By Priyanka Sen

id like to think, maybe foolishly,
humans are good.

The clatter of rubble falling from the incomplete construction site, mingling with the endless blare of car horns at traffic signals, drowns out whatever silence the city has left. Beyond the country clubs, the glistening black roads, and the people stumbling home from their 9-to-5 with a beer or a shot at the bar, there isn’t much left to begin with. Maybe that’s why they keep telling us to savour the small moments, because the big ones just don’t come around anymore.

Amid the exhausting sprawl of the city, they share a cigarette like a ritual, the smoke rising between them, an ephemeral communion bound by a mutual understanding. Ash clings to the white railing like residue from conversations no one dares to finish. The silence between them has grown familiar. There’s no need to say what they both know: unstable work, parents getting sicker, rent deadlines, pressure from home. The license company won’t guarantee tomorrow, but it buys today. Barely. And barely, somehow, still matters.

Maybe we want each other to succeed, in theory. But survival doesn’t leave much room for generosity.

Maybe that’s why love feels like another form of survival. Like hope, like memory-things that return, even if we don’t ask them to.

We keep thinking about love, the beginning, the end, and all the in-betweens. The selfish way it demands everything become about itself. It’s a phenomenon of constant exchange, a sprawling moment disguised in emotional expenses. However, not all of it is bad or rotten. Love has its tender moments, like when the world caves in and all you have left is a familiar hand to hold. You think you wouldn’t flinch if it ended. But now, here you are, adjusting to a new kind of life. One that works for both of you. One that makes everything feel a little easier. Eventually, it crosses your mind, dulling the edge of horror and silencing the churn of self-doubt. What would you do without them?

And then, the bigger question:

What can you even hope for?

Because hope, contrary to what they say, “isn’t a thing with feathers. It’s a sewer rat.”

Hope is grimy, stubborn, surviving on scraps. It doesn’t sing; it gnaws its way through.

We pretend we don’t need softness. But sometimes, we imagine it anyway, out of habit, or hunger.

So we hope. 

We hope the next time we meet, it’s over coffee. We hope, they’ll pay the bill. And you’ll promise a next time, just to settle the debt.

Marcel Proust writes of two kinds of memory: the mundane kind, like misplacing your glasses, retracing steps, and the other, more elusive kind, born from longing. The kind that clutches at your chest without warning, tethered to a scent, a shadow of a moment. 

It makes us pause and wonder what the purpose of it all is-why we’re here, and what binds us.

We are patchworks of other people. 

Though often taken for granted, memory serves a purpose: it allows us to see ourselves in a light from which we are usually estranged.

“We think we no longer love our dead

But that is because we do not remember them: suddenly

We catch sight of an old glove

And burst into tears.”

So everywhere that memory has taken me, I’d like to guide it back to all the goodness I’ve borrowed from this world: the advice offered in passing, the warmth of shared meals, the dull fantasies spoken aloud, the laugh, the love, the life.

“I’d like to think, maybe foolishly,

Humans are good.”

And maybe this is the purpose: to live through the other, tormenting phases life throws our way.

Maybe this is why we hold on.

This single ounce of faith in a flawed but flickering batch of humanity.

This.

This, and this.

Priyanka Sen is a literature student and emerging writer from India. Her work centers on memory, connection, and the fragments we build our lives from.