I. The Tired Voice It started with a conversation.
Or maybe more accurately, a complaint—but not the casual, everyday kind. This one came steeped in weariness, a fatigue that ran deeper than words could fully carry.

“My throat hurts again. I just finished my allergy meds last week and now I have a viral infection,” she said. “I’m just tired, Suhas. I can’t catch a break.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. She rarely did. Her body was a battleground—immune flares, chronic fatigue, inflammation, misdiagnoses. A constant war waged quietly beneath her skin.
She spent most of her recent days within the four walls of her room—not imprisoned by her parents, but by something more insidious: her own failing biology.

And yet, she wasn’t the kind of person who liked to stay still. She was wired for the world—her soul thrived on connection, stimulation, presence. She got FOMO from missing a single weekend plan, a meme thread, a music drop. Being forced into stillness felt like slow erasure.

She was spiritual. I wasn’t.
At least, I thought I wasn’t. But more on that later.

She told me about the latest round of meds. Allegedly for allergies—pollen, according to the doctor.
But something didn’t sit right.
The patterns were off. The frequency too uncanny. A hunch tugged at the edge of my logic: What if it wasn’t allergies? What if it was something else? Something deeper?

So I said it out loud. Gently. Tentatively.

She didn’t get angry. She never really did. Not with me.
But her voice changed. Not in tone, but in tension. Like a door quietly clicked shut.
“But the doctor said so,” she replied, a trace of steel in her softness. “He wouldn’t be wrong… and you wouldn’t know more than him, would you?”

It wasn’t a defence of the doctor. It was a defence of sanity.

Because to question the diagnosis was to peer into the abyss—to consider that something worse might be lurking beneath what she already endured.
And sometimes, when your days are already dictated by uncertainty, the known pain becomes safer than the unknown possibility.
Better the devil you know than the void you don’t.

Her tonsils, I remembered, had been inflamed for months.
Pharyngitis. Tonsillitis. Again and again, like a loop.
Antibiotics, salt gargles, lozenges, repeat.

And then I remembered something she once said, maybe half-joking, maybe not. She had a way of wrapping heavy truths in casual sentences, as if they were too sharp to hold raw.
“Most diseases are psychosomatic,” she had said. “Your body reflects the pain your mind cannot express.”

At the time, I rolled my eyes internally.
As someone rooted in science, the idea felt too fuzzy, too steeped in spiritual vagueness.
But now, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

What if she was right?
What if her body, tired of screaming in silence, had chosen to scream in other ways?

She was constantly unheard—by doctors who dismissed her symptoms, by family who assumed she was being dramatic, by a world that only listens when you’re visibly breaking.
What if her voice, silenced emotionally, was now being silenced physically?

It made too much sense.
The body speaks.
Sometimes it whispers.
Sometimes it begs.

And then, I turned inward.
Because once you ask why someone else is suffering, the question never stops there.
It circles back.
It asks: What about you?

If her body was reacting to a life of emotional suppression, what was mine reacting to?

I didn’t have an answer. But the question lingered like a thorn under the skin.

And then it deepened.

Who am I, really?

Not my name—Suhas. That’s just what people call me.
Not my roles—son, brother, friend. Those are just hats I wear.
But the me behind my eyes. The one asking the question.

Am I this body?

I move my arms. I feel hunger. I sense the cold air against my skin. That must be me, right?

But then again… my heart beats on its own. My lungs breathe without permission. My stomach reacts before I think. If I am the body, why don’t I control it fully?

Okay. Maybe I am my brain.

I think. I reason. I remember. That makes sense.

But… if I’m my brain, why can’t I choose happiness? Why can’t I access every memory like a folder? Why do I forget what I don’t want to forget, and remember things I wish I didn’t?

No. That doesn’t fit either.

So what am I?
A voice inside a body it can’t fully command?
A mind behind a machine it doesn’t fully understand?

II. The Meaning in Madness
Days passed. I procrastinated. I spiralled.
Thoughts of purpose slowly gave way to thoughts of futility.
The universe was massive. Beyond comprehension. And we were… tiny. A mistake, maybe. A flicker. A biological accident that thought too much.

Then I came across an image. An old one, but it hit like lightning.

It was the photo Voyager I took as it left the solar system.
At the edge of everything familiar, the probe turned back for one last glance—and captured Earth as a mere pixel. A pale blue dot, suspended in a beam of scattered sunlight, floating in a vast, black sea.

Carl Sagan’s words echoed with the weight of poetry and grief:
“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives… on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

It hit me like a punch I didn’t see coming.
If I hadn’t been in an existential crisis before, I was drowning in one now.

What does one do when they begin to question their own existence?

They search. Quietly. Desperately.
Sometimes through books. Sometimes through late-night monologues with the ceiling. Sometimes in the pauses between conversations or the light bleeding through window blinds.

I found myself floating in that kind of void—untethered from certainty, no longer comforted by science or logic.
I had always found solace in structure. In systems that made sense. But now… nothing made sense.

I knew the universe was vast and I was minuscule.
But knowing that and feeling that?
Two very different things.

Even the things I once enjoyed lost their colour.
The world was happening, but I wasn’t in it.
I was just… observing. Dissociating from my own life.

And that image—of Earth as a fleck of light—it haunted me.
That was me. That was my family, my friends.
Every war. Every heartbreak. Every poem ever written. Every act of kindness. Every desperate prayer.
All of it, trapped in that tiny dot of dust, drifting silently in an uncaring void.

If this was all we were…
What was the point?

But slowly, quietly, something shifted.

I thought of her. My friend. Struggling, hurting, but still hoping.
I thought of my mother humming while making tea.
Of old songs playing in the background.
Of late-night laughter with people I love.
Of holding someone’s hand when they’re scared.
Of sitting beside someone in silence and still being understood.

These things shouldn’t matter in the grand scheme of the cosmos.
But they do.
So much.

And that’s when it clicked.

Maybe that’s exactly the point.

Yes, we are small. Yes, the universe is infinite. But that speck—that pale blue dot—thinks.
It dreams. It feels.
It creates symphonies, stories, questions. It falls in love. It asks why.

We are the only ones, as far as we know, who look up at the night sky and whisper, “You’re beautiful.”

Without us, the universe is just… physics.
Math. Gas. Silence.

We give it meaning.
We are conscious fragments of dust… staring into the void, and giving it names.
Singing into the silence. Writing poems into the dark.
Creating purpose not because it was handed to us, but because we chose to.

That is the answer I found—not in some divine revelation, not in a scientific theorem—but in the very act of searching.
The purpose of life isn’t hidden in the stars.
It’s in how we live.
How we love.
How we endure.

We don’t find meaning.
We make it.

And suddenly, the void didn’t seem so empty anymore.

III. Epilogue: A Quiet Realization
So I return to my friend, and her tired voice. Her pain still lingers. Her battle isn’t over. Her throat still aches, and the world still doesn’t quite listen when she speaks.

But maybe… there’s something more sacred in that struggle than I had first understood.

Maybe every word she fights to say is a rebellion against the silence.
Maybe every breath she takes in defiance of her sickness is a form of prayer.

Not to a god. But to life itself.

Because what is life, really, if not resistance? Resistance against entropy. Against decay. Against the pull of meaninglessness. Every moment we choose to keep going—despite pain, despite uncertainty, despite futility—we are choosing to live with intention. We are saying, I matter. This matters. Even if the universe doesn’t say it back.

My friend is still confined to her room, but her mind is a battlefield of constellations. Her spirit, though tired, is luminous. Perhaps she doesn’t realize it, but she’s showing me what it truly means to persist. What it means to hold on—not blindly, but bravely.

She speaks in metaphors. She believes the soul speaks through the body. And maybe she’s right.
Maybe her swollen throat isn’t just infection. Maybe it’s her soul begging to be heard—not just by others, but by herself.

And maybe I, the man of science, needed her quiet pain to crack open something inside me.
To remember that not everything is meant to be measured.

Some things are meant to be felt.