Any plate of rice I serve would have the meat on the right side, and my next favourite curry farthest on the left, with any other curries filling the space in between. I lecture my younger brother the same way my mother used to lecture me. If I find a new favourite song, it stays on repeat until I eventually get sick of it. My go-to Saturday morning breakfast is “egg in bread,” something I learnt from somebody I used to know. I think far too much about what my phone wallpaper should be. I broke away from my pessimistic self and started seeing the world a little differently because of a dear friend.
If you’re still here, reading this list of seemingly random things about me, it all ties back to a story I once read about mermaids. The author described how the mermaids exchanged their scales as a token of the highest form of love. That idea lingered with me. It made me wonder—what sort of scales form my own canvas of love?
That list at the beginning only covers an infinitesimal part of the scales I carry. Some are of my own making, while others were entrusted to me by family, friends, people who are no longer in my life, and even random strangers. There are things I don’t even recall receiving but that still live quietly within me. At the same time, I have no idea who carries something from me in their lives.
It made me realise that we are endlessly influenced by every person who crosses our paths. Currents of love, understanding, and empathy run through us, forming a kind of shared DNA whose boundaries we’ll never truly know.
And maybe that’s what makes us so beautifully human, the way our scales shimmer with fragments of everyone we’ve ever loved or learned from. But as we collect these scales, we must also learn to protect them. To honour the pieces we’ve been given, to polish the ones dulled by time or pain, and to guard the ones that still ache.
It’s such a bittersweet feeling to realise how many traces of people linger in my daily life, some I haven’t spoken to in years. An artist I love, a website I still visit, inside jokes that continue to make me laugh. And yet, I find comfort in knowing that the best is yet to come. From people I’ve yet to meet, moments I haven’t yet lived. It provides me with a small, steady kind of hope that not everything has to be sad or melancholy, that even in change and distance, love keeps finding its way back to us in new forms.
In the end, the most powerful way to love ourselves and others back may be in how we cherish these mosaics that weigh in our hands.
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