The Tender Ache of Remembering Nothing Special
Or, how magnificently strange and unbearably precious it is just to briefly exist, and stumble, and love, and miss
The other afternoon, as I was having coffee and trying to focus on a very overdue deadline, my brain decided it was the perfect moment to remind me of this random shopkeeper from my childhood.
He ran a tiny convenience store in the neighbourhood—one of those kirana shops you pass every day but rarely think about, filled with snacks, lentils, shampoo sachets hanging like garlands.
I don’t remember his name. I don’t remember ever talking to him. He was just a figure in my childhood landscape, one of many blurred faces who inhabited the backdrop of my life.
And yet, suddenly, here he was, occupying my focus, the deadline abandoning all hope beside my lukewarm coffee.
It felt strange—sad even—to miss someone I didn’t really know. To miss a place I don’t imagine I’ll ever visit again, and to ache over an ordinary moment I can’t relive simply because it already happened once.
You ever get that? These uninvited memory-flashes, like glitches in our internal software. Something stored by accident, like when your phone randomly snaps an accidental screenshot of your lock screen and you find it among your actual photographs.
At first, they feel like mistakes. Noise. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if they’re something else entirely. Maybe they’re not glitches at all. Perhaps this is precisely what human memory is designed to do—to grab random, insignificant images and tuck them away. Not because they mattered then, but because they might matter later. Perhaps someday this small, meaningless memory may come to mean something very big and very tender in the quiet halls of nostalgia. I dunno.
I know for sure that nostalgia unfairly reorganises the past. I am deeply aware that my childhood wasn’t the carefree utopia I sometimes make it into. You can’t just brush off the exam panic, the tiny rejections, or the heartbreaks that—at the time—felt like the world was falling apart.
The past only seems simple because we don’t have to solve those problems anymore. And yet, even though that shopkeeper had zero impact, I sort of missed him, for a moment at least. Truth is, it’s probably not about him at all.
Maybe I just missed the version of me who used to walk past him, blissfully unaware of what adulthood held—existential anxiety, taxes, laundry, meetings.
Maybe I just missed the life that even though felt massive and unknowable, it was massive and unknowable in neat, contained ways—like a maths test I hadn’t studied for, a crush I couldn’t speak to, who’d win the cricket match, or what we’d eat for dinner.
Maybe what I ache for now is not the past itself, but the simplicity and straightforwardness of that “massive and unknowable” world. Things used to have a structure, a finish line, a next step. Because these days, everything feels layered, overwhelming, and terrifyingly complex.
Lots of maybes.
But maybe that’s what growing up really is: not some triumphant march toward wisdom, but more like standing in front of the fridge in the morning, staring at leftovers, overwhelmed and oddly nostalgic for a time when someone else just picked breakfast for you.
Yet, as my coffee grew colder and the cursor blinked accusingly on my screen, I realised something else: those random, quiet moments woven into our lives mean a great deal, precisely because they vanish unnoticed until they’re gone.
Memory isn’t the perfect archivist we wish it to be—it’s scattered, biased, flawed—but perhaps that’s exactly where its beauty lies. It saves not just grand narratives, not just highlight reels, but random shopkeepers and shampoo sachets, allowing us to revisit a simpler, gentler past even as we stumble through an uncertain present.
I’m never going to shake nostalgia, just like I’ll never fully understand the rules of adulthood (example: Why does the day feel shorter even though I have too much to do?). But maybe that’s okay. Because adulthood most likely doesn’t erase childhood; it stacks on top of it.
We’re all really just an endless accumulation of memories, fears, dreams, and ordinary moments stitched together.
I think it’s just the human condition: to carry more than we can make sense of, to feel everything too much and never quite enough, to laugh at memes and cry in the shower and then go make ourselves a cup of coffee like that’s a perfectly reasonable sequence of events.
I don’t know if the shopkeeper’s still there, selling little packets of shampoo and lending another child quiet comforts simply by being there—existing in the background, steady and mundane and unknowingly significant. Probably not.
Things change, and it’s both heartbreaking and hopeful that they do. Because someday—a decade or a year from now—I will stumble upon another quiet moment, another forgotten face, another random quirk of memory that reminds me how magnificently strange and unbearably precious it is just to briefly exist, and stumble, and love, and miss.
Here’s to all those little forgotten pieces of life we never realise we’re holding on to; they’re not glitches, they’re proof that we’re human—and that, I think, is pretty wonderful.
I was in Sri Lanka in March. I didn’t go looking for anything specific. Mostly, I was just trying to outrun the noise in my head. But somewhere between the faded temples, the salted air, and those long, wordless evenings, something in me softened. Not a breakthrough, not even a story—just a quiet shift, like a door left slightly ajar. What followed wasn’t clarity, exactly, but a kind of noticing. These posts are pieces of that noticing. A way to make sense of the things that moved, and the things that stayed still.