​Sepia by the Sea

​

The winter air by the seaside in Chennai is not cold.

It never shocks the skin or demands attention.
It only lingers; salted, patient; like it knows we will eventually notice.

This is the city where we rebuilt the dream.
Not the first one. Not the reckless, shiny version we carried in our twenties, when love was loud and certainty was cheap. This was the second dream. The careful one. The one assembled quietly, piece by piece, after we learned how easily things break.

We bloomed again here.
Not all at once. Not evenly.
Some parts of us bloomed while others were still recovering.

We are a couple in the thirties’ spectrum. That sentence alone feels heavier than it should. Our conversations have fewer exclamation marks. Our bodies negotiate with time. Our love no longer tries to prove itself; it simply tries to stay. When it enters a room, it doesn’t rush. It sits down. It exhales.

This is the city where we had the baby.
Not just where she was born, but where she arrived; into our unfinished selves. She arrived while we were still learning how to be kind under pressure, how to be gentle while exhausted, how to hold something fragile without turning rigid. Sleep disappeared. Control followed. What stayed was instinct and two people learning, clumsily, to tag each other out when the night became too long.

And we fought.
Not like in movies.
No grand speeches. No clean resolutions.

We fought like children who had lost their favourite toy, ourselves, angry, confused, irrational. We fought over small things that were never small. We slammed doors softly. We kept emotional receipts. We said “it’s fine” when what we meant was “please don’t leave me alone with this feeling.”

There were days we lived in the same home like respectful strangers. Days when love felt like an archived memory; evidence of something real, but distant. Like a photograph you know is yours but don’t quite recognize anymore.

Yet Chennai kept breathing around us.
The sea kept showing up without fail.
The winter air kept holding us without asking for explanations.

Our home changed shape.
It became louder, messier, softer.
Love moved from poetry to logistics; from promises to practice.

And then there is parenting.
Our shared, unspoken joke and our most public failure.

We constantly remind each other how bad we are at it. How we somehow decided that parenting meant enrolling our three-year-old in advanced philosophy. We ask her to understand patience, emotional regulation, empathy ; as if she signed a consent form agreeing to be more mature than us. We expect her to behave better than two adults who have entire vocabularies and still resort to shouting.

We lose our temper.
Immediately, shame follows.

We sit there afterward, replaying the moment, dissecting it like a crime scene. We tell each other; out loud; how we’re failing. How we’re damaging her. How we should have known better. Guilt becomes a shared language between us, spoken fluently and often.

And then there are the days she is sick.
Small. Warm. Heavy with fever.

On those days, she reaches out to console us. A tiny hand on our cheek. A soft voice telling us it’s okay. Telling us not to worry. That’s when it lands; with a strange mix of awe and heartbreak; that the most emotionally mature being under our roof is three feet tall. That somehow, without trying, she is raising us while we’re busy trying to raise her.

And somewhere in all of this; in the noise, the guilt, the exhaustion; we find each other again.

Not the way we first fell in love.
This love is different altogether.

It doesn’t sparkle.
It steadies.

It knows where the light switches are, in the dark. It knows which silences are dangerous and which ones are safe. It knows when to argue and when to let things be. It shows up not with declarations, but with presence. With tea. With quiet forgiveness.

Our home now carries a sepia tone.
Not vivid. Not dramatic.
Warm around the edges.

Our smiles have softened. They no longer perform. They simply exist. Our memories feel aged in the best way; creased, familiar, impossible to throw away. The kind you don’t frame, but keep folded inside a book you return to when the world feels too loud.

This is not a story about getting it right.
It’s a story about returning.

Returning to each other.
Returning to love, altered but intact.
Returning to ourselves, slowly.

The winter air by the seaside in Chennai still pauses for us.
And when it does, we remember.

We didn’t just survive love.
We learned how to live inside it.