It's the Small Things | Solidarity Over a Bowl of Soup
It has been almost eight months since I moved into my student accommodation in Edinburgh and met my five flatmates — three of us from India, three from China. While everyone’s warm and friendly, I’ve always felt a quiet protectiveness toward one of them: Angie.
Angie is 22, from China, and deeply passionate about literature and film. Some of my favourite reads this year have come from her shelf.
Our bond developed organically, cooking meals at the same time, sharing dinner at the kitchen table, helping each other wash up after. At first, we stuck to surface-level questions: “Where in China are you from?” “Is it very cold where you live in India?” But as familiarity grew, so did affection. We exchanged movie recommendations, brought home unusual fruits from Lidl for the other to try, and saved slices of cake for each other after events. A quiet rhythm settled between us.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
One night, over a bowl of noodle soup during dinner, as Angie laughed at me struggling to handle my chopsticks for the nth time, we began talking about relationships, a topic we had both deftly avoided until then. We joked about friends endlessly swiping on dating apps, and the chaos of modern romance. Then Angie paused and said softly that she had never dated — and did not really want to at the moment.
She looked at me, unsure of how much space that truth was allowed to take up.
I slurped in response. “I haven’t either… and that’s by choice.”
Her shoulders eased. Then she asked, almost whispering, “Do you want to? Because I do, someday... but I think I might be asexual (ace).”
From the way she said it, I sensed it was one of the first times she’d voiced it aloud. She placed the word down gently, like it might break. And in that moment, I wanted so much to hold it with her, to protect it.
I’m ace too. I’ve known for a while now, though it took time to feel at peace with it — especially when friends were cycling through different stages of relationships and constantly asking why I wasn’t “trying”. I remember how isolating it felt, wanting to fit in but not quite fitting the script. So, when Angie opened up, I felt I needed to be there for her in the way I wish someone had been for me. To say: It’s okay. You’re okay. Asexuality isn’t a flaw or a gap — just a different way of being.
We talked for hours about the comfort and confusion of it, about feeling disconnected in a world (and at an age) where intimacy is almost always equated with sex. We shared that we both still desire love, connection, even romance… only in different ways; sharing book and film recommendations, bonding over artsy museum dates, showering loved ones with acts and words of kindness. Neither of us is aromantic. We still imagine companionship, handholding, building a life with someone. We just don’t feel the urgency for sex to be part of it.
She told me she’d never been able to talk about this back home in China, that there wasn’t space, or language, or safety to bring it up without fear of being dismissed or misunderstood. Had this conversation happened back in India, and had I been the one coming out, I might have been just as nervous, if not more. The vocabulary around queerness still feels limited, the space for asexuality even more so. So sitting in that Edinburgh kitchen, I felt quietly confident in myself, and deeply honoured that Angie felt safe enough to share her truth with me.
Since then, not much has changed, and yet there has been a slight shift in our relationship. We still talk about anything and everything and still borrow each other's books and opinions. But now, we look out for each other a little more. We roll our eyes at romance tropes in fanfiction pieces we exchange, share knowing smirks when our flatmates and their friends ask us our relationship status, and when the world feels too loud, sometimes we just go about our routines side by side, in companionable silence, knowing the other gets it. In Angie, I have found a kind of home I didn’t expect — one where I don’t need to explain myself, where difference is ‘normal’. I hope that she has found the same in me.
That night, in a small kitchen in a foreign country, over a bowl of soup, I was reminded that solidarity doesn’t always arrive in crowds or grand gestures. Sometimes, it lives in a quiet truth shared over dinner. In the unspoken understanding between two people still learning how to navigate what they feel. Sometimes, it’s just one person saying, “It’s alright, you matter… I understand.”
Teesta Krishnan Sinha is a university student and writer with interests in reading, baking and conducting social research on issues of identity and belonging.
We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.
And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.
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