He told me once that the highest honor in life wasn’t a promotion or a wedding toast, but being remembered by someone who didn’t need to remember you. The kind of man who has no place in your biography, no reason to keep your face filed away, and yet does. Like the shopkeeper who nods before you speak, or the bartender who looks up and already knows you’ll ask for something neat, like you’ve got the dignity of a man who just can’t trust something as mundane as ice.

It sounded trivial when he said it. Until I realized most of us walk around anonymous, passing through each other’s life like shadows. And then one day someone pauses, studies you for a moment, and declares, wordlessly or otherwise, that you’re not forgettable. That you could handle something bold. Suddenly, the world feels less like a series of transactions and more like a movie where you’ve finally been cast.

And then he confessed, dead serious, that he was reconsidering his loyalty to pickles. I thought he was joking at first, then he insisted that it was a matter of identity. I laughed, but he didn’t. We build our lives, he said, around unspoken alliances with small things. The sweet bread we defend, the cigarettes we forgive, the condiments we let define us. And maybe those choices matter more than the big ones, because we make them every day, without witnesses. You want to know who you are? He asked, look at what you reach for when you’re too tired to pretend you’re better.

“Or what you don’t reach for”, A woman at the table overheard us and murmured that everything felt casual, though the stakes were impossibly high. And isn’t that the central condition of modern life? You swipe right and it’s either a meaningless conversation or a shared mortgage. You pick shawarma over paneer and you’re bargaining with your digestive tract for the next twelve hours.

“It’s life and death to her”, he told me, and everyone laughed. I didn’t. Because I could see it. The way that phrase fit. Life and death aren’t delivered by grand events. They come disguised as errands, snacks, moments you don’t bother to notice until you can’t undo them. Life’s gravity hides inside these stupid, ordinary moments, waiting for you to laugh so it can crush you with its weight.

I thought about it long after he left. How recognition from a stranger and doubt over pickles could occupy the same space as love, betrayal, mortality. How the tiniest acknowledgments could carry a force as profound as a goodbye kiss. And I realized maybe we don’t survive by assigning importance to the big things. Maybe we survive by pretending the small ones are enough.

“Cosplay”, that was his one-word explanation for the absurd wardrobe, offered without irony, on a sultry Trivandrum summer afternoon when the air itself seemed too heavy to permit even the thinnest linen, and yet he wore black in layers, as though neither heat nor humidity affected him.

I had only just returned from the hospital, still holding the folded prescription that pronounced my blood pressure “elevated.” A phrase so bland, so politely bureaucratic, it sounded less like a medical warning than the veiled hint of a landlord threatening eviction.

The fluorescent corridors, the faint smell of disinfectant, the slow shuffle of other patients, these clung to me as I pushed open the door of my flat, expecting emptiness, and instead found him. He was already there, seated at the kitchen table with the composure of someone who had always belonged to the room, polite enough to nod but not to smile, his black garments resembling less the clothing of a man than the ceremonial costume of someone convinced that this world, in all its damp heat and crumbling plaster, was merely a stage on which he had been waiting for me to arrive.

Compared to my previous roommate, whose bathroom kombucha experiment had nearly driven me out by smell alone, this new one seemed tolerable, even welcome. He mostly kept to himself, was punctual with rent, not given to midnight parties or loud declarations of entrepreneurial destiny. He didn’t even doom scroll with the sound on. His only eccentricity was the wardrobe, row upon row of indistinguishable black coats he hung in the closet beside mine, so numerous they seemed not chosen but issued, like a uniform for a profession he declined to name.

I told myself it was harmless. People collect worse hobbies than cosplay.

At dinner I found myself speaking too much, filling the silence with anecdotes of work, trivial observations, a stream of chatter that embarrassed me even as I produced it, until, catching his steady gaze, I confessed with a nervous laugh that I only talked this way to keep from falling asleep, that I had not been sleeping properly at night. He did not return the laugh, nor even nod, but said instead, in a voice so flat it stripped the words of comfort, “Sleep more,” and though it sounded like advice, it carried the weight of command, as if he had said “Breathe” or “Obey gravity.”

I often felt a discomfort around him I could not name, though I laughed it off, even later when, half in jest, I asked if I might borrow one of his endless black shirts for a funeral (for my life by then had tilted, imperceptibly but unmistakably, toward funerals rather than weddings), and he refused, saying, “They don’t suit anyone else,” with a finality that was not unkind but immovable, and I knew by the chill that followed that he had spoken not merely of clothing.

I ignored the unease, as I ignored the new grays multiplying at my temples faster than seemed fair for my age, or the sudden tightness in my chest that woke me one night and sent me staggering into the living room where he sat motionless, scrolling endlessly through his phone, not startled by my intrusion nor alarmed by my breathless state, only glancing once as if to acknowledge that he had already taken this scene into account, and then back to his screen, where I imagined he must be reviewing the endless feed of lives like mine, each post another fragile timeline edging toward its end.

Of all our interactions, the one that unsettled me most happened one afternoon as I was crossing a street. A car swerved at the last instant, missing me by inches, and when I looked up, heart pounding, skin slick with the shock of almost, I saw him leaning against a lamppost in that ridiculous cloak, watching with neither alarm nor surprise, as though merely confirming that this was not the moment, but that a moment would come. He didn’t mention it later that night when I wanted to talk about it, he pretended to not hear me. I figured that from his vantage point, it might not have looked that scary, although, as absurd as it may sound, a fleeting thought entered my mind that he was the one driving that car. Even though it would have been physically impossible.

Just as it would have been absurd for me to accuse him of any deliberate sabotage in the way the bread seemed to grow mold almost before the packet was opened, or the bananas collapsed into black pulp overnight as though unable to withstand another day in his company, or the milk turned sour in unopened cartons despite the date printed confidently on their sides, so too it would have been unreasonable to hold him accountable for the slow withering of my succulent, a plant that, by all logic, ought to have thrived in neglect, gifted to me by a colleague with the assurance that it required almost nothing or for the small goldfish, innocent and thoughtlessly purchased, that floated belly-up after only three days. And yet, taken together, these small betrayals of life gave the impression that nothing endured long in his presence, not because he had lifted a finger against them, just as he had never lifted a finger against me, but because they seemed, in some silent, unspoken recognition, to yield themselves up to him, as if in deference.

I told myself, constantly, stubbornly, that he was nothing more than a roommate with peculiar habits, that the spoiled food, the sleeplessness, the gray hairs, the near-misses and funerals, were all coincidences, the ordinary scatter of adult life, and that my unease was merely fatigue.

But denial, like all things, frays in time, and what came to me at last was not the sudden shock of revelation but the slow, inevitable settling of dust after a door has closed.

He was no hobbyist, no eccentric cosplayer, not even, in truth, a guest within my home. He had been here before me, he is here still, and he will remain long after I am gone.

Death has always been my roommate. And I, just his tenant.

Franz #kafka, by all accounts, led a thoroughly unimpressive life. He was an insurance clerk. An argument can be made that it is the sort of job you take when you’ve already given up on having a calling, and he spent his evenings writing things he was pretty sure no one wanted to read. He was chronically ill, socially detached, and riddled with self-doubt. The man basically specialized in existential dread and tuberculosis.

In his lifetime, he published a handful of short stories. Nothing major and certainly nothing that would make you think, “Ah yes, here is a literary titan in the making.” His novels, The Trial, The Castle, Amerika, were left incomplete, which feels appropriate given how much he doubted they were worth finishing. He died in 1924, telling his friend Max Brod to burn the lot. Straight to the flames, please and thank you.

Max, being either wildly disobedient or secretly clairvoyant, did the exact opposite. He published it. All of it, that is, the unfinished drafts, the notes, the existential ramblings. And somehow, people read it. Then scholars read it. Then critics called it genius. Today, Kafka is a literary monolith. He has an adjective #Kafkaesque, all to himself, which is more than most popes can claim.

The dude died thinking he was irrelevant. He died knowing he was a failed writer whose best legacy might be a properly filed insurance claim. Meanwhile, after he kicked it, the world decided he was a prophet of modern alienation. He never knew. Never got to bask in the praise, nor sign an autograph. Never saw the lectures not the fanfare.

Imagine that, spending your whole life convinced you were shouting into the void, only to never find out, that the void was listening.

There’s a show called After Life, which is one of those deceptively simple Ricky Gervais projects where he plays yet another emotionally defunct man with a wit sharp enough to be classified as a weapon.

The plot is straightforward, his wife dies, and instead of doing the societally approved grieving routine (cry, journal, eat icecream in your undies, pretend to heal), he decides to live in a way most people only threaten to do, completely indifferent to consequences, charm, or pants that fit.

Tony, the character, is not “trying to find meaning.” He’s not “processing trauma.” He’s just done. He’s done pretending that any of it matters. He is, how do I put this, philosophically nuclear.

And like Gervais himself, Tony is a staunch atheist, the kind who prefers drowning to being saved by someone who prays.

And then there’s this scene.

Without too much of series recap, He meets a kid. Tiny and bald. Clearly one of those “here to emotionally destabilize you in under three lines” characters. She has cancer, obviously. Perfectly poised to snap a misanthrope out of his existential coma. She asks him if he believes in Heaven.

And suddenly, everyone tenses. His friend. The air. Me, on my third rewatch, pretending I’m not about to feel anything because I’m emotionally mature and definitely not haunted by unresolved childhood detachment issues.

Now, we all know what Tony’s supposed to say. The script, the arc, the expectation. He’s going to unload something about the indifferences of the cosmos. He’s going to drop some elegant despair bomb and we’ll all nod and pretend we weren’t hoping he’d flinch.

But instead…this mf’er lies.

None of that philosophical preamble or tortured hesitation. A gentle, intentional lie while still showing on his face that he’s struggling to hold back.

He tells her what she needs to hear. just for the sake of being kind, he has to choose something else over his own conviction. Which, for a man like Tony (and Gervais) is basically a religious experience.

He does not believe in God. He doesn’t suddenly believe in heaven. He believes in protecting this small, dying person from the full weight of his personal worldview. Which, if we’re honest, most people don’t do even for their closest friends, let alone a child they met fifteen seconds ago.

And what struck me wasn’t just the restraint. It was the hierarchy. In that moment, he places compassion above truth, just for it to land heavier than any sermon because it wasn’t delivered from a pulpit, but was muttered, begrudgingly, by a man who’s spent the entire show earning the right to not give a shit.

Which brings me to me. Because, unfortunately, I watched that scene and had the deeply annoying realization that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking “being right” is the same thing as “doing right.” That conviction, the oscillation between pure white and vanta black, is more valuable than mercy. I’ve always believed that truth is a scalpel and you should use it every time someone’s confused, even if they’re already bleeding.

One of my closest friends has, over the years, tried to tell me that I tend to treat morality like a filing cabinet. She’s vehemently opposed to anything black and white. I’ve been told that I believe in justice the way accountants believe in ledgers. That empathy, for me, is mostly theoretical until the spreadsheet starts shaking (inside joke). I dismissed this, obviously. Because nothing says “you’re wrong” quite like citing logic during an emotional intervention.

But watching Tony, of all people, choose kindness instead of the usual, it hit different. A quiet, terrible reordering of priorities. I saw, clearly, disgustingly clearly, that sometimes beliefs are less important than timing.

Sometimes, the kindest thing you can do is shut the hell up and let the illusion breathe.

And that’s a sentence I wouldn’t have written two days ago.

I used to think that there is some kind of peace in truth. That caving meant cowardice. That softness was for people who couldn’t handle facts. But now I think softness is the only thing stopping facts from turning us into weapons.

And I hate that I learned this from television.

But here we are.

What a stupid, beautiful, completely unnecessary gift it is
to be wrong.

Et parfois, mentir doucement, c’est juste une autre facon d’aimer.