i’m afraid that i’ve begged all the people in my life to love me.

As I begin my 20s, I already begin to resent friends in committed relationships who slowly decenter platonic female friendships the moment they enter a relationship. While I value seeing my friends fall in love, I always remember that it comes at a price of inevitably being less prioritized in their lives. Of course, this doesn’t hold true for all my friends in relationships. I resented the one’s who gossip and, debrief everything relayed to them in private, to their boyfriend. I resent the ones who slowly forget to update me about their day, because they pour all of that love and energy into their boyfriend. How can you befriend someone for months, years, and slowly watch the slow decay unfold in front of you? How can you talk about so many spots in the city to explore with your partner, but be idea-less when it comes to making plans with your friends? I watch how plans become less prioritized, calls become less frequent, and gaps in which I used to feel effortlessly filled with laughter and small updates now stretch into long silences.

I cringe when I see friends like post about how their boyfriends don’t deplete their energy like their friends do. I wince whenever my friends repeatedly cancel plans to spend time with their partners. I’m horrified by the title of being someone’s girlfriends, at the price of people who have chosen to love you, before you were even your partner’s “type.”

It’s not just the absence that stings, it’s the quiet reshuffling of importance. The way I can feel myself moving down an invisible list, from someone essential to someone optional. And maybe that’s the part I struggle to admit out loud—the fear that platonic love is treated as practice, while romantic love is treated as the real thing. That friendship becomes something you grow out of, rather than something you grow within.

I don’t want to compete with someone’s partner.

is the price of non-conformity as a woman loneliness?

When I imagine the future I want for myself, I know that it will inevitably come with loneliness. I am not a stranger to loneliness. It’s a feeling that that I walk with in my everyday life. It is a presence that sits with me as I stare into the horizon. I know that my decision to be child-free comes with the inevitability of loneliness. I am courageous enough to be child-free. I am both selfless and selfish enough to say I am child-free. It will never make me less of a responsible adult. It doesn’t take away from my competency. It will never take away from my sense of womanhood, because it never was something that was a necessary condition that defined womanhood. I know I will be questioned, and likely enter relationships with men who think they’ll change my mind. I know my own female friends won’t understand that choice, and encourage me to freeze my eggs. My tokophobia emerges whenever the conversations deepens , and my friends discuss family planning. The painstakingly slow process in which misogyny seeps into our conversation. Being from a culture that pushes woman to settle and marry and have children so soon, terrifies me, as I know I will inevitably grow apart from my friends who will internalize that they must decenter platonic relationships in order to be a fit mother. I see the bits of it already. Perhaps, it’s my deeply pessimistic nature which seeps into the cracks of all the positive friendships I have that drives me to believe that it will all just go to shit.

It makes me realize what I want will never be enough for the people I love. They will, for the most part, always desire having a nuclear family. It’s not a far-fetched concept, but something that quietly shapes the interactions I have with people as I get older. My desires in life will never center around making a family, though, I know that it’s a respectable goal for women who choose it.

I have always desired waking up to the laughter of the friends I love. I have always desired coming home and debriefing my day to women who care for when I laugh, cry, and embrace and wipe my tears when I am struggling. I love so deeply, and observe so deeply, for a man with a third of the attention span to win the hearts of my friends and be their life-companion. Platonic love is the truest form of love. It doesn’t come with the added nature that you share blood, grew up under the same roof, make love with one another, or will have children together. It exists without obligation or expectation, chosen again and again rather than assumed. There’s no script to follow, no roles to perform—just two people meeting each other as they are, without the pressure to be anything more.

It survives distance, silence, and change because it isn’t built on possession or permanence, but on understanding. In its quiet way, it proves that love doesn’t have to be romantic to be profound, and that sometimes the purest connection is the one that asks for nothing but still gives everything.

learning to pass the fucking bechdel test

It’s so interesting to see how people reset themselves after a breakup. You stray from platonic love so deeply, have entire versions of yourself that only are viewed by a partner, you rely so deeply one person’s support, that you forget that the people around you have to offer you. Heartbreak needs months, years to process. The people who have left the biggest mark in our lives, will be women, but for some reason we place the emotional weight of romantic love to be more heavier than that. If you conform to heteronormative standards, you will live and wake up to a man everyday. You will blend into him; from his beliefs, his anger/patience, his sense of humour, his kindness/lack thereof, and that person will bear witness to the rest of your life.

Your youth is one of the only times where you can fully maximize that time with your friends; you will one day have to tell a man before you leave the house about your silly little dates with your friends; you will have to notify him about a girls trip you’re planning; you will have to even think more broadly about your work schedule, and your children, before you can even see a girl friend for matcha. This is something I encourage people to reckon with, instead of falling into the trap of thinking you have time. I am not a placeholder in your life, until you settle down for the one. I am not Chappell Roan singing to you about your inevitably fucked relationship because you actually are probably a lesbian.

From as young as I can remember, I was taught to be male-oriented. To haha-hehe my way through love, instead of participating in actual relationship dynamics. I was taught that’s what defined girlhood: love triangles, rom-coms, ditzy characters like Mabel from Gravity Falls or Rory Gilmore. The story of girlhood was always interesting because she had romantic interest(s). But, in college, once the newness of my environment began to die down, I became rather less interested in love altogether. I’ve had strong negative opinions about being dependent on a man, yet chased the high that limerence provided me. It is a deeply destabilizing feeling. For once in my life, a lot of love interests were not one-sided, but I needed to grapple with my own sense of identity and self-worth. I remember vividly talking about an actor I thought was cute to a friend on a day-trip, and she mentioned that this conversation was not passing the bechdel test. And she was absolutely right. I had self interpreted entertainment written through the lens of male writers as something that I exhibited in my own own actions and thoughts. It made me really think about how to become less male-centered.

To not completely reject the idea of a relationship, but really understand that I don’t have to search for one to necessarily “complete me” or become a “better version of myself.” It might sound silly to think of your life as a main character; I definitely distance myself from the thought, but the benefit of having that mindset, is that it helps you realize how futile some of the relationships you have in your life. At a young age, you think you have so many attempts to really get to know someone deeply. As you get older, you realize those chances are less frequent that you thought. That scared me for a while. It made me think, and buy into cultural conformity, that love for me was a ticking time bomb. I only had a few more years, to find who I fell in love with, or that choice would be forsaken from me. I realized that pressure drove me to lose aspects of myself, and find even the most god-forsaken men attractive and worth pursuing a relationship with.

I can’t tell you the exact point in time, but from then, I am holding myself responsible for rejecting men. They are not a crucial part of my hidayat. I don’t have to buy into Western ideology that makes me feel the need to be interested in causal sex, or doing things for the plot. They do not shape the course of my life, unless I deliberately allow them to enter my life. I will not be a reflection of the woman in my life, who were forced to settle for less. I am allowed to want more, and for that to look different to me.

So maybe what remains—when romance is no longer the axis everything spins on—is something quieter, but far more deliberate. A life where love is not scarce, not hierarchical, not something you have to audition for. A life where friendship is not a waiting room, but a destination in itself. I don’t want to beg to be chosen, or shrink myself into someone easier to keep. I want to build a world where the people who love me do so loudly, consistently, and without needing to be reminded of my place in their lives. And if that kind of love is rarer, slower, or even lonelier at times, then so be it. I would rather endure the loneliness that comes with staying true to myself than the quiet grief of being perpetually second in a life that was never meant to sideline me.

A sliver lodges near his lung, each breath sharpening it,
each gasp teaching it how to hurt.
He calls out again, again
his small lungs burning,
desperation drumming against his ribcage.

He cries for his mother,
but she is somewhere under the same sky
in pieces the world will never count.

Across the ocean, people line their mouths with gluttony,
they stitch their comfort with threads,
pulled from someone else’s skin.
Laughter spills
wine stains white tablecloth
red.

They write lines of script that kills,
hold hands and sing sermons,
their indifference poised between a tap and scroll,
there was time.
there was power.

Under the rubble,
his body trembles.
Flies land on his open wounds,
crawl across the dirt-caked curve
of his cheek.
His eye, half-lidded,
stares at a single shard of sky
as if begging it to widen,
to swallow him whole,
to end the waiting.

Across the ocean, we harvest indulgences disguised as sweetness
from a distant orchard —
never asking why the fruit
tastes faintly of ash,
why every bite
echoes like a falling stone.

They call it ordinary life,
but the market they feed
is a quiet battlefield,
and their wallets march
even when they don’t.

But the boy’s breath begins to slow,
his mind pleading for mercy.
Even after his body stills,
the sound of him doesn’t.
It clings to the dust,
threads itself through shattered beams,
rides the wind across the sea,
a thin, persistent echo.
His blood turns into a trembling river,
carrying fragments of war
through the corridors of a child’s body.

His gaze freezes on that thin slice of sky,
and he never looks away again.
Once again, his chest rises, but does not fall.
The air reaches his lips, pauses,
and chooses not to return.

And long after his breath fades,
the earth still holds his shape
an absence carved deep enough
to shame the living,
if they ever dare
to look.

And the blood on the rubble
is not nearly as red
as the blood on our hands.

I stare at my shoes, gripping the overhead rail, catching a glimpse of the skyline before the train dips underground again. For a second I imagine myself as a city transplant on her first day at work.

It isn’t. It’s actually my one hundred and forty-seventh. Seven more songs until my stop.

My eyes drift closed as the dreadful sound of Meghan Trainor begins. The only thing I’m looking forward to now is the latte I’m hoping to make once I get there.

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch something familiar — a wisp of red hair. I pause. She’s hard to miss the moment she steps onto the train. Bright red. The kind that makes you look twice without meaning to. The same shade I remember from her Hinge photos.

Red gingham skirt, Mary Jane pumps, silver nose hoop, snake ring, a Dream Syndicate tote bag. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear in that absent-minded way I remember from her profile, one hand gripping the overhead rail while the other steadies her bag against her hip. She stares out the window, somewhere between thinking and daydreaming.

Then her eyes meet mine — and she catches me mid-stare.

I am, apparently, a fool.

Fuck, where did she say she worked again? Tower 28? Amika? Something with design — or podcast production?

Fuck.

It was something editorial. Was that her, or another girl? Not Vogue… what was it?

Brain, please. A coherent thought would be great right now.

If it’s Vogue, she gets off at Fulton St, a couple stops before mine. Meaning I have three and a half songs to figure out what I want to do. I felt numb, my palms sweating, suddenly aware my B.O. has probably tripled.

I kept glancing up, trying not to be obvious about it. There’s something strange about recognizing someone you’ve never actually met; your brain fills in the gaps from a few photos and a short bio. Seeing her in real life made her seem more vivid: the slight crease in her brow as the train lurched forward.

I try to remember what we talked about. Something witty to start a conversation. Her foster kittens, she’s an ex-pre-med, her poison of choice is an aperol spritz, loud middle child, and has a mandala tattoo she regrets. I think we just kept missing the timing window. Every time one of us resurfaced the other was in mid-life-spiral week. a very unceremonious ending, so to speak.

The next stop is Canal Street.

Two stops left.

I don’t have my life together. Not enough savings to be a good girlfriend. Not enough stability to invite someone into my life without a disclaimer. My plants are on hospice care. I still Google things like “is aluminum microwavable?” My emergency fund is basically three paychecks and a jar of coins, my laundry situation is a diplomatic crisis between the chair, the floor, and the basket that was supposed to solve this problem. Most days it feels like I’m just improvising a life I’m not entirely sure how to hold together.

So letting this moment pass for the sake of dignity suddenly feels like a terrible investment.

This stop is Fulton Street. The next stop is-

I watch her start to leave the cart. My feet move before I can think, I rush out of the train car, nearly colliding with the morning sea of commuters, just to reach her in time.

— — — —

“I’m so sorry to bother you.” I let out an exasperated breath, my bag falling off my shoulder. “but I think we’ve spoken before.”

She pauses, one earbud halfway out.

“Oh. Wait — yeah,” she says slowly, squinting at me. “You look really familiar. Do you work around here?”

“Uh — kind of? I mean, not here here.” My brain stalls. “We matched on Hinge. A while ago. You had — uh — kittens.”

Her face lights up. “Oh my god, the foster kittens!” She laughs. “Yes. Wait. You’re — “

She says my name like she’s pulling it out of a dusty filing cabinet.

I nod, too eagerly. “Yeah. Hi.”

There’s a brief pause as the crowd moves around us.

“So this is… funny,” she says.

“Statistically improbable,” I add, immediately regretting the phrase.

She laughs again, softer this time.

“I always wondered what happened to you,” she says. “We just kind of… stopped talking.”

“Mid-life-spiral week,” I say. “On my end.”

“Oh good,” she says. “Same.”

Another pause. Not bad. Just… hovering. The train doors beep somewhere behind us. I realize this is the part where a normal person says something charming.

Instead I blurt, “Would you maybe want to get a drink sometime?”

Her eyebrows lift. She pauses for a moment.

“Yeah,” she smiles. “I’d actually like that.”

My brain short-circuits.

“Oh. Great. Cool. Awesome. Fantastic.”

I pat my pockets like a man searching for car keys he drove here with.

“Do you — uh — do you want to exchange numbers?”

She unlocks her phone and hands it to me.

I type mine in with the concentration of someone defusing a bomb.

“There,” I say, handing it back. “Now you have my number. For… logistical purposes.”

“For logistical purposes,” she repeats, still smiling.

She waves lightly as she starts walking toward the stairs.

“I’m a bit late to work. I’ll text you.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay.”

She disappears into the crowd.

— — — — -

I stand there for a second, feeling a flicker of pride, like I’ve just done something brave for once.

Then the train jolts.

Meghan Trainor is still playing.

I blink.

My hands are still gripping the overhead rail.

I never moved.

Across the car, she steps off at Fulton Street. She adjusts her tote bag, pulls one earbud out just long enough to check the signs, then tucks it back in and disappears into the morning crowd without ever looking in my direction.

The doors close. The train pulls away.

I stare down at my shoes. Seven songs left until my stop.

Somewhere between Canal and Fulton, I imagined an entire conversation — a small cinematic victory. I imagined a version of myself that could step off the train and into her life.

But that version of me stayed in my head.

I never got off.

And the city moved on without me.