June 29, 2026, 05:45 AM
The trip was cancelled. The tickets vanished into the digital void, but the manager approved the leave anyway after yet another follow-up, leaving me stranded with an empty week and the heavy, stagnant air of this shabby little room. Oh, but not before telling me the last task I completed was half-wrong because she had given me the wrong details. She did not even have the courtesy to apologise or clarify whether I had to redo it before my leave or after. She immediately replaced the ticket with an invitation [a demand, really, with zero clarity about the trip or the work] to join her for an upcoming event. I don't want to go. I cannot bring myself to go. The sheer exhaustion of performing “civilized,” enthusiastic participation for the corporate apparatus makes my limbs feel like lead. I want to resign and stop existing.
To escape this hold, I threw myself into the absolute torture of the job search loop. I applied. I followed up. I scratched at the skin of my soul to pull out professional-pretty words for a temporary position that offers disgustingly low pay. It forces me to move to a massive, hyper-capitalistic city where the starvation wages won’t even cover the rent of a closet. I sent them a list of basic, structural questions about the contract. They didn't answer. They completely ignored the text, bypassed my autonomy, and simply sent back a cold, automated job interview link with multiple calls on a weekend. The absolute frustration of being treated like a blank, faceless line of data makes my blood run hot. Is it my fault, though? Am I the problem? The endless bucket of guilt drops down on me, whispering that I am lazy, that I am a fraud of a social worker who doesn't know how to struggle in the real world. But is it truly a crime to refuse to jump from one burning cage into a slightly larger, more expensive burning cage? Why must the only option for survival be a submissively low surrender to an economy that demands total consumption for zero return?
you are a flicker on a glass screen,
a hand drawing borders for a creative crony king.
then I saw you trade the mogul’s golden lease
for the loud, anti-establishment machinery of peace.
now the track goes cold, the wires disconnect,
I do not know whose house you currently protect.
but I build a middle-station in my head:
a city where I stop before I cross the sea,
a city where I find you on my way back to me.
no romance... just a heavy, tangled weight,
deep, intensely confusing friction at the gate,
where my skin forgets the state.
Lately, the real world has become so loud, so violent, that my mind has engineered its own total blackout. To numb the chemical burn of these daily violences, I have descended completely into a deep, heavy, and extensive state of maladaptive daydreaming. I fade out. It is a violent physical pulling away, a slow-motion detachment where my eyes glaze over, the walls of this shabby room dissolve, and my consciousness is dragged backward into the dark, velvety lining of my own skull. My breathing slows until I am barely a tenant in my chest, completely slipping away from the physical gravity of my life.
I spend hours trapped inside this hyper-fixated illusion, letting the phantom of this stranger sedate my nervous system. I imagine a life mapped out around him. I imagine visiting him in that massive city, a deliberate, quiet layover on my way before leaving the country for work, and again on my way back. There is no neat, romantic paperwork in this dream. Instead, it is defined by a deep, heavy, intensely confusing kind of emotionally-charged relationship, a friction so thick and disorienting that it temporarily drowns out the historical ownership of my body, rewriting my nerve endings in a language the dictators of my past cannot read.
But I have noticed a terrifying, unyielding pattern in these daydreams. The script is always the same. It always starts with me as this alternative person, someone who completely lacks mainstream attention, but who holds a quiet, undiscovered cool. In the early stages of the dream, he is given all the credit for finding me out, for excavating me from the dust beneath the bed storage where the rest of the world left me archived.
But as the relationship unravels, my own reality begins to poison the fiction. In tandem with the daydream, I find myself frantically scouring the actual internet, furiously inspecting his life’s trajectory, his surroundings, his words, his views, analyzing his old videos, and pinning down random dots on the physical map of his world. I hunt for data, but all I find are weapons to use against myself. Those real-world details feed directly into my subconscious, culminating in an absolute, suffocating wave of insecurity. The dream-architecture cannot hold the weight of my damage. I systematically frame the relationship’s end as a tragic, inevitable undoing. A self-inflicted sabotage where I prove to myself that even in my own head, I am unlovable. And with that collapse, the narcotic high of the daydream violently breaks. The illusion shatters, and my physical body comes crashing down onto the mattress, twice as heavy and hollowed out as before.
The domestic surveillance of this familial state only heightens the crash.
A few days ago, I walked into the hallway and caught my mother with her ear clamped tightly against my sister’s bedroom door. Her face was pressed to the wood, a literal apparatus of the family regime. I asked her quietly what she was doing. She didn't even flinch. She just whispered that she was checking who my sister was talking to. In that chilling, micro-second of realization, the architecture of the house shifted. I realized she must be doing the exact same thing to me. She is listening through the plaster, patrolling my borders while I sleep.
Yet, in the thick depth of my mind, I keep forgetting. I slip so deeply into those intense, imaginary worlds that my physical armor completely drops. These moments of raw, vulnerable escape are abruptly shattered when my mother suddenly enters the room.
Lately, though, something even more unsettling has started happening. For some time now, I have noticed she knocks a bit before entering. This tiny, uncharacteristic delay goes completely against the raw, invasive fabric of our society. It feels terrifyingly deliberate. From her perspective, it makes me acutely, agonizingly aware of my own unraveling. It is as if she knows I am losing my mind under this ceiling; she is knocking out of a strange, clinical pity, giving the crazy girl a few seconds to hide her symptoms.
When she stands in the doorway, the whiplash of being dragged back from my mind into the room creates an almost physical terror. All the suppressed, heavy emotions inside me feel like metallic feelings violently springing out of my skin, pulling and tearing against my flesh under the invisible, high-voltage magnets of an MRI machine. I am raw, exposed, and magnetic, trapped in the gaze of the woman who broke me, while my mind desperately tries to crawl back into its hole.
I desperately need a new job. The daily reality of my current workplace is becoming a slow, poisonous chokehold. The entire institution is slipping rapidly into a hyper-nationalistic, capitalistic machine, a loud perpetuator of the oppressive status quo, all while wrapping itself in a deceptive, performative branding as the "Pioneer of change and equality." The sheer hypocrisy of the state apparatus wearing a mask of liberation makes me sicker and sicker with every shift. I am suffocating under their neat, non-profit corporate lies. I need an exit route that pays a decent work-from-home wage, or something that pays well enough to physically launch me far away from my hometown... or better yet, entirely out of this country.
I want change. I am screaming for it inside my head, but I know that change seldom comes to those who remain glued to the rock bottom. Or perhaps that is an optimistic lie. Sometimes, change does come at the rock bottom... but only when the structural floorboards completely collapse beneath your weight, unlocking a terrifying new level of rock bottom further down.
I just want a life. A real life, far away from this non-life, this thin life, this malnourished, degraded, and thoroughly humiliated existence. Please. I wish I believed in gods. This exact moment feels like the kind of heavy, desperate juncture where a human being should be on their knees, weeping and begging a higher power for a clean deliverance. But there is no altar here. Instead, all I see is my mother descending deeper into her own brand of religious madness. She spends her days chasing local godmen, traveling to their crowded talks in the scorching, oppressive summer heat, only to crawl back home entirely sick and dehydrated. Nobody else in this house will take care of her. So the duty falls on me. I am forced to lull her physical pain, to tend to the woman who polices my borders, simply because we share the exact same room and her sickness occupies my air. To lull my own mental pain, to survive the suffocating geometry of this shared bedroom, I turn the static back on. I close my eyes and fantasize about random men who sporadically appear in random online videos, rewriting them into my partners. I drag these digital strangers into my isolation, using their fictional warmth to block out the sound of my mother's religious broadcasts and the terrifyingly slow click of the door handle. I am a captive building empires out of ghosts, praying to a screen because the sky is completely empty.
The terrifying truth is that the further I move forward in life, the deeper I sink into the floorboards of this house. This hole of a waiting room is no longer a temporary pause, I believe. I feel it transforming into a dense, unyielding black hole of my own futile existence. The gravitational pull is total. I can never seem to locate or situate my adult self anywhere in the modern world, because whenever I reach inward to find a coordinate, I am violently dragged back to the exact same origin point. I am forever that lonely, terrified little schoolgirl, trapped between the walls of a deeply traumatic home and the hostile, suffocating desks of a bullying school, with absolutely nowhere else to go. That childgirl’s identity shapes the entire architecture of my adulthood. It dictates the oversized, protective clothes I choose to wear, acting as a soft shield against the world’s gaze. It governs the defensive way I work, the raw, bleeding ink with which I write, and the paranoid loops in which I think. It is the filter for how I feel, how I clumsily exist among others, and how I desperately fail to socialize, pulling my borders tight whenever a stranger gets too close. I am a twenty-five-year-old-plus woman walking through a neat, polite "democracy", but underneath the skin, I am still just that little girl under the desk, waiting for the blows to land, completely unable to find an exit from the day I was broken.
I wish I could want death even. But even that is no longer there; the wish to die has died along with the rest of my vitality. There is an absolute, staggering death of wantingness inside me. I cannot even summon the passion required to desire my own erasure. Desire itself has been completely hollowed out, leaving a flat, calcified plain where the hunger for an end used to burn. It is a terrifyingly quiet state of existence. To be completely devoid of appetite, to look at both life and the void with the exact same unblinking, indifferent eyes. Now, I don't want to end myself; I wish the world would end. I wish the entire hyper-nationalistic, capitalistic, misogynistic, patriarchal, classist infrastructure, the corporate cages, and the invasive domestic systems would collapse and fall directly onto me. Let the whole rotten weight of civilization crush my bones into the soil of this room. And from my softly rotting body, tucked safely beneath the rubble where no manager or mother can ever reach, a new world would quietly bloom... A single, small purple flower with tiny, bright yellow beads at its center. Let my flesh become the fertilizer for a quieter, gentler ecosystem that doesn't know the language of surveillance or trauma.
I summon all the gods humanity has ever crafted, created, believed in, or prayed to. I summon the ancient deities of stone, the modern gods of money, and the violent, policing entities used as an apparatus to control the bodies of tired daughters. I summon all of you into this small, suffocating bedroom to challenge your structural silence: Hi. If you exist, if there is a single drop of sovereignty in your mythologies, then end it. Tear down the floorboards of this waiting room and let the sky collapse.
~ Oizys.