That’s the thing about people
who don’t stay.
They leave things behind.

Ice cream as a punctuation.
The way I fold my shirts now.
Coriander on everything.
that was you.

Someone taught me to sit
with silence
instead of filling it.
Someone taught me
espresso after 4 pm
is self-sabotage.
I still drink it.
But I think of them.

I catch myself eating slower now,
reading a poet
someone underlined for me
in a book I never returned.

The ache is this:
none of them are here.

But what stays —
what stays is
that I am a living museum
of everyone who loved me
and everyone I loved
and some who just
passed through long enough
to change the way
I hold a cup,
or say goodnight,
or chase misal pav across the city
because maybe that obsession
was always about you.

I am made
entirely
of what stayed.

The small, small things
they didn’t know they left.

I bought Lollapalooza, Mumbai tickets the second they announced Linkin Park. Same day. Didn’t even think about it.

Because how do you not show up for the music that kept you alive?

I was in 10th grade when Pranav Bhaiya handed me a burned CD. Two Linkin Park albums, one just released. I had no idea what I was about to hear. No idea that music could do that. Reach inside and name things I didn’t have words for.
I couldn’t talk to my friends about what was happening to me. About the anger from violations I’d experienced. About feeling so out of control in my own life, my own body. About being fifteen and carrying things that were too heavy and too secret and too much.

And then I heard Crawling.

It wasn’t written for me. It was written about substance abuse. I didn’t care. It was mine. Every word of it. That feeling of your own skin being wrong. Of rage and helplessness living in the same moment. Of desperately wanting control when control has been ripped away from you.

I played it over and over and over. Let it scream what I couldn’t.

Somewhere I Belong and Numb gave me something else – they told me it was okay to not fit. That being different, feeling like an outsider, not belonging anywhere – that wasn’t my failure. When you’re drowning and can’t tell anyone why, those songs become oxygen.

Standing at Lollapalooza when Crawling started, I didn’t just sing it.

I screamed it.

Every word. Every line that held me together when I was fifteen and breaking. That crowd, that moment – it was the first time that rage and pain and survival got to be loud. Got to take up space. Got to exist without apology.

I don’t know how else to describe it. Every version of me was there. early version of me who survived, the one who’s still figuring it out, the one who bought tickets without hesitation. We all got to breathe. Finally.

That fifteen-year-old inside me got their moment. Got to release what they’d been holding for over twenty years.

Thank you, Pranav Bhaiya. You gave me survival tools when I needed them most. You gave me a way to feel things when feeling anything was dangerous.

I finally got to say thank you the only way that made sense.

By screaming it.

The Stack

Base OS: https://termux.dev/ – A terminal emulator for Android that acts as a Linux environment. I found this to be really close to my mac terminal and is super powerful.
Web Server: Nginx 1.29 – Handles reverse proxy and serves static content.
Application Server: PHP 8.5 with PHP-FPM – For running PHP applications.
Database: MariaDB 12.1
Monitoring: Built my own monitoring page for now.

I initially considered deploying Prometheus and Grafana through Docker, inspired by tutorials claiming it works on Termux. However, two realizations stopped me. First, Docker fundamentally can’t run properly on Android—it requires kernel-level features that Termux can’t access, meaning those docker-compose up -d commands would never actually work. Second, even if it somehow worked, the memory requirements were prohibitive. A typical Docker + Prometheus + Grafana stack consumes 400-700 MB minimum (with recommendations of 4-8 GB RAM)¹, which would choke my Android device’s resources. Rather than fight these limitations, I built a lightweight internal monitoring system instead. It may lack polished Grafana dashboards, but it provides essential monitoring without the impossible memory overhead.

Remote Access: Cloudflare Tunnel (cloudflared) – Exposes services to the internet without opening ports.

SSH Access

The phone runs an SSH server on a port (Termux uses a non-standard port since standard ports require root).

From my laptop, I connect with:

ssh <username>@<phone_ip> -p <port>

The SSH server starts with sshd and runs in the background. Once connected, I have full terminal access to manage services, update code, and monitor the server.

What It Hosts

Currently running a few small web projects and personal tools. The setup is lightweight, always-on, and costs nothing to run since the phone is always plugged in and connected to WiFi.

Why Use an Old Phone?

– Low power consumption – Uses a fraction of what a desktop or Raspberry Pi would consume
– Always on – Phones are designed to run 24/7
– Free hardware – Repurposing a device that would otherwise sit in a drawer
– Surprisingly capable – Modern Android phones have decent RAM and storage. My hosting provider wanted me to upgrade my plan to host more domains, DBs, and what not. I no longer have that restriction. As long as my device supports it, I can host it.

If you have an old phone lying around, it’s definitely worth trying out!

1. https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/1.8/storage/

For years, I loved the idea of espresso. I’d try to coax it out of a moka pot, force it through an Aeropress, always ending up with something that wasn’t quite right. I could get caffeine into my body, sure. But there was no joy in the process. Just the vague dissatisfaction of knowing I was fighting my equipment to produce an inferior result.

In 2020, I bought my first espresso machine.

Now I wake up excited. Not for the coffee itself, though that’s excellent, but for the ritual. I turn on the machine, let the water heat while I freshen up, and by the time I’m ready, it’s ready. The process has become something I look forward to, not something I endure. The difference isn’t marginal. It’s total.

I have a kettle that cost upwards of 20K rupees. Friends have ridiculed me for it. I’ve accepted that I’m a snob. The kettle makes perfect pourovers every single time. It’s beautiful to hold, beautiful to pour. This is what money is for. Converting it into daily joy.

I used Windows for a decade. It worked. But working isn’t the same as working well. Twenty years ago, using a Windows machine meant constant maintenance. Fighting drivers, managing updates, troubleshooting inexplicable slowdowns. In 2013, I switched to a MacBook. Suddenly, I wasn’t spending my energy keeping the machine functional. I was doing the actual work I’d bought a computer to do. The tool disappeared into the background, which is exactly where tools belong when they’re right.
Same with cycling. I had an MTB. It got me from point A to point B. But riding it felt like work in the wrong sense. Effort spent compensating for the bike rather than enjoying the ride. I upgraded to a gravel bike. Now the things that used to be a pain are just… not. The tool matches what I’m actually trying to do.

Inferior tools extract a tax you don’t notice until you stop paying it. You can absolutely get things done with the wrong equipment. You can make coffee without a proper espresso machine. You can write code on a struggling laptop. You can ride a bike that fights you on every surface. But you’re spending energy on the tool instead of the task. And worse, you’re spending energy convincing yourself you don’t mind.

The right tool doesn’t just work better. It changes your relationship with the activity itself. It transforms the thing from “something I need to do” into “something I want to do.” The mocha pot made espresso a chore I subjected myself to because I wanted the result. The espresso machine made it a morning ritual I genuinely look forward to.

I’m not talking about expensive versus cheap, or new versus old. I’m talking about fit. The right tool for what you’re actually trying to accomplish. Not what you think you should be trying to accomplish, or what you can technically get away with. What you actually want to do.
When the tool is right, it disappears. You stop thinking about the espresso machine and start thinking about the espresso. You stop managing your computer and start creating with it. You stop fighting your bike and start riding it.

That’s what great tools do. They don’t announce themselves. They don’t demand appreciation. They don’t need justifying. And they make damn sure you never settle.

Yesterday while coming back from Cafe Cursor, Reddy2go explained a major life decision. Very articulate. Very thought-out. All the reasons lined up perfectly.

Made me wonder: was that really why they decided, or are they connecting dots backward?

Steve Jobs famously said you can only connect dots looking backward. But maybe we’re not discovering patterns, we’re creating them. We make choices for messy reasons — emotions, pressure, timing. Then construct narratives that make us feel like we knew what we were doing.

I caught myself doing this. Spent months saying I wanted to move cities. Changed my whole life around it. Felt completely sincere. Never moved.

So what is sincerity? I think it’s this: enough internal alignment that you don’t notice the dissenting voices.

You have different parts wanting different things. When one voice gets loud enough or you suppress the others effectively, it feels unified. Real.

But that doesn’t mean you’re seeing clearly.

We’re all rationalizing. The question is: are our stories helping us grow, or keeping us stuck?