anchored

MK-ultra, chai, and a decade i didn't notice passing

Jun 05, 2026

last evening, someone brought up MK-ultra during a conversation that had already wandered through like a dozen different topics. someone asked if i knew about it. I had heard of it, but instead of remembering the event itself, my brain went somewhere else entirely. It went back to the memory of how I first learned about it. I never actually read about MK-ultra. like a lot of things I know, someone else told me. in this case, it was him. I remembered him telling me about a time he was playing some online game and ended up talking to someone from the US. their conversation drifted the way internet conversations do, and MK-ultra came up. he told me about it later, along with so many other things that ended up staying with me way longer than I expected them to.

and that’s the strange thing about how my memory works. I don’t just store information. I store the route I took to get there. I rarely arrive at the fact first. I arrive at the moment it entered my life. the voice. the room. the person who said it. the version of me that was sitting there listening. my mind traces the path before it finds the knowledge. what should’ve been a simple reference to a historical event became a return to someone I once loved. I kept thinking about this after the conversation ended. how often does this happen. entire subjects in my mind aren’t neutral. they’re anchored. a book isn’t just a book if he recommended it. a political idea isn’t just an idea if we once debated it late into the night. wven a random fact carries something. It carries the imprint of a relationship I thought I had already moved past.

we don’t talk. I’ve built distance, new routines, new conversations, new versions of myself that don’t include him. and yet, in the actual architecture of my memory, he’s still there. not as someone I actively think about. more like a structure that a lot of my thoughts pass through without asking permission. this is probably part of why I find it so hard to write about anything in a clean detached way. I can start with history, philosophy, music, something wide and abstract.. but eventually my mind folds it back into something personal. and at the center of so many of those personal things is love. or whatever version of it I was trying to understand at the time…

I’m currently reading gunahon ke devta, and something about it unsettels me in a way that feels familier. the story isn’t mine. But the emotional atmosphere feels recognisable, like I’ve lived fragments of it in a different form. the intensity, the inwardness, the way longing survives even when life keeps moving. It doesn’t mirror my experience exactly. but it rhymes with it. and that’s often enough for memory to start echoing. I wonder sometimes why I write about love so much when I think about a thousand other things. science, politics, psychology, random internet rabbit holes, fragments of information that have nothing to do with relationships. but when I sit down to actually write, love is what surfaces. not because it’s the only thing I know. because it’s where so many thoughts became emotionally charged enough to stay…

love, for me, isn’t just a subject. It’s a memory system. It’s where information gets attached to meaning. where neutral things become unforgettable. and once something becomes unforgettable, it starts shaping how everything else gets remembered too. I don’t think I chose this. I think it formed itself. through repetition, through closeness, through years of associating learning with another person’s mind, their voice, their way of seeing things. even when I think I’m writing about something unrelated, I find I’m still writing through that lens.

people say you move on by letting go. I have let go, in all the ways that are visible. I stopped the contact. stopped the daily presence. stopped the ongoing story. but memory doesn’t update itself the way life does. so I live with something more complicated than absence. connection without continuation. I don’t really have a better way to put it than that. maybe that’s why I keep returning to love in my writing. not because I’m stuck. not because it’s the only story I have. because it’s where so many of my stories were first given any emotional weight. It’s the lens through which everything else still seems to echo. sometimes I think I’m writing about love. other times I think I’m just trying to understand why everything I remember still knows where to find it…

after writing all of this i went to the kitchen to make chai and ended up talking to my roommate about it. she said, he has been an anchor in your life. and that word just sat there. anchor. because i realised, i’ve known about him for so long. not even in a relationship sense, just in conversations, through people, the way someone exists at the edges of your life before they fully enter it. it’s been a decade since our first conversation. an actual decade. fuck.
she told me not to beat myself up about it. and i’m trying. i will try. but i also don’t want to yearn anymore. i’m so tired of yearning…

dear reader, if you read this far — thank you. i didn't plan to publish this. this was just me thinking out loud, and somewhere in the middle of it i thought, why not just hit publish... it's unpolished, it's a little all over the place, and i might archive it later when i'm feeling less exposed. but right now, in this moment, it's true. and that felt like enough reason to send it. thank you for reading.