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What I shed, What I keep

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What I Shed, What I Keep Every few months, an old version of himself quietly expires and a new one takes its place: a different hat, softer pants, fewer social feeds tugging at his skin. This is the story of a man in his seventies, tracking a lifetime of reinventions — wardrobes, houses, work, even underpants — to ask what he is willing to shed, and what he will fiercely keep. Denzil Jayasinghe 6 min read · 1 day ago E very few months, something in me starts to itch. Not on the skin — somewhere under it. A quiet insistence that the man I was three months ago is slightly out of date. So I molt, gently, and agree to become someone else. Two months ago, I put Facebook and Twitter away. Not in a grand dramatic gesture, just… closed the tabs and did not open them again. The hours that came back to me drifted into writing instead. I found myself at the keyboard, telling small stories with a boyish enthusiasm I thought I had lost. This essay is one of the side effects. Sometimes, out of habit...
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Buried today

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Buried today “Buried Today” is a quiet, deeply personal reflection on the day a son buries his father. Through restrained grief and memory, the writer confronts loss, family duty, and the sudden emptiness left by a man who once seemed permanent — revealing how death alters the living as profoundly as it claims the dead. Denzil Jayasinghe 5 min read · Just now N ot a neighbour. Not a friend whose passing one acknowledges with a muted call and then files away. My father. There is something indecent about writing the word. It feels abrupt, like the closing of a wooden lid. I had always believed — without daring to examine the belief — that he would live forever . Not immortal in any grand sense, but present. Seated in his chair. Listening. Waiting for the world to pass by and report itself to him in bulletins and static. I left him young — too young to understand the arithmetic of time. I had barely completed my apprenticeship in being a son when I decided to become a man elsewhere. In my...
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Free-will no more

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Free-will no more Some things are small on the surface – a piece of clothing, a brand name, a strap peeking above a waistband. But for a boy who doesn’t belong yet, they can mean everything. This is a story about Grade 9, a new school, and the quiet, burning mission to fit in – one jockstrap at a time. Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 7 hours ago B ack in junior school, undies were not a thing. Nobody wore them. None of my mates, anyway. We ran around, played, sweated – and nobody thought twice about it. That was just how it was, where we came from. Then Grade 9 happened. And everything changed. Leaving middle school was already painful enough. But the school I was stepping into – that was another world entirely. A proper ivy college, right in the heart of Colombo. Not my sleepy suburb. Not my kind of people. I was a village boy walking into a city I didn’t know, full of city boys who had been born knowing things I hadn’t even heard of. These fellows were something else. Tall boys in lon...
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