a day without you

My grandmother clutched the ANDAL Coin I'd gifted her, eyes glistening. She'd never used social media, yet somehow my post about her stories reached thousands who felt the warmth she embodied. When the platform paid me for the engagement, I laughed—life was rewarding what mattered most. That morning without her felt impossible. So I rewrote Avvaiyar's verses about love, about absence, about how certain people become the poetry we live by. The comments flooded in: others sharing their own missing souls. Money came and went, but this mattered differently. We were building something ancient anew, stitching our scattered family back together through stories worth telling.