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Dear Aayushma,

I hope you have been doing well. I often wonder how your days have been lately, whether life has been kind to you, or whether you have been carrying things quietly, the way we sometimes do. Distance stretches time in strange ways, yet you still feel close in my thoughts.

I wanted to write to you not with answers, but with something that has been sitting with me for a while.

Recently, I came across a short video. You may have seen it too. A penguin standing among its group, still and ordinary, until it wasn’t. Without urgency, without spectacle, it turned and walked away.

I do not know why that moment unsettled me so deeply.

Nothing dramatic happened. No chaos followed. And yet it stayed with me, lingering like a question left unanswered at the back of the mind. For days, it refused to fade.

People were quick to react. Jokes appeared. Explanations followed. Everyone seemed eager to name it, label it, place it somewhere safe. But none of it felt right to me. It felt like watching someone rush to close a window because the air coming in was unfamiliar.

What keeps returning to me is not what people think happened, but what might have happened.

Why did it leave?

Was something calling it, the way the sea sometimes calls without sound? Was there a direction that only it could feel, a pull so subtle it looked like choice? Or was it simply heavy in a way we do not allow animals to be, because we like to believe weight belongs only to us?

I wonder if pain needs awareness to exist. I wonder if loneliness can live inside a body without language. I wonder if belonging can fracture quietly, without warning, like ice cracking beneath steady feet

And then there is the question I hesitate to touch.

What if there was no reason at all?

What if it was neither despair nor courage, neither instinct nor confusion? What if it was simply a step taken, unremarkable to the world, but irreversible all the same?

That possibility unsettles me most.

Because if there is no reason, then meaning does not wait to be discovered. It is something we build after the fact, the way we draw constellations by connecting stars that were never meant to touch.

Maybe there is nothing to learn from the penguin. Maybe not every moment is a lesson. Maybe some moments exist only to remind us how fragile togetherness can be, how easily a line can be crossed without anyone noticing.

Still, I cannot ignore what it stirred in me.

It felt like watching someone walk out of a room you did not realize you were standing in. Like realizing that staying is also a choice, even when it feels like stillness.

I do not know what the penguin carried. I do not even know if it carried anything at all.

But it made me pause. It made me sit with uncertainty instead of rushing toward meaning. And perhaps that pause itself was the quiet invitation.

I wanted to share this with you because I know you understand how some questions are not meant to be answered, only held.

Write back when you can. I would love to know how you have been, and what life has been asking of you lately.

With warmth,

Always thinking of you