with less hesitation. In the fifth, she trusted the sweepers fully. In the seventh, she called a line herself, voice steady, broom extended like a compass needle finding north.
They didn’t win gold.
They didn’t even medal.
But in the final end of their last game, with the score tied and everything distilled into one clean slide, Hannah released the stone without flinching. It curved exactly as planned, kissed the edge of an opponent’s rock, and settled into the four-foot circle like it had always belonged there.
The crowd’s roar wasn’t explosive. It was warm. Rolling. Sustained.
Later, back in the quiet of her room, medal-less but lighter somehow, she thought about what the ice had taught her.
That momentum requires friction.
That yelling “Hard!” at the right moment can change the trajectory of everything.
That you cannot steer once you’ve let go — only trust the line you chose.
Most of all, she learned that visibility is not the same as validation. The work still happens in small rinks behind bigger arenas. The growth still happens when no one is watching.
The Olympics did not turn her into someone new. They simply magnified who she already was: steady, observant, willing to sweep furiously for something she believed in.
When she came home, the town rink still smelled like cold air and coffee and determination. The ice still waited. The stones still hummed when they moved.
And Hannah — no longer small, still thoughtful — stepped forward to throw again.
Mira noticed it on a Tuesday — which feels important, because nothing extraordinary is supposed to happen on a Tuesday. The café was half full. The espresso machine was performing its usual opera. She was mid-sentence about something unimportant when she looked up and saw him looking at her.
Not staring.
Not assessing.
Looking.
There is a difference.
His name was Leon. She would learn that later. What she learned first was the feeling — the strange, steady warmth of being seen without being measured.
Most people look at you and immediately begin arranging you. Too loud. Too quiet. Too much. Not enough. They hold you up against invisible rulers.
Leon didn’t.
When Mira spoke, he listened like her words were landing somewhere real. When she laughed, he didn’t rush to fill the silence afterward. When she faltered — because she always did, eventually — he didn’t look away.
And that was the thing.
He didn’t look away.
There’s a vulnerable moment that happens when someone holds your gaze a second longer than expected. It can feel like standing at the edge of a dock, unsure if you’ll be pushed or invited to jump.
With him, it felt like steady ground.
One evening, weeks later, they sat cross-legged on her living room floor, a single lamp pooling gold light around them. They had been talking about childhood — the fragile kind of honesty that arrives after midnight. She told him about the years she spent shrinking herself so others wouldn’t leave. He told her about learning to perform competence because asking for help felt dangerous.
Somewhere in that exchange, their eyes met.
Really met.
And Mira felt something unfamiliar: safety.
Not excitement. Not fireworks. Not the dizzy spark of uncertainty.
Safety.
She saw herself reflected there — not the curated version, not the agreeable version, not the braced-for-impact version. Just her. Unedited. And he didn’t flinch.
In his eyes, she wasn’t “too much.” She wasn’t a puzzle to solve or a project to fix.
She was enough. Already.
And she realized something quietly seismic: love, at its deepest, might simply be this — two people brave enough to look at each other without armour. To let their reflections shine back unmarred by distortion.
Later, when he brushed a strand of hair from her face, it felt almost secondary. The real intimacy had already happened.
It had happened in the looking.
In the staying.
In the gentle, unwavering gaze that said: I see you. You’re safe here. You don’t have to disappear.
And for the first time in a long time, Mira didn’t.
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