I just… I can’t sleep, again. It’s 2 AM and the only sound is the crickets outside, which I usually find comforting, but tonight it just feels oppressive, like a giant blanket of quiet that’s pressing down on me. I’m in my old bedroom, the one with the floral wallpaper that my mother insisted on when I was ten and I hated even then, and the air here always smells faintly of dust and lavender potpourri, even though I clean it every week. It’s all just so *small* here, you know? The house, the town, the whole damn world sometimes. And that’s the problem, I guess. The smallness. Because everyone here knows everyone, and everyone knows *everything*. Or at least, they *think* they know everything. They know my family, they know my parents have been together since high school, they know my aunt married her childhood sweetheart and my cousin married the guy from next door. It’s this endless cycle, this unspoken rule that you find someone, you settle down, you have kids, and then you just… repeat. And that’s what they expect of me, too. Especially now that I’m back. I came back after university, which was supposed to be my escape, my big break from all of this. I got a good job at the clinic, I’m an optometrist, which is exactly what I wanted to do – help people, you know, but still have my own life. But then my grandmother got sick, and my mother, bless her heart, she just couldn’t handle it all on her own. So I came back, just for a bit, to help out. And now it’s been two years. Two years of weekly family dinners where my aunt always asks if I’ve met any ‘nice young men’ and my mother gives me that look, that *look* that says ‘your biological clock is ticking, dear.’ It’s exhausting. The worst part is that they’ve already picked him out. Not officially, not with a formal declaration or anything, but it’s so obvious. It’s Rishi, the son of my father’s business partner. He’s… fine. He’s a nice guy, really. He’s handsome in a very conventional way, he’s got a good job in the city, he’s polite. And he’s interested. Oh, he’s *very* interested. He calls, he texts, he suggests dinner whenever he’s in town, which is every other weekend it seems. And my parents, they just beam. They talk about how compatible we are, how our families have known each other for generations, how it’s just… perfect. And I just sit there, I nod, I smile. I go on the dinners. I even let him hold my hand once when we were walking back from the fairgrounds, and it felt like… nothing. Absolutely nothing. No spark, no flutter, no sense of connection. Just a hand in mine. And I felt this surge of something, not sadness, not even disappointment, just a cold, hard anger. Anger at myself for being here, for letting this happen, for not having the guts to just scream and run away. Anger at them for thinking this is what I want. Because it’s not. It’s really, truly not. The whole idea of it, of finding one person, just *one* person, and spending the rest of your life with them, building a house, raising kids, doing all the little domestic things… it just feels like a cage to me. Like I’m signing myself up for a life sentence. I’ve seen it with my parents, with my aunts and uncles. They’re not unhappy, not exactly. But there’s a quiet desperation in their eyes sometimes, a sense of something lost. And I just can’t do it. I can’t. I mean, look at the world. Look at all the different ways people live, all the different connections they make. Why does it have to be this one, rigid structure? Why can’t I have meaningful connections with multiple people? Why can’t I explore different aspects of myself with different partners? It’s not about being promiscuous, not in the way they’d think. It’s about being *free*. Free to connect, free to explore, free to experience life in all its messy, complicated glory without being tied down by a piece of paper or a set of societal expectations. I’ve tried to talk about it, once, with my best friend. She just looked at me like I’d grown a second head. She said I was being “unrealistic” and that “love works in mysterious ways.” Love. What even *is* love, when it’s dictated by family history and community pressure? It’s not love, it’s a transaction. A social contract. And I just don’t believe in that kind of contract. Not for myself, anyway. But how do you tell your family, your entire community, that the very foundation of their happiness and their world view is, to you, just… an outdated fantasy? You can’t. Not here, not in this tiny, suffocating place. So I just lie. I nod, I smile, and I lie. And I feel like I’m suffocating.