January 2, 2024 - The Taboo Tango of Veiled Realities

The second day of the new year is when the new year turns into another year. The second day of the new year feels like flipping the calendar only to find the same chapter as if the fresh start is just a rewind button to the familiar pages of yesteryear. The 31st midnight is a trip outside to look at the sun with a glimmer of hope that maybe it has turned Pentagon or is diminishing, but the rays of light chomp on the glimmer of change. And the first day is just the hangover from the light's voracious appetite. The second day—back to square one!

The second day's dawn mirrors the unvaried routine of the days before, each tick of the clock underscoring the stubborn persistence of the status quo. It's as if time itself has chosen not to partake in the newness promised by the calendar. The resolutions made just 48 hours ago seem like distant echoes, drowned out by the monotony that has crept back in. On this day, aspirations collide with the reality that change is an elusive quarry. The second sunrise of the year casts a stark light on the challenges ahead, with the shadows of yesterday refusing to dissipate. It's a peculiar dance between anticipation and disillusionment as if the universe has conspired to test the resolve declared amidst the cheers and confetti of New Year's Eve.

Remember my last entry's ending? The pretentious bollocks of me and my droplet against the ropey fabric of society? And I went to sleep, thinking I would turn my droplet into a rebellious ripple tomorrow morning. It's not just about navigating the same mundane script; it's about injecting defiance into the routine. Each task, no matter how trivial, has to be a subtle act of resistance. The meetings, the chores, the predictable rhythms—you have to consistently and performatively morph into opportunities to defy the gravitational pull of conformity. So, I wake up thirty minutes late to work; my blisters are all gone, and my uterus has gone on a monthly riot. So, yeah. If not a shift from square one to square two, surely an elevation of it. As the day unfolds, the rope frays your edges, testing your collective insistence that you need to do something until your ordinary is no longer synonymous with the predictable. The ordinary is no longer a passive landscape; it's an active battleground, and you have to conquer the change. Every minute becomes a minute. And, even if you are putting on your best fight, it feels as if you are just waiting. Doing nothing. I was just waiting for the minute to pass. Just to pass the elevation from square one to square two, so it at the very least feels palpable. Laden with conformities, and defiance against the mundane becomes a shameful rebellion. You do it secretly. Quietly. Shamefully. You close your door, detach the plugs of reality, separate yourself from the fabric of a collective entity, and try to bring about change. But the change is supposed to be etched into the fabric. Fought and inked with the reds of shameful floundering and blues of under one's own steam.

I took a few hours to entirely detach myself and, most humanely, pluck the tendrils of conformity one by one. In the privacy of my sanctuary, I unravel the threads of conformity. The shame is not born from the act itself but from the realization that this defiance is deemed subversive. It's an acknowledgement that society frowns upon those who dare to question the predictable and who choose to colour outside the lines of conformity. And the constant fear of taking your secret colours outside sets a nest in the back of your mind. I come here, and I think about what to write. And, whenever the door creaks open and reality's plugs are reattached, I drop the act somewhere in the corners of the web, but the shame lingers. It grows out of you as if it were your own motherly creation, not chopped out and laid bare open by the hands of a morality sheepdog. The rebellion may be quiet, but its impact is loud, and it sometimes drops down your cheeks or climbs up your throat. And you either let the shame do its job while you continue your silent defiance or you give in and etch the fabric with the bile of atavistic instincts.

Either way, you never know what additional features of the struggling game get released and added to your character every morning, so don't make categorical statements a couple of hours before to the public (not that anybody actually witnesses this gory act of textually-induced logorrhea) that you are on the verge of changing the mattress of your long pedigree.

- Oizys. 

January 1, 2024 - Stale Resolutions, Fresh Trauma

Welcome to 2024, where nothing has changed. The world is still the same. Bullets are still being fired. Kids are still starving. I am still in the same clothes as last year. I spent the whole day in the same cot I was rotting the entirety of last year, wondering what my resolution for this year should be. I know it sounds like a joke, but it is not. It is probably an age-old habit that has set in inertia, and no matter how much we fail to keep up with the resolutions, we always fence off December and January with a hopeful view, thinking that whatever happened, has happened; let's try and get better starting this year. Nothing changes. You might start a new diary page with some fresh ideas, but society's script is still the (stale-)same. We go for therapy and try to heal ourselves, but the newspaper guy every morning slaps us with freshly baked trauma. We tend our garden in the winter so we can see the flowers bloom when spring comes, and we peek up to the streets to see the epoch enthusiasts chopping off our ability for personal transformation.

You say it's the quiet decisions, the daily choices that accumulate like droplets forming a mighty river. Then why are our hard-earned droplets licked and sucked by the royal pond of stagnation sentinels? You say, after all, change begins within the confines of our hearts. Then why are the custodians hell-bent on stomping on our resilience to try something new with their boots of conformity? You say it's not about grand gestures or sweeping transformations but about embracing the power of incremental change. Then why are the routine rulers throttling our personal evolution with the coded habits entrenched deep in our amalgam that wallop any kind of deviation? For how long do you think you will attribute individual drawbacks and wellness pieces of advice to the problems that require a grotesque transmogrification of intricately woven unequal threads of the conglomerate tapestry, where somewhere some are stretched thin to their ancestral cores and others suffocate under the weight of uniformity, casting shadows over the once "vibrant diversity"?

We sit in our fields of labour, yearning for a beacon of change. Some days, we succumb to weariness, letting the weight of the world convince us that our small, quiet acts of defiance are insignificant. Staring at this sea of monotony, we awaken our quiescent competence somewhere within us. Because if we don't propel ourselves forward, the suffocating grip of the corporate matrix outsources its job to the relentless assault of hunger and begar. Our pale legs and parched throats reek from waiting for freedom since forever. Can we collect all the droplets into a raging river that sweeps away the barriers to progress? Or is it just everyone for themselves, each with their own droplet, attempting to win the fight?

I begin my new year, hopefully, with a new thought, if not a new life, a clean slate, or a new page. Just me and my droplet.

- Oizys.