She stood by the balcony, leaning on the fence, watching the train as it passed by the trees. She thought the sight of the train moving looked prettier at night, and its wheels following the rails carried a sound, a rhythm. The night was colder than usual. Chores were done, and now it was time to sleep.

She opened the cupboard to get some clothes. She saw a biscuit box, the aluminium one, and opened it to find her stuff that she had saved up since she was ten—the gifts and bracelets she got from her friends, and those braided bracelets using rubber bands that once were a big trend in school, the kind of trend everyone swore was “the thing” and then would forget about it two weeks later. It was so nostalgic.

She found her diary, a small one. She smiled as she read what she had written on the first page: “By the power vested in me I swear that everything in this diary is in fact the truth. By the way, there’s no vest.” She smiled again, thinking, “Dramatic, but hey, at least I had a good sense of humour.”

She kept moving through the pages, reading, and reached a specific part.

Title: My To-do List in Future

• learn how to braid
• speak English fluently
• eat all the flavours of Nice chip
• taste all the flavours of Barbican
• have an identity and for that education is your tool so work hard
• be good at badminton
• be a traveller
• learn how to make pol sambola

And it kept going. She paused for a moment. She thought for herself, how did she go from this bright, joyful person to this dim, robotic version of herself? The girl that wrote this had been so joyful and full of curiosity, but had turned into a woman who had become a machine, doing things because she had to, not because she wanted to.

That young girl had written with excitement, as if the world was wide open before her. Now, life was smaller, shaped by work, family, and responsibilities. A marriage. She never even imagined she’d be married by this age. She thought she’d be in university on her way to build her identity. She wasn’t unhappy, not exactly. She loved her family. But sometimes, she grieved the life that she never got the chance to live.

And pol sambola—she learned to make it just how her mom would, and she made it almost every single day now. It wasn’t something grand, but something her 11-year-old version would be proud of. If only that little girl knew her big future achievement was going to be grating coconut every morning, she wondered how it would have been.

Nala, her cat, jumped onto her bed and curled up in the space between her crossed legs. As she moved her hands through Nala’s soft fur, she was reminded of her first kitten, which was also on the list: get a kitten. It was orange, white, and black, and would curl up in her lap just like Nala. Very pretty. It was playful but calm. Sadly, it died in an accident. For a long time, the pain was too sharp to even speak of. That cat was a comfort in the dark for her. And her father had lied, saying it had run away, thinking she’d be too sad. Only recently he had told her the truth. She didn’t know how to feel about it. She wondered if she felt betrayed, sad, or relieved. She just didn’t know what to do with that information. Throw herself on the floor and cry a decade later? She just nodded.

She closed her diary and placed it on the table beside her bed, somewhere she could reach it this time, as if life had given her back a piece of something she thought she had lost. She looked at the luminous stars on her ceiling. Every time she looked at them, the spark she had felt seeing them at first had never left—just like how she thought she had lost her dreams. They had never left. They were there the whole time, living quietly within her.

She thought of the dream that never left her. Not the job, not the money, but freedom. Freedom to express herself as she was, to gather new experiences, to see new places, above all, a peace of mind. She pictured it like a serene morning in the hillside, where tea plantation fields stretched for miles, and across the horizon you could see the mountains fully, and a bright blue sky with little to no clouds.

She realized that her dream had always lived within her, just quietly, and that was enough to keep her moving. Also, no one said daydreaming a little is unhealthy, and it’s cheaper than therapy.

The house was quiet. She turned the light off and went to sleep. It wasn’t the life she had imagined, but it was hers, and it was there, and for now, it was enough.