Distant dreams

 The clatter of the stainless steel kettle against the stovetop was the only sound that ever truly answered Jasmine. At thirty-eight, her apartment was a museum of silence, curated by her own hands. The faint, sweet-spicy scent of jerk seasoning or curry chicken from the kitchen downstairs, a ghost of her father’s cooking, was a permanent resident, a scent that always felt more like home than the woman who lived there.

At work, Jasmine was a fortress. Her critiques in marketing meetings were legendary, her eye for a flawed strategy so sharp it could draw blood. She dismantled the ideas of fresh-faced college graduates and tenured VPs with the same cold precision. “Throwing shade on someone else’s path,” she once read somewhere, “doesn’t illuminate your own.” She’d scoffed. Illuminating her own path wasn’t the point. Obliterating theirs was.

It was easier that way. Safer. To focus on their incompetence was to forget the gnawing hollow in her own chest, a cavity carved out twenty years prior. The memories were like old bruises that never faded: the sting of her Chinese grandmother’s dismissive click of the tongue—“Your hair is too wild, not like a proper girl’s”—and the echoing silence from her Jamaican friends’ parents, a subtle, unspoken question of where she really belonged. She had been too much for one world, not enough for the other. The hurt had congealed into a quiet fury at all forms of authority, all systems of acceptance she could never quite crack.

One evening, after eviscerating a junior executive’s proposal with what she told herself was necessary rigor, Jasmine came home to the silent apartment. The victory felt like ash. She made tea, the ritual a poor substitute for companionship, and her gaze fell on a faded photograph tucked beside the microwave. It was of her, at nineteen, eyes bright with a hope that now felt like a foreign language. She was standing between two worlds, smiling, not yet knowing she would be fully accepted by neither.

A sound escaped her, a sharp, broken gasp that startled her. Then another. She slid down the kitchen cabinet, the cool linoleum a shock against her skin, and the tears came. They were not gentle, but wrenching sobs that tore from a place deep within, a place she kept barricaded behind walls of criticism and cynicism.

She cried for the girl in the picture, for the life she had wanted—a life of connection, of a family of her own, of belonging without question. She cried for the years she’d spent using the failures of others as a shield, a way to prove she was superior to the very world that had rejected her. All the energy she used to despise people, to pick them apart, had been the exact energy she needed to build the life she truly wanted. She had been a brilliant critic of everyone but herself, and a negligent architect of her own happiness.

Alone on the floor, the fortress lay in ruins. The tears were not a sign of weakness, but the first honest sound she had made in years. They were the painful, necessary rain after a long drought. For the first time, Jasmine wasn't just staring at the cracked foundations of others. She was finally, terrifyingly, looking at her own. And in the devastating quiet that followed the storm, she understood: owning this painful story was the only way to start writing a new one.