You Keep People in Small Ways

I make my noodles the way a friend once showed me in high school.

Back when life felt half-finished and quietly sacred.

When afternoons stretched longer than they do now.

When we believed we had time to become whoever we said we would be.

She told me not to overcook them. “Let them breathe,” she said, as if noodles had lungs. I laughed then. I still hear it sometimes when the water starts to boil. I still strain them the same way. Not because it’s the best method, but because it’s her.

It’s strange, the things that stay.

Every now and then, I revisit a playlist made by someone I no longer speak to. Someone I once would have crossed oceans for without asking what waited on the other side.

The songs don’t hurt the way they used to. They feel archived. Like letters in a box you don’t open often, but can’t throw away. I wonder if I ever cross their mind when those songs shuffle on. If a certain intro still reminds them of late drives and unfinished conversations.

I don’t reach out. I just listen.

I eat sushi because a girl I adored once insisted I try it. I remember wrinkling my nose, pretending to be skeptical. I remember her laugh when I admitted it was good. Now I order it without hesitation. Sometimes I sit there, chopsticks in hand, thinking about how love expands your world in small, edible ways.

I crave Indian food because my best friend once took me to Tandoori Flames and told me I hadn’t really tasted spice before that night. The heat, the smoke, the way the naan tore in my hands, I’ve been chasing that exact flavour ever since. Not just in food. In life. That intensity. That warmth.

There are films I love only because someone I loved loved them first. I watched them to understand them better. To sit where they sat emotionally. Some of those films stayed with me long after the people didn’t.

And sometimes I pause and realize,

I am made of these things.

Of borrowed tastes and inherited habits.

Of recipes and refrains and recommendations.

Of inside jokes that no longer have a shared audience.

I used to think becoming yourself meant shedding people. Growing independent. Uninfluenced. Original.

But that’s not how it works.

We are porous.

We absorb. We keep.

We carry.

I am a perfectly tempered instrument, and life is going to play me, but the sound that comes out is layered. Tuned by every hand that ever touched the strings. Softened by every voice that ever called my name gently. Sharpened by the ones that didn’t.

Even the brief ones changed the melody.

I am a mosaic of everyone I’ve ever loved, even for a heartbeat. A glance across a room. A semester. A summer. A year that felt eternal and then wasn’t.

Some people stayed long enough to build foundations. Others were just passing through, leaving behind a colour I didn’t know I needed. And I don’t resent that anymore.

There’s something beautiful about being evidence of connection. About knowing that parts of you were shaped by laughter in kitchens, by shared headphones, by menus passed across tables, by someone saying, “Try this.”

It means I was here.

It means I felt things fully.

It means I let people close enough to leave fingerprints.

So when I make my noodles the way he showed me, or press play on that old playlist, or dip sushi into soy sauce with muscle memory that isn’t entirely mine, I don’t feel haunted. I feel human.

A living archive.

A collage with a pulse.

A song still being written.

And maybe that’s what growing up really is, not becoming untouched, but becoming aware of all the hands that helped shape you… and choosing to carry them gently.