My mind is a library, with a quiet corner reserved for an archive of brief moments, random faces and forgotten places, each carefully preserved, as though it held a quiet significance only my heart could recognize.

I often find myself romanticising the ordinary; an aesthetic cafe I stumbled upon while wandering unfamiliar streets, a scientific idea that captivated my curiosity for hours or strangers with whom I shared a brief but meaningful connection before our paths quietly diverged.

Some may think it’s silly to hold on to things that seem so insignificant. But my mind has collected a million of these little fragments, carefully tucked away for no reason other than the fact that they made me feel something.

Because what’s the point of living if I can’t romanticise life for everything it brings, whether grand or ordinary?

And what’s the point of having a heart if it cannot feel deeply for all that it witnesses?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about someone I met on a train journey a while back.

Not in the sense of longing for him or wondering what could have been. What lingers isn’t possibility, but curiosity.

I wonder what he’s doing right now, in this very moment, in another city, while I sit here drinking my coffee and reminiscing about a conversation that lasted only a few hours.

How has life unfolded for him since that day? Did that brief encounter blur into the background of his memories, or does he still remember me?

I may never know.

I’ve often wondered why such a brief interaction still occupies a quiet corner of my mind. Why it lingered long enough to make itself at home. Why I keep replaying the conversation, laughing at the same jokes, feeling my heart grow lighter at the memory, and rewriting different endings to a story that was left beautifully unfinished.

It was a misty afternoon wrapped in a soft drizzle. I had boarded the train and was looking for my seat. Across from it sat a man with headphones on, sketching something in a small notebook, seemingly unaware of the passing landscape. The tiny strands of hair at his temples stirred gently in the breeze drifting through the open window. There was something oddly cinematic about the whole scene. I remember getting lost in it for a moment before quietly settling into my seat.

I’ve never been the kind of person who starts conversations with strangers. So I sat there, watching the rain blur the world beyond the window as tiny droplets kissed my face through the open frame. There was something deeply soothing about the weather, like hearing a familiar melody after years. The steady rhythm of the rain quieted the constant noise in my head, and for the first time in days, I wasn’t thinking about the work I’d left behind.

Every now and then, I would glance at him, curious about what he was drawing.

Eventually, he caught me looking. He took one side of his headphones off and smiled.

“Checking me out?”

I laughed, a little flustered.

“No… I was just trying to see what you were drawing.”

Without a word, he turned the notebook towards me.

“It is beautiful”, I said, silently admiring his talent.

It was a picture of an elderly couple sitting on a bench at a rain-soaked platform, watching a train approach.

Somehow, that single moment became the beginning of a conversation that lasted the entire journey.

We talked a lot, about everything from silly little things to politics, and everything in between, as though we’d known each other for years. He spoke passionately about his art, his research, science, sports, and how annoying the person in the next seat was for talking loudly on the phone. I told him about my writing, the books I loved, my work and the little pieces of my life that I don’t usually share with strangers.

There was something different about that, something effortless about sharing our inner worlds. No need to curate ourselves, no pressure to impress each other, no filtering our thoughts before they became words. The kind of conversation that makes you feel seen without trying too hard, understood without needing to explain everything.

Five hours disappeared without either of us noticing. Then we reached my station. I told him it was time for me to leave.

For a moment, neither of us said anything. It wasn’t awkward. It was a brief pause to acknowledge that the conversation had reached its natural end.

Neither of us asked for each other’s number or suggested staying in touch.

There was a moment of “what if” that passed between us as we exchanged a silent goodbye with our eyes, but neither of us dared to give it a voice.

As I walked away, I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking. Whether he hoped we’d meet again someday, whether he never wanted a beautiful memory to become anything more, or whether he was waiting for me to say something that might have changed the ending.

Fate never let our paths cross again. Maybe he moved on with his life, and I was just a passing face he had long forgotten.

Maybe not everything is meant to continue. Some are more beautiful when they remain untouched by the need to become anything more. Some people arrive not to stay, but to leave behind a piece of themselves within us, altering the way we see the world.

And among a million other things, this memory will also remain carefully preserved, waiting to find me again on a rainy afternoon.

I will travel again, meet new people, collect different stories, discover unfamiliar places, and gather a million more small moments. One by one, each will find its place in the little archive of my mind. Each will revisit me in unexpected moments, on rainy afternoons, golden hours and sleepless midnights, reminding me of what they once were.

The beauty of brief encounters lies in their impermanence, and perhaps that is why they remain alive long after they have bid goodbye. And perhaps that is enough.

Depression is like cancer; an uninvited guest that does not knock or announce itself, yet finds a way in. It settles quietly, spreading in silence and invading your mind before you even realize something has changed. It slowly consumes you, and by the time you realize it, you are already cursed by its invisible hands, holding you in a quiet chokehold.

Depression isn’t just sadness. Sadness has edges; a beginning and an end. This is different. Time feels like it is slipping through your fingers and days blur into each other; an endless loop with no way out. At least, that’s what it convinces you. So you stop looking for an escape and accept it. And slowly, it becomes your normal.

You don’t feel much of anything; neither sad nor happy. You become numb to everything around you; people, places and things you used to enjoy once. Moments that once felt alive slowly fade away from your memories. And somewhere along the way, you forget what happiness even felt like. It doesn’t just change the way you feel but also how you see yourself. Your mind rewrites you; it convinces you that this is life now. The way you feel right now is how it has always been, and this is how it will always be.

At some point, you believe the story it feeds you and start building a life around thoughts that were never meant to define you. Every thought becomes negative, and every situation feels heavier than it should be. You convince yourself that there is no escape; you are stuck in a loop of overthinking and exhaustion. You begin to live inside your mind, mistaking it for the real world. The more you live in it, the more you drown in the darkness. And the cruelest part? You begin to find comfort in the pain; not because it feels good, but because it is familiar; and familiarity is harder to leave.

Depression doesn’t stay in your mind; it seeps into your body too, making it hard to even get out of bed. Sometimes you try to go out with little energy left in you. You go to work, talk, smile, and carry on with responsibilities only to completely fall apart in the quiet corner of your room later. You are not living anymore; just surviving, hanging by a thread and nobody notices it. You stop talking to people, not because you want to, but because you don’t know how to explain what you’re feeling. How do you explain a feeling you barely understand yourself?

So you watch silently as people move forward with their lives while you are fighting your own thoughts day after day. The same thoughts which grow stronger until they sound like the truth. You feel hopeless, helpless, worthless, and life itself feels meaningless. Your mind whispers that the world is better without you and that you are just a burden to your friends and family. You think nobody cares and that you are alone, even when everyone surrounds you; not because you are, but because you feel like you are.

Depression narrows your vision until all you can see is negativity. You are no longer capable of making decisions, so you stop trying because you think you are going to fail anyway. And then comes the scariest part; the constant guilt of not doing enough, of not being enough. You start living in the reality it shows thinking this is forever and don’t even consider the possibility of getting out of this darkness. So you live on autopilot, waiting for something to change without knowing how to change it.

At night, you try to fall asleep, hoping it will save you from the echoes of your own mind. But it doesn’t, instead they grow louder. You try to distract yourself from the replaying conversations in your head, yet you fail. You search for sleep playlists on Spotify or ‘how to fall asleep’ videos on YouTube, hoping that would work. And then suddenly, everything you suppressed comes crashing down. You start to cry. In the silent corners of the room, your pain feels louder than anything else; but no one listens. Eventually, you fall asleep; not peacefully, just out of exhaustion.

And the next day, the loop repeats. You go on with the day as if nothing happened, as if you didn’t fall apart just hours before.

If this felt like your story, you are not broken, and you are not alone in it. The story depression has told you isn’t the truth and this state isn’t permanent. This loop can be broken; not all at once, but slowly, one step at a time. And this isn’t where your story ends. This is where you slowly find your way back to yourself. To your true self, which still exists beneath all of this.

I have always been seen as the resilient one, at least by my friends and family. The one who could adapt, endure and continue after significant stress, disappointment or adversity. They admired how I always seemed to bounce back from setbacks with patience and determination.

What they never saw was how long it took me to recover. How long it took to begin again.

I've often wondered why the smallest inconveniences affect me so deeply.

A cancelled plan.

A delayed reply.

A single interruption.

None of them are life-changing, yet they somehow rearrange my entire day.

The inconvenience lasts for a minute.

The recovery lasts for the rest of the day.

I envy people who lose five minutes without losing everything that follows. They acknowledge the disappointment, adjust and move on. I, on the other hand, spend hours, sometimes days, trying to find my way back.

Perhaps it's because I have set standards for myself that I would never place on anyone else. Expectations so high that even the smallest deviation feels like failure.

When my morning doesn't go as planned, it stops being about the morning. It becomes a threat to everything that follows: my schedule, my goals, my future and even my sense of self-worth.

The inconvenience is never just an inconvenience. My mind doesn't experience it in isolation. It immediately projects its consequences. One delayed task becomes a wasted day. A wasted day becomes lost progress. Lost progress becomes another reason to believe I'm falling behind.

I replay the version of the day I had imagined instead of accepting the one I'm living. I search for what went wrong, how to fix it and how to recover what was lost, even when nothing meaningful was actually taken from me.

The irony is that, by the time I recover, I often forget what the inconvenience was in the first place. The inconvenience ends long before my reaction to it does.

What remains isn't the event.

It's the guilt.

The guilt of everything that happened because I couldn't let go of five difficult minutes. The guilt of letting an unexpected event steal my momentum and everything that depended on it.

I don't break because life is difficult.

I break because I struggle to recover from the smallest detours.

For a long time, I believed this meant I wasn't resilient. I thought resilience meant never being shaken, never losing momentum and never letting emotions interrupt productivity. Watching other people move on so effortlessly only reinforced that belief.

Now I wonder if I misunderstood resilience altogether.

Perhaps resilience isn't measured by how quickly we recover. Perhaps it's measured by whether we return at all.

It doesn't matter whether we question it, cry over it or replay it a thousand times. What matters is that, eventually, we settle our emotions and begin again, even if it's from scratch.

The more I questioned myself, the more I understood that resilience doesn't look the same for everyone. Some people return in minutes. Others return in days. I happen to be someone who needs more time.

That doesn't make me less resilient.

It simply means my recovery takes longer.

Now I'm learning to treat inconveniences as they are, instead of turning them into obstacles that threaten everything I've worked for. Not because I want to stop feeling deeply, but because I want to shorten the distance between falling out of rhythm and finding it again.

I don't want five difficult minutes to decide the next five hours.

I don't want to be carried away by the wave of minor inconveniences.

And perhaps the hardest lesson of all is learning that some inconveniences are, in fact, just inconveniences.