Echoes of Mahnoor

Talking to my friend the other day, she casually mentioned that her younger cousin doesn't know who Mr. Bean is. I genuinely had to pause for a second. How does a four-year-old not know Mr. Bean? How does a child grow up without knowing the characters that practically raised an entire generation? It sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but it made me realise just how different childhood has become. There was a time when coming home from school meant throwing your bag somewhere, grabbing a snack and rushing towards the television because your favourite cartoon was about to start. There was no scrolling endlessly through hundreds of videos, no algorithm deciding what you should watch next and certainly no option to replay an episode whenever you wanted. You simply waited for it. Then there were the weekends. The kind where waking up early didn't feel like a punishment because there was a Ben 10 movie playing at noon. You'd already seen half of it before, but that didn...

There are people who spend years in our lives and leave almost nothing behind. Then there are people who stay for a few months, a few conversations, or even a single afternoon, and somehow leave fingerprints all over the person we become. That makes me wonder if they know the change they instilled in me. I wonder if my Physics teacher knows that he saw potential in me when I couldn't see it myself.  I wonder if my Sports teacher knows that entrusting me with the netball team taught me confidence and responsibility.  Seeing potential in someone is much like sunlight falling on a flower. The sun doesn't ask the flower to bloom overnight, it simply keeps showing up every day until, one day, the flower blossoms into something beautiful and fragrant.  Sometimes, all a person needs is someone who believes in them before they can believe in themselves. Then I wonder if that friend who broke me ever realized that they taught me when to leave. We spend so much time thinking about ...