I was exactly halfway home from the open-air market when the realisation hit me.

My fingers were turning a deep, concerning shade of purple under the agonising weight of two canvas tote bags filled with vegetables, artisanal cheeses, and a suspiciously heavy jar of I don't know what. I was sweating. I was exhausted. And as I stopped at a crosswalk to adjust my grip, my brain successfully processed a critical piece of information:

I rode my bicycle to the market.

My bicycle was currently locked to a streetlamp, blissfully unaware that I had abandoned it.

How did I manage to forget an entire vehicle?

I suppose I forgot it because my mind was not there. I had been completely dissociated, violently triggered by the sheer, terrifying elegance of the boutique market I had just visited.

This local market was a peaceful scene with courteous people purchasing delicate, beautifully arranged tulips. They wore ironed linen, and soft, classical guitar music played in the background (in my mind). The atmosphere was so civilised that it stirred a deep, involuntary nostalgia for the wild, unrestrained chaos of the neighbourhood bazaars in my homeland.

I was walking home, lost in the memory. Because, in my hometown, you do not buy delicate little floral arrangements. You buy aggressive, overgrown tree saplings that have entirely lost their botanical elegance and look as if they are ready to demand a mortgage. And you buy them anyway, carry them on public transport, expecting them to be pear trees, but they grow into something else.

To understand how a functioning adult can become so lost in nostalgia that they simply abandon a primary mode of transportation, we must consult the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and his 1940 book, The Imaginary.

Sartre claimed that human consciousness cannot simultaneously perceive the physical world and imagine something absent. To effectively daydream or vividly recall a memory, your brain must actively suppress the physical environment. This means temporarily overriding your current reality to allow space for the fantasy.

This is precisely what occurred. To fully immerse myself in the vivid, chaotic memory of dragging a fake pear tree onto a busy minibus, I had to completely disconnect from my current physical location. My mind wandered through the noisy streets of my homeland, and my legs, on nostalgic autopilot, began walking as well.

Sartre would argue that my imagination was working flawlessly; it was so potent that it managed to erase a bicycle from my perception.

During this 10-minute walk of nostalgia, I thought about the marketing strategy in my hometown market, which relies purely on surrealist performance art.

For example, to demonstrate the elasticity and size of their undergarments, you will often see a vendor with a thick moustache wearing a neon pink D-cup bra stretched over his plaid shirt. Sometimes, he wears it on his head, with the cups looking like headphones.

He screams into the void.

It is highly effective.

Directly in front of him, a barricade of elderly women would be deeply engrossed in their own quality control. They stand there aggressively, stretching the waistbands of colossal cotton underpants. I have no idea when testing the tensile strength of underwear elastic became a national pastime, but they pull at those waistbands with such intense, suspicious focus.

(Sometimes, watching this spectacle, I cannot help but think: if this country had dedicated the sheer amount of time and collective energy it currently spends on testing the limits of underwear elastic to literally anything else, we would undoubtedly be a highly prosperous, intergalactic superpower by now.)

Anyway, if you happen to visit the market at sunset, you find yourself in psychological warfare. The vendor will aggressively shove the last, tragically wilted lettuce towards you. If you hesitate, they do not offer a discount. Instead, they issue the ultimate agrarian ultimatum: 'Fine, don't take it. I'll just feed it to the cows.'

It is a masterful sales tactic. In a single sentence, the vendor establishes that, in their eyes, my purchasing power and a farm animal’s appetite are equally viable revenue streams. I am suddenly dragged into direct market competition with a cow. My fragile human ego is instantly activated. I simply cannot lose a bidding war to livestock. I immediately buy the depressed vegetable, not because I want a salad, but purely to assert my dominance over the imaginary heifer who was apparently next in line.

Wispr Flow lets you dictate prompts, acceptance criteria, and bug reproductions inside Cursor or Warp — with automatic file name and variable recognition. Say user_id, get user_id. Say useEffect, get useEffect.

Paste directly into GitHub, Jira, or Linear. Give coding agents the full context they need without typing a novel.

89% of messages sent with zero edits. Millions of developers use Flow daily, including teams at OpenAI, Vercel, and Clay. Free on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.

Start flowing free

With these and approximately 30 more scenes from the hometown market in my mind, I finally arrived home, completely without a bicycle but in full possession of a competitive vegetable.

And there, waiting impatiently at the door, was the cat.

If I am a fragile victim of Sartre’s The Imaginary capable of erasing an entire vehicle from my perception just to daydream about cotton underpants, the cat is the absolute, terrifying embodiment of Physical Reality.

As I hobbled into the hallway, she paid no attention to my mind wandering through thoughts of elegance and chaos at home. Her only concern was that her food bowl was at 40% capacity, which she considers an active famine. She then started weaving fiercely between my legs, trying to trip me while I was still carrying fifty pounds of groceries. She serves as the perfect philosophical grounding technique; you can't detach from the past when a six-pound predator is trying to attack your ankles now.

As I dropped the excruciatingly heavy canvas bags onto the kitchen floor, my fingers purple and trembling, my Sartrean daydream finally collapsed entirely. She approached the canvas bags and sniffed the vegetables with deep aggression. Finding it entirely unacceptable, she looked up at me with profound, unblinking disappointment, clearly demanding to know why I hadn't brought her the cow instead.

Under the cat's judging gaze, I realised that we are not an intergalactic superpower. And I am not a French philosopher.

I am just a person standing in my kitchen, overwhelmed by a flood of nostalgic memories that exceed what my mind can hold, slowing it down.

My reality rebooted. The neon-pink bra vanished. The elegant European street snapped back into focus.

I looked down at my bruised fingers. With the heavy, profound sigh of a defeated pedestrian, I left home and began the long, humiliating walk back to rescue my bicycle.

Keep remembering your transport,

Asena

RABBIT HOLE

Every week, I fall down a few rabbit holes. I gather here some insightful things (I don’t promise) I have read, watched, and discovered over the last seven days. If you’re looking for a bit of wonder, click the links below to explore more.

I've always found the platypus to be a fascinating creature. I learned that the first scientist to see this remarkable animal shared the same intrigue but went further, believing he was being deceived and that it couldn't be real. 

When Europeans first received a preserved platypus specimen from Australia in 1799, they were convinced they were being trolled. They had the right to be sceptical, as the nineteenth century was notorious for taxidermy hoaxes. So scientists naturally assumed this creature was just a duck's bill stitched onto the body of a mole. (very creative indeed) They literally took scissors to its pelt, trying to find the stitches where some mischievous taxidermist had sewn a duck's bill onto a beaver's body.

It turns out, the platypus is just a walking biological anomaly. It is a mammal that lays eggs. It produces milk for its young, but because it doesn't have nipples, it just secretes the milk through its skin like sweat. It hunts using electroreception; males have venomous spurs on their hind legs, and just recently, scientists discovered that if you shine ultraviolet light on a platypus, it glows a biofluorescent neon green.

It is the proof that evolution occasionally works on Friday afternoons when everyone just wants to go home.

I saw this very disturbing and gloomy painting. Yet, rather than stirring up feelings of deep melancholy, it simply reminded me of the forgotten, overcooked offerings left to burn in the oven of the History of My Own Culinary Disasters.

Mary Shelley authored Frankenstein as a teenager, establishing her as a Gothic legend. Her personal life, however, was equally dark. In 1822, her husband, Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, tragically drowned when his boat sank during a summer storm off Italy. During his cremation on the beach, an attending friend observed that his heart stubbornly refused to burn in the flames; modern doctors suggest it might have been calcified from a past case of tuberculosis. The friend quickly removed it from the fire. Mary later kept his preserved heart for her entire life. Nearly 30 years later, after her death, the calcified heart was discovered in a box inside her desk drawer, romantically wrapped in a copy of one of Percy's final poems.

That’s it. You’ve now officially reached the bottom. Thank you for reading. ❤️ Your reward this week is a visual representation of “this seemed like a good idea at the time.”

If this email has been forwarded to you, blame your friend. Then join here →