In the suspended, hovering pieces of her life, she had always kept herself apart, a careful distance from the faces and places that drifted through her days. She pushed them away softly, deliberately, as though the gentlest force might spare her the hurt of letting them stay too long.

She had long carried a faith in universalism, a thought she had once scrawled in haste: that belonging meant stretching oneself outward, beyond the tight walls of nation, race, religion, and all the brittle cages we build around ourselves. And yet now, as time poured on, unyielding and relentless, she felt an ache she did not recognise, an ache for something fixed, something ordinary, something she might at last call home.

She, too, had lingered in that quiet hope, waiting for something to return, some steady rhythm, some fixed point amid the restless, endless drift of the world. And in that waiting, she became both witness and wanderer, caught between what was lost and what might yet find its way home.

For a long time, she had mocked this desire for normalcy, certain it was a weakness, a regression into the simplicity of the familiar. But now, as the years wore on, she found that the older she became, the more she felt the deep, almost primal need for kinship, for a place to belong, for something to hold onto.

That night, she closed the window and lit the dim glow of the lamp. The silence in the room was heavy, and she picked up her pen, fingers hovering over the empty page. The words refused to come. Only the silence remained, pressing in on her chest, a hollow ache she could not name. She traced a line across the page, a hesitant, looping curve that twisted back on itself, a futile attempt to find meaning in the blankness.

She set the pen down with a soft, resigned sigh and lit a cigarette. The smoke curled lazily into the quiet, filling the space with its bitter sweetness, just as her thoughts spiralled, waiting, suspended in the same quiet emptiness.

The day before, she had visited a friend who lived deep in the narrow, labyrinthine streets of Jyatha, in the heart of Kathmandu’s Thamel. It was a place she knew well, yet it always seemed new, constantly shifting, like the world she inhabited. Her friend, sharp, tongued and scornful, had insisted on showing her a documentary about the Maoists in Nepal. She had hesitated at first, instinctively refusing the offer, but the insistence in his voice, mixed with the promise of a rare glimpse into revolution, had worn her down.

The video buffered endlessly, its progress halted at regular intervals, the caption flashing across the screen: “Revolution does not wander alone; it is carried in the breath and bone of those who dare to live it. Lives move it forward. It never moves without them.”

The room fell silent, as though the air itself had thickened with a question that no one dared voice. She watched the screen, frozen, as stress and ambiguity seemed to embody themselves in the still, unfinished image.

The pause lingered, as if time itself had stopped to listen. She left without a word, and the silence, thick, patient, slipped after her, trailing through the door like a shadow unwilling to let go.

She had been turning it over in her mind, wondering if belonging could ever be real without its other side, without the shadow of exclusion always waiting, just out of reach.

How could one meet the world, not as a single self, but in many, taking in every shard and shadow of who they were? She had carried this question for years, like a stone in her pocket, and now, feeling the weight of time pressing into her bones, the answer could no longer be ignored, no longer slipped past in silence.

In the days of her youth, she would have brushed such thoughts aside, called them frailty, a betrayal of the values she had painstakingly gathered around her like armour. Those values, principles of universality, of stretching the self beyond the narrow walls of belonging, had long shaped the contours of who she was, marking her as both careful and untouchable.

And yet now, with a sorrow that hummed beneath her ribs, she found herself questioning those very values. Was there something in the world itself, some deep pulse, that demanded a return to the solid, the fixed, something less fluid than she had ever imagined?

It was a struggle, threading together her need to belong with the freedom she had once held as truth, the shifting, untethered self she believed was the only road to true liberation. Each tug of longing seemed to pull against the currents of what she had known, leaving her suspended between yearning and liberation.

The very notion of a ‘standard’ pressed against her, a subtle defiance of the convictions she had carried like scripture in her bones.

(In)Visibility

In her small Kathmandu residence, surrounded by the clutter and chaos of her thoughts, she had written in her journal the night before: “In my Kathmandu residence, time has folded itself still. Paused, inside, outside, everywhere, the hours hold their breath, waiting for something unnamed to stir them again.”

What was it she was waiting for? She didn't know, exactly. A return to normalcy? To some sort of order?

It was as if she had been caught in a suspended tide of uncertainty, a weight more pressing, somehow, than the death that had once drifted along the narrow currents of the Bagmati River.

She had walked to TU that week, a campus soaked with the scent of crushed flowers—flowers trampled underfoot, their beauty wasted by the weight of broken dreams and the incessant march of time, unlistening stride.

The flowers stood like quiet witnesses, fragile and trembling, reminders of all that had been surrendered, all that had slipped through fingers too eager to believe. They whispered of a freedom that glimmered like promise, only to ring hollow when caught in the harsh light of reality.

The campus hung heavy with loss, a place where hopes and ideals had withered quietly, slipping away in the pale glare of fluorescent lights, unnoticed, unclaimed, leaving only shadows to remember them.

The students had come together, young comrades in black, white, and red, their clothes streaked with the mud of their own making, of their own struggles. They circled, speaking of revolution and change, their voices slicing through the quiet of a winter day’s end. She watched, drawn in despite herself, caught by the fire in their rebellion, the raw pulse of their passion that refused to be ignored.

The dog at one comrade’s feet flinched when a voice rang out, and for a moment, she thought she heard it groan, low, mournful, a sound too deep for words, as if it carried the weight of everything the world refused to name.

There, among the slogans and posters, under the looming shadow of Marx and his hammer and sickle, she glimpsed something at once beautiful and tragic. The movement had curled into a shadow of its former self, draped in the gaudy colors of a consumer-driven world, yet its pulse still throbbed in the chants that rolled through the air, stubborn and unyielding.

The voices kept calling for a freedom she could neither take into her hands nor push away, a freedom slipping through her like smoke, no more reachable than the answers to the old, persistent questions that had followed her through the years.

She could feel it in the air, a tautness, a strange inevitability pressing against her skin. In the crowded courtyard, men and women, old and young, gathered together, speaking over one another, their voices rising and falling like tides, carrying the same demands for justice, for change, for something better, over and over, as if the world itself might finally bend to listen.

“She found herself asking, almost to the dust and the wind, “What has become of these roads? Of this country? The questions rose in her like old spirits, refusing to be quieted.”

In the endless debate over development and freedom, the answers seemed as fragmented as the lives of those around her.

She caught herself asking, not to anyone in particular, Where in this wide living does ease reside? The question drifted out of her like a sigh, as if hoping the world might answer.

It was a question she had carried for years, worn smooth by her turning it over and over. An economist, surely, would have a tidy answer for it. But she was no economist. She was only a witness, watching hope fray at the edges, watching bright ideals sag and fold into shapes far more tangled, far more troubling than she had ever been taught to imagine.

In the midst of it all, she felt the weight of her own isolation, the quiet realisation that she was, perhaps, more invisible than she had ever allowed herself to admit.

She had spent her life seeking answers, only to find more questions, more ambiguity, more contradictions. Yet in the silence of those moments, in the stillness that accompanied the buffering of that film, she found a strange kind of peace, a recognition that perhaps freedom, like everything else, was never as simple as it first appeared.

Her own life, too, lived in that slow, circling buffer, always loading, never landing. And maybe in that suspension, in that breath held between what was and what might be, lay a truer truth than she had ever allowed herself to name.