It was a quiet evening in early spring, the kind where the wind hadn’t quite decided if it still belonged to winter. I’d come over to see a friend, but she was upstairs, still getting ready or maybe just lost in her own timing. I found myself sitting instead in the kitchen with her mother, a woman whose presence felt like a book you’d forgotten you already started—warm, familiar, just waiting for you to open to the next page. The kitchen was lit by a single amber bulb and smelled of something baking—yeasty and soft and hard to place, like memory before it fully forms. She offered me coffee in a chipped white mug, and I took it. No sugar. No milk. Just the two of us and the slow hush of the house around us.
She looked at me for a while, not in the way people usually look when they’re trying to think of something polite to say, but like she was measuring whether I was someone who could hold what she was about to share. Then she asked, out of nowhere, “Have you ever been to India?” I shook my head. “Not yet,” I said. She smiled gently and leaned back in her chair. “I went in ’65. It was different then. Not better. Just… slower. Quieter. But louder inside.”
I said nothing and just sipped the coffee, which had already gone lukewarm. And then, as if a door had creaked open somewhere deep inside her, she began to speak—not like someone performing a memory, but like someone revisiting a room she hadn’t stepped into for years. She told me about joining a Peace Choir when she was barely twenty. How they sang to raise money for the Red Cross, and how someone at some point asked if she’d be willing to go. Not for music, but for help. “They needed hands,” she said. “Not voices. Not opinions. Just hands.”
She flew to South Korea first, long before it looked anything like the place people post about now. There, she spent three months baking donuts for soldiers in a makeshift kitchen that always smelled like oil and flour and exhaustion. “We didn’t have measurements,” she said, almost laughing. “We made them by feel. You just knew when the dough was right. Like how you know when someone’s about to cry—you don’t need them to say anything.” She paused, then added, “Some of them cried anyway. The soldiers. Usually the younger ones. Said it reminded them of home. Not the donut. Just the fact that someone made something warm.”
When Korea ended, she went to India. Alone. She carried travel cheques in her bra and a notebook filled with half-written addresses of people she was supposed to meet. Delhi, Jaipur, Madurai. She learned to navigate chaos without Google Maps, to haggle in markets without words, to trust people because sometimes that’s the only way to keep moving. “Everything felt alive,” she said. “And everyone seemed to know something I didn’t—but they didn’t hold it over me. They just let me walk beside them.” She lost her shoes in a temple. Slept through a monsoon. Shared her last chocolate bar with a child who gave her a mango in return, sticky and warm and perfect.
I listened. I didn’t say much. Just nodded when it seemed like the right thing to do. Her voice was steady, but the story held weight, the kind that builds in your chest when someone shares something they almost forgot they were still carrying. She didn’t tell it like a triumph. She didn’t dress it up in nostalgia. There were no metaphors, no grand morals. Just the facts, and the feeling underneath them. A life lived, not documented. Held in muscle and memory, not in posts or pictures.
When she stopped talking, the silence between us felt full, not empty. She stared into her coffee for a moment, then said quietly, “I didn’t go to find myself. I just went because something needed doing. And I knew how to do it. That was enough.” I wanted to tell her how rare that felt. How good it was to hear something unpolished, something not built for display. But I didn’t say any of that. I just nodded again. Because some stories don’t ask for praise. They just ask to be heard.
Now, whenever I scroll through endless feeds—flashes of curated adventure, filtered meaning—I think of her. I think of the donuts made by hand. The crumpled travel cheques. The moment someone handed her a mango in exchange for kindness. I remember that not all journeys are for show. Some are for service. Some are for stillness. Some are for stepping into the unknown, not to be seen, but to bear witness. And I wonder how many stories like hers go untold—quiet, weighty things sitting in old kitchens, waiting for someone to listen long enough for them to unfold.
Because the stories that matter most don’t always shine.
They simmer.
They stay.
And if you’re lucky,
someone offers you coffee,
and they let you hold one for a while.
life 