By Durdaneh Malik
I wake up. My eyes dart up to the ceiling fan, adorned with patterns too intricate to fit in with the sterile, soulless dorm room. I lay still, with my vision locked like this for a while. Before I turn to my side in my barely conscious state, I close my eyes again and think: Who will I see beside me today, on this pillow that is—and has remained for years—empty?
Will I see the person who reminds me of the fragrance of lilies, the one who exiled me so permanently from the world of everyday people? Will I see the docile youth, absolutely indistinguishable from a woman, who I devotedly wrap into a delicate, bridal saree in the throes of my daydreams? Will it be the sage-prince who emerged out of scripture to tell me that God is in the small human mercies? Or will it be, instead, the woman I desired relentlessly despite our obvious workplace rift? Or a friend I cannot claim, or that one queer acquaintance who I don’t really speak to but haven’t stopped thinking about since our first meeting?
This futile, semi-regular morning ritual is a weird confluence of past hauntings and feeble future hopes. I’ll admit that this list of mine is long; however, that is not the aspect I want to emphasize. The only takeaway intended from the above is simply that there is a list. 2025 was an abysmal year for the world as a collective, and I will second that on a personal note, too. This year forced me to cram five whole lifetimes inside its 365 days—but, looking back, I can only say I am grateful to have gone through the ordeal. Throughout this journey, one of the many undiscovered parts of myself I finally had the courage to encounter was my polyamory—and I am writing this as a pioneering attempt at embracing it in its entirety, without shame.
I am painfully aware of the fact that for a South Asian woman in her late 20s—who is continuing her bachelorhood, has been queer for as long as she can remember, will decidedly never marry, will remain childfree, and will likely never have the heart to come out to her non-secular brown family—the implications of truly unbridled self-discovery are as enlightening as they are heavy. I seek only to acknowledge this load so that someone somewhere may find a parallel in their story and perhaps find some relief as they continue on their own path, carrying their own load.
The expectation of viewing one steady romantic partnership as the ultimate prize is certainly not a new concept, and it is unlikely to go out of style anytime soon. Every time our desi mothers dressed us up as brides for play-pretend weddings in our toddler years, we were being silently fine-tuned to it. And then there is the media storm fanning the flames: with forlorn music beckoning an ex back to bed, internet hacks on how to become the divine counterpart to your crush, and of course, a barrage of promotional videos of the umpteenth romance drama or tragicomedy film about star-crossed lovers, who quite literally seem to move mountains and jolt the universe into action in the face of any worldly circumstance that might threaten their union. The bottom line is, you will hardly pass through life without being infected by the allure of the utopian ideal: the perfect heteronormative, monogamous, lifelong silhouette of true love. I am honestly talking to myself as I reflect on that last point: You will hardly pass through life immune to it. On a more extreme, rather existential note, I have often come across discourse on the internet about purposelessness and the obsession with romantic success going hand in hand in the modern era. Love, they say, replaces God when a disillusioned generation cannot be sold on Paradise and divine virtue anymore.
Through the eyes of someone raised in the East however, cultural, religious, and social norms blend together to create the pervasive demand for the whole nine yards: marriage, kids, and to be a pet of your in-laws. Quadruple the pressure applies if you are assigned female at birth. I remember becoming exhausted with this concept very early on in life. By 15, I already knew I was never going to have kids. I have this silly memory of a conversation at school—a few of the girls were waxing lyrical about their dream partner during recess, asking each other what they imagined would happen when they reached marriageable ages. When it was my turn in the rotation, I shrugged and flatly told them that I was confident I would boast at least two divorces before my 30s were over. They nodded along and said I gave off that vibe. Now, more than 10 years later, I find myself looking back to that sardonic, younger Durdaneh and chuckling—half because she was right about so much, and half because, for all her cynicism, she still failed pathetically in her attempts to escape being human.
During the spring of 2025, I found myself battling two evils at once. On the one hand was my personal anguish—I was at a crossroads between choosing to give my entire being to this enormous love I felt for someone I could not be with and walking away and starting over. On the other hand was the mayhem around the globe. I saw and heard things so senselessly violent I could not properly sleep or stop weeping for weeks, and lived through a brutal and bloody regime change that made me fearful of death for the first time in 11 years. And in the midst of all of this, worsening relationships with my family made it impossible to truly find any respite. All I would do after waking up each day was ruminate about annihilation till my mind went numb. Around this tumultuous time, I met someone.
All I knew of this person when we crossed paths was that they were widely reviled. In the unforgiving social scape of gossiping aunts and persistently irked, patriarchal figures, they were a nail that awkwardly stood out from a plank. Even so, a reasonably elevated standing on the social ladder meant that, much to their dismay, the unofficial purity council often had to simply leave them be. We met through a mutual friend who was also going through a tough time, and I learnt then that they were devoted to more than one partner romantically. One or two polite exchanges turned into prolonged discussions about the weight of existence, about the humane duty we bear toward one another, about God and whether that Being truly loves Creation, about friendship, and about the pain and beauty of it all. I realized, while listening to their uncommonly beautiful love stories with each of their partners, how much an adjective can sound like a prayer when someone takes up the impossible task of conveying their adoration for another. Six weeks after meeting them, I found myself taking a ride through my city on a warm spring evening listening to Sleep Token’s “Emergence,” aching to be engulfed within the gentle cocoon of their arms. For the first time ever, I discovered two bodies instead of just one, kneeling at that mysterious altar where I was to offer the worship of my heart and happiness. There was no dissonance there, as there had been in so many instances in the past. There was only being.
My life has, time and time again, placed me in peculiar positions through which I have only survived by adapting and evolving in equally peculiar ways. Now at square one of my journey to fully understand all the ways in which I experience romantic intimacy, I have opened myself up to dating for the first time ever (in the conventional sense of the term, at least). And a side note to that: It amazes me now how criminally unexplored I left my own queerness when I was living under the invisible influence of the norms I thought I had long transcended.
I will end this with a similar ritual to what I described at the beginning. Lying on my couch, I stare into the alabaster ceiling. It is the last slow evening before the weekend ends—I close my eyes to take a nap. Before drifting off to sleep, I envision a future me holding hands with a friend I had fallen for slowly over the course of the last five years. On the kitchen counter, I see a large arrangement of roses. It is from my paramour, who, at long last, is returning from their business trip to some obscure town in Italy—the roses are a premature gift to celebrate the reunion. My phone starts buzzing to life in my bedroom, and I answer it, delighted to hear the laughter of the woman I have called “wife” even before she shed her dead name three years ago. My life is a constellation of connections—incomparable, irrefutable, and each as precious as the other. I am loved; my heart is full and spilling over.
Durdaneh Malik is a graduate student pursuing a PhD in biology and currently resides in upstate New York in the U.S. She loves locking in to bass-heavy darksynth music, because it’s honestly hilarious to imagine finding oneself in the middle of a club, studying. When she isn’t at the center of a fresh bout of unravelling, she can actually be pretty decent company.