somewhere between dread and disassociation

Handala has been boarded. Not just boarded like some passive cargo tagged and tracked. They was detained. Ripped from the static silence of resistance and tossed into the theater of criminality. The humanitarians, the ones with powdered milk and bandages in their bags, not bullets, captured like criminals. Because mercy now wears a keffiyeh and that’s apparently enough reason to shoot at it. They had baby formula. Not rocket launchers. Not funding for some ominous shadow group. Not slogans. Not smoke. Just cans of powdered life. And somehow that still made them dangerous. I saw it. With some twenty thousand people on YouTube live stream. They entered and disconnected the camera. I don't know how to be okay in a world that finds feeding infants controversial. I don’t know how to be okay at all, honestly. The war isn’t just on borders or skies or the flesh of children. It is gnawing at my ability to think. Like I’m walking around with this concrete in my chest. All cracked and set wrong. And some days I feel like my bones are just scaffolding for grief. There’s blood behind every grocery bill. There’s a grave hiding in the silence between two news notifications. And I keep refreshing. Refreshing like it’s a slot machine. Like maybe, maybe this time, it won’t be worse. The guilt has become a resident spirit. It laces my tea, it creaks in my joints, it blinks with me. Not survivor’s guilt... no, that’s too neat a phrase. This is witness guilt. This is I-saw-it-and-did-nothing guilt. This is my WiFi is stronger than their cries guilt. Starvation has a sound, and it isn't a stomach growl. It’s quieter. It’s a whisper of a mother trying to breastfeed air. It’s a child playing pretend with an empty bowl. It’s the dull clink of a spoon stirring nothing. This isn’t poetry. This isn’t politics. This is human rot, dressed up in policy papers and signed by cowards in air-conditioned offices. This is a planet leaking blood and everyone is walking around with towels over their eyes, pretending it’s raining.

And me? I sit here at 2:41 a.m., half-dressed in sorrow, half-numb in the blue light of my laptop screen, and I try to write. Because maybe if I write it down, the silence won’t swallow me whole. Because maybe if I write it down, I won't forget how this felt... this rage, this ache, this need to scream at a wall. Maybe one day someone will read this and understand that we lived through hell. And some of us tried, even if all we could do was write.

Sometimes I feel like my skin has started to forget softness. Like I’ve been bracing for bad news for so long my muscles have forgotten how to unclench. Even joy feels... slippery. Like holding water in trembling hands. I catch a moment of laughter and then feel guilty for it, like I should apologize to someone, maybe to the rubble, maybe to the mothers, maybe to no one, maybe to myself. I watch people post sunrise photos and recipes for lemon pasta, and I envy them; not for their peace, but for their ability to live like the world isn't actively disintegrating. Meanwhile, I’m standing in the middle of a mental marketplace where grief is sold wholesale and I can’t seem to stop buying more of it.

I’ve been reaching out to people. To help. To do something. I send messages, I fill forms, I research places and names and how to make a dent. Not just rent, really! And then I freeze. Their replies, short, kind, overwhelmed, sit like unopened verdicts in my inbox. My hands hover over the keyboard like they’re waiting for divine instruction. I don’t know why I’m so scared. It’s not danger, it’s not doubt. It’s something else... paralysis with guilt trailing it like a shadow. Some days, mighty words spill out of me, like I’m anointed with rage and clarity. And some nights, I just cry. And cry. And cry. Until my pillow starts to feel like a confession box. Until I forget what started it in the first place. Some days I read everything. Every report. Every account. Every number turned body turned absence. I want to document every single instance of violence, as if memory alone can become a kind of justice. And some nights, I delude myself with detachment. Scroll past. Skip. Silence the tabs. But the guilt... it waits. It waits like a needle under the skin, like a whisper behind every distraction. And what about this body? This soul? This place I live in? How do I mourn a world outside while sitting at the brink of my own implosion: abuse, homelessness, indignity, the slow rot of a life that isn’t screaming but still very much burning? Is this what it means to be a witness? To hold the horrors of many in your hands while your own house collapses? To consume war and suffering like some forbidden fruit, and still have to sweep your own broken glass before bed? Is this the morality of international law? This... this organized silence in the face of genocide? This paperworked apathy? Is there morality at all? Is there God? God, I hope there is. Not for salvation, not for peace. But just so we can blame him. So someone bigger than us can finally be held accountable. Because I am tired of us being the only ones carrying this weight. We, the poets, the empaths, the overthinkers, the weepers in the middle of the night, we are not equipped for this. And yet we continue, with open hearts and choked throats, writing, screaming, breaking in private, like it’s a ritual we’ve inherited. Because we have to. Because if not we, then who? We have to continue. We have to write. We have to document. We have to witness. We have to warn the future from now. I don’t know what tomorrow brings.

I haven’t been able to write. Not really. Not honestly. Not like me. Every time I try, it feels like I’m carving thoughts out of stone. They’re stuck in this purgatory between too much and nothing at all. There are nights I stare at the ceiling so long I start to believe it's staring back. Nights where I replay conversations I never had, where I imagine packing a bag and just leaving, no note, no final message, just the echo of absence.

And then there’s the uselessness of my own life. This sticky, cloying sense that I’m just floating. Consuming suffering with a side of tea, writing about starvation on a ulcerative stomach. What does that make me? I feel it every time I scroll: this choking mixture of rage and shame, a storm of helplessness masquerading as thoughtfulness. I do feel. I do care. I do try. But it never feels like enough. Like I’m a luxury item in a collapsing world, something with no real function, just existing, while they bleed out in live time. It doesn’t just anger me. It paralyzes me. Like my limbs are politically detained by privilege. Like my intentions are being held hostage by my own comfort. I want to break things. I want to scream at the walls of this world. But all I do is (try to) write. And that feels both holy and humiliating. I keep thinking: How is my life any more than theirs? What exactly is this disparity, if not just the grotesque choreography of luck? If one twist of fate had rotated the globe just a little differently, would I be the one begging for powdered milk? Would I be the nameless headline, the blurred face, the collateral grief? What is this but not... not earned. not deserved. not fair. not anything except lottery. And I sit with that like it’s a rotting fruit on my desk, too sacred to throw away, too spoiled to eat. And then there’s law. This fictive, sweetened structure that was never built for us. International law: the soft fiction handed down by empires in suits, declaring genocide illegal while watching it livestreamed. It’s a performance. It’s a spell spoken in Geneva accents, meant to soothe, not to solve. Because this law has always been a master's tool. And master's tools don’t dismantle master's homes. They reinforce them. They polish them. They make them palatable for the press releases and digestible for diplomats. Every resolution, every declaration, every tribunal: it’s theater. Meanwhile, the child under the rubble has no concept of legality. They know only dust, and blood, and the taste of abandonment. The courtrooms are clean. The victims are not. The law says, “Never again,” while the master mutters, “Again, and again, and again.” This isn’t a system. It’s a mythology. A religion of paper and pretenders. And the worst part? It tricks you into thinking something might happen, that maybe this time, justice might be heavier than bureaucracy. But it never is. Because the war-criminals write the war-manuals. Because the red lines are drawn in erasable ink. And me? I’m here psychoanalyzing the collapse, writing long, desperate, quiet essays in a forgotten blog like I’m documenting a dream that nobody else had. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a siege. It is a siege.

My blog has become a ghost town. Even the drafts feel haunted. All half-thoughts and jagged phrases and metaphors that die halfway through the sentence. And I wonder if I’ve become one of those people who used to write. But maybe this, tonight, maybe this is my way back in. Not with something polished or profound. Just this broken, aching thing that looks like a diary entry but is actually a quiet scream wrapped in metaphors, tied with shaking hands. I don't know what tomorrow brings. But I know I’ll carry it, like always. With sarcasm, with softness, with rage, with resilience, with the stubborn hope that writing still matters, even if no one reads it but me. And I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to forgive. I don’t want to move on, or heal, or process. I want to hold this open wound to the face of the world and scream: LOOK. THIS IS WHO WE ARE. And maybe that’s enough. Or maybe it’s just ink on a screen, doomed to drown in the algorithm. But I wrote it. So it exists. And maybe that’s something.

And then there are the rituals. Retweet. Repost. Share. Email this MP, sign this petition, add this flag emoji, read this long-form article that makes you weep on the train. Make a carousel post on Instagram. Talk about it. Talk about talking about it. Buy from this fund. Boycott this brand. Wear a keffiyeh, enunciate the name of the oppressed right this time. It all feels like putting out a house fire with a scented candle sometimes. Like bringing one peony to a mass grave and whispering, “Sorry.” It is activism written in erasable ink. It is screaming into pillows and calling it strategy. It is the performance of caring in a world that punishes care the moment it gets inconvenient. Soft activism. It's the religion of the internet age, right now. Sometimes, I feel like it is a way to feel like we are doing something while doing exactly what the system wants: keeping things cute, clean, bloodless. We do it because we need to. Sometimes, it is exactly what we need to do. Because the alternative, silence, feels worse. It is worse. But... even this begins to rot. Even this begins to taste like ash. Because the likes don't bring back the dead. The infographics don’t stop the siege. And no one, no one, has ever been freed by an algorithm. And, it all starts to feel like yet another master's tool. And yet we do it. We have to. Because what else is there? But maybe, maybe we scream louder. Maybe we abandon the polite language of peace. Maybe we stop worrying about being palatable. Maybe we say it: This is genocide. This is imperialism. This is manufactured famine. This is the organized, systematic theft of life. This is settler colonialism. This is apartheid. This is Western-funded and media-laundered and law-proofed evil. And you don’t have to “understand both sides” when one side is bombing hospitals. You don’t have to play devil’s advocate when the devil is in uniform and speaking at the UN. You don’t have to explain why children don't deserve to die. You just have to scream it until the walls crack from the truth. Let it be messy. Let it be ugly. Let it be unfiltered. Because soft words have softened the crimes. And now the world needs blunt force honesty. Let our writing be jagged. Let it cut. Let it tear through the algorithms and the apathy. Let it unsettle dinner parties and crack the glass of newsroom neutrality. Let it say what we’ve been made to feel ashamed of saying: This is not complex. This is not complicated. This is calculated cruelty. And if they call us radical, so be it. If they call us emotional, let them. If they call us too loud, we’ll be louder. Because silence is a privilege we can't afford. Because words, as useless as they may feel, are the last weapon we haven’t sold off. So scream. Write. Repeat. Until they hear us. Until they can't pretend they didn't. And if we burn our voices out in the process? Then we burn knowing we didn’t whisper through the fire.

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This headline is what I keep reading: clinical in its delivery, apocalyptic in its content. Every atrocity imaginable. Not poetic hyperbole. Not activist rhetoric. Just a list. A cold, factual catalogue of suffering so extreme it short-circuits the brain. This is not even a whole summation of all other headlines I have screenshotted. Or wrote in the back of my notebook. These are some I screenshotted to add here. Not just Israel, Gaza, Palestine. But so many others.

Genocide. Ecocide. Mass infanticide. Sexual violence as strategy. Aid workers, executed. Children, sniped, like pests. Hospitals, bombed, not accidentally, but with intention. With coordinates. With absolute, godless precision.

And the “global North,” the “free world,” the alleged torchbearers of human rights fund this. With taxes. With silence. With the polite clearing of throats in UN press rooms. “We are funding an endless nightmare and it should haunt us forever.” Yes. Let it haunt us. Let it sit in our teeth and fester under our tongues and pulse in our temples when we try to sleep. Because this is not just their tragedy. It is our crime, too. The ghost of every bombed child follows the supply chain all the way back to our wallets. And somehow, we’re still expected to play sane. Still expected to go to work. Still expected to go to brunch, pay the rent and “move on” and “hope for peace.” As if peace is a wish. As if peace is a polite dinner guest and not something ripped from the mouths of the murdered. I don’t know how to be okay. I don’t think I want to be okay. I want to remain cracked. I want to stay furious. I want to hold this grief like a relic and never let it be cleaned or catalogued or cremated. Because that would be the final violence: to look away, to compartmentalize, to make peace with it. This isn’t a “situation.” This isn’t a “conflict.” This is the textbook definition of evil. With receipts. With video. With global indifference as its PR team. And no amount of strategic wording, peace talks, or photo-ops can wash the blood off these hands. The blood is in the ink. The blood is in the laws. The blood is in the silence. So I will write. And scream. And cry. And fail. And try again. Because writing is all I have left that feels real. And maybe... maybe... if we scream loud enough, one day the world will finally hear us and say, "Never again" and actually mean it.

If you have reached till here, please:
1. PCRF - Palestine Children’s Relief Fund
2. Medical Aid for Palestine
3. Gaza Mutual Aid Collective
4. Rammun Foundation
5. Gaza Funds
6. Grassroots Gaza غــزة الشعبية

- Oizys.

A paper temple of grief, rage, and resistant breath.

So much has happened since the last time I cracked open this blank page and tried to make sense of myself. So much I’ve tried to write down, over and over, only to watch the words curdle before they could settle into shape. Things have been… let’s just say a series of sharp objects tossed into a bag and shaken violently. Bad. Then worse. Then something passable for bearable. I took an overnight trip, one of those half-baked spiritual getaways where you're supposed to cry near some river and come back cleansed, but I just ended up sitting on cold stone, asking God things I didn’t want honest answers to. I prayed anyway, even though I’ve long suspected God is a landlord: absent, entitled, and slow to return your calls unless you’re paying in suffering. And yet I see people with everything; land, language, lineage; clutching gods like heirlooms while the rest of us are just trying to earn a fraction of their peace. Holiness, it seems, is hereditary. Even the divine feels gated. The privilege in faith.  Of those born with sanctified ceilings. But for the longest time, I was... almost apathetic. Not angry. Just bored. Lukewarm toward the idea of God, like a song you’ve heard too many times at too many funerals. I would think, if I believed God existed, then what? And my next thought would always be, So what? It reminds me of something I read on Tumblr years ago, buried under a screenshot of someone’s mom trying to evangelize through text message:

[Source: Avainblue from Tumblr]

That never left me. The idea that divinity could look at me, full of rot and cracked things, and say, I love you anyway and somehow that’s the miracle? That I’m still considered salvageable by someone whose power depends on pity? It never felt like love. It felt like a warning. Some days I wonder if spirituality is just emotional labor women are expected to perform while the world keeps extracting our unpaid hope. I tried to feel something divine. Instead, I felt like a sock left behind in a temple corner, wet, cold, and vaguely blasphemous. I didn’t feel enlightened. I felt like I’d overdressed for an event that never happened. Like I brought all my wounds to a confession box only to find it gutted, empty, someone had stolen the priest and left behind a receipt. I sat on that stone and waited for something holy to touch me, but the only thing that brushed my skin was wind and disappointment.

I’ve been applying to jobs like someone trying to fish with no bait. I send out resume after resume like folded notes in class, hoping someone reads them and scribbles back. Nothing. Ghost town. Radio silence. The job market is a rigged roulette table dressed up as meritocracy. I keep spinning the wheel, pretending the house doesn’t always win. And somewhere, men in glass towers still sell optimism like stock tips. They say “just pivot” like it’s a dance move, like it’s not my rent, my visa, my body on the line. There are people out there who call this a ‘skills gap,’ as if the system didn’t design the gap to be unbridgeable unless you’re born already standing on the other side. I don’t know if it’s me or the universe doing that thing again where it forgets I exist for a while. June came with its claws: PMS waited until the last minute, then pulled me under like a riptide. I nearly slipped back into the old skin: the one that lives inside a mattress, stares at the ceiling for 17 hours straight, and dreams about choking on bedsheets. I didn’t. Not entirely. But I could hear it. That beast in my mind, all teeth and whispers, even in sleep. Especially in sleep. It doesn’t growl. It doesn’t chase. It just sits. Patient. Like it knows I’ll come crawling back when the motivation runs out. It sharpens its claws on my confidence, folds my ambition into tiny paper cuts. It doesn't scream... it hums. A lullaby of all the things I’ll never be.

I’m crawling back up. Slowly. With elbows scraped and some dignity left in a jar somewhere.

I’ve also been circling around this prompt from ismatu.gwendolyn like a crow watching a carcass it’s not ready to pick apart.
(1) What is truth? [give it one sentence]
(2) Who or what do you trust to tell you what’s true about your greater world?
(3) What do your trusted sources tell you about
what is true at this particular moment?
(4) What is the narrative of truth from sources outside of those you trust?

So here goes, finally, some truth. Truth is a blade... clean, merciless, and incapable of affection.

I have tried living with it. I have tried making sense of being cut by it while it drew blood in my own life. While it unspooled a memory. While it did not save me. While it humiliated me. When someone told me the “truth” and it didn’t set me free, it just left me raw and exposed. I have tried writing that. Let truth walk in, not as a concept, but as a character. Maybe she wore stilettos. Maybe she smelled like smoke. Maybe she said my name in a voice I hated. But I could not. Because truth doesn’t arrive gently. She drags her heels on the tile, knocks once, then bursts in. She doesn’t sit. She paces. She tells you the thing you already feared and says it with no ceremony. She leaves the door open when she goes. That’s what makes her unbearable, she doesn’t care what’s left in her wake.

I trust books more than people. I trust strange poets and angry women with smudged eyeliner who say things out loud even when their hands shake. I trust people who admit they’re guessing. And I trust silence, sometimes, because it doesn’t pretend to be wise. The ghosts and saints in the bathroom stalls, in late-night forum threads, in a moment where I felt saved by someone else's unapologetic rage. With no names or gloriously unnamed, just outlined against neon lights. There was a woman once in a public library bathroom, her eyeliner looked like she'd cried it on purpose. She told me the thing I’d been afraid to name. Not to be kind, but because she needed someone to hear it too. She smelled like peppermint and gasoline. I remember thinking she was what prayer must look like if God were ever truly tired.

But what about the truth I feel about myself? The kind I can’t intellectualize or explain away. The most truth I feel about myself lives in a song—one that reminds me of a dark, windy evening. I was 13. Or 14? There had been a flood. Or was it a cyclone? I was lying on the floor. There was no electricity. All the windows were open. Everything smelled like damp stone and wet grief. A boy thought I was someone else. Another kept ignoring me for exactly who I was. I didn’t speak. Not out loud. But I still feel like I’ve been speaking from that floor ever since. Every time the wind picks up, I hear it again... the part of me that learned how to disappear without going anywhere.

And I’m not 13 or 14 anymore. The twenties have slipped halfway through my hands like wet clay, and I still haven’t figured out what shape I’m supposed to be. I locked the bedroom door some years ago and haven’t really left. Not in the ways that matter. Not in the ways that stay. And I fear... god, I fear... that I’ll never be able to. That the beast in my mind will outlive every plan, every dream, every miracle I try to make from this damage. That all my glittering fantasies, my imaginations of getting big, of becoming someone will be eaten alive by that quiet, cunning thing that lives inside me and only opens its eyes when I’m trying to sleep. It will mock me forever. Flick me hard enough to wet my eyes but never hard enough to scream. It will make me vomit out my spineless courage, laugh while I try to clean it up. It will hold up all my waste: my half-finished poems, my deleted applications, my never-sent messages, and ask, “Was this it? Is this what you were going to become?” I worry sometimes that I am not a survivor. Just a soft, slow implosion in progress. That I’ll never make anything out of this damage. Just with it. That I’ll keep stitching wreckage into art and calling it healing.

Maybe it was born from centuries of hush. Maybe the beast is colonial hangover and generational anxiety and unpaid therapy bills wrapped in a shawl and called strength. The beast with ancestors lacerations in the existing skin where the blood of inner torment leaks out and feeds the systems that taught silence to women, especially brown ones.

Diane Nguyen: Because if I don't, that means that all the damage I got isn't good damage, it's just damage. I have gotten nothing out of it, and all those years I was miserable was for nothing. I could've been happy this whole time and written books about girl detectives and been cheerful and popular and had good parents, is that what you're saying? What was it all for? [Source]

I too once started writing a short story about a girl who never spoke, but could taste lies on her tongue. I stopped midway through because I got scared it was too strange, too soft, too much like me. It still sits in my drafts, unnamed. I don’t open it. I pretend it ended where I left it. Like it chose silence over rejection. And then, one night, I stumbled across a reel. A man said, quietly “I guess I’ll talk about my biggest regret in life… I threw away a museum.” And it hit me so hard I almost forgot how to breathe. Because I knew. I knew what he meant. That this unfinished life I keep trying to build and rebuild isn’t just a mess, it's a museum. A museum of almosts. A museum of drafts and detours and detachment. And one day, I might walk through it, alone, and realize I didn’t lose it to fate or bad luck. I lost it to fear. I curated a gallery of empty frames because I was too scared to hang the damn art. Too scared to finish. Too scared to start. Too scared to be bad. Too scared to be seen. And now I wonder if that’s the legacy of this beast inside me: not just pain, but incompleteness. A life made of corridors that never open into rooms. And the haunting knowledge that I was the one who locked the doors. That one day, I will look back and realize I preserved my life in the waiting room more than I lived it in the present. And one day, people with full lives; messy, radiant, loud, living lives; will meander past. They’ll stroll by this museum of emptiness without pausing. Without noticing the walls once trembled from the weight of unsaid things. It will become so benign, so forgettable, so dust-covered and quiet, it will be like it never even meant to exist. Not a tragedy. Not a warning. Just an absence so ordinary it blends into the skyline. Maybe that’s the cruelest kind of erasure, the kind that doesn’t even need effort. Maybe that’s what regret is: a museum without visitors.

The world doesn’t mourn what doesn’t become profitable. It forgets slow creators. It buries us under headlines of unicorns and 30-under-30s until we start thinking our quiet is a crime. Maybe truth was never supposed to be healing. Maybe it was meant to be dangerous. That’s why they fear ours because it doesn’t sell anything. It just stands there, wounded and whole.

Anyway. These trusted sources tell me that everything is falling apart, not in a dramatic apocalypse way, but in the slow, invisible kind of rot, the kind that happens behind walls before a house caves in. The foundation’s cracked because the blueprint was never meant to shelter us. It was built by men who assumed someone else would scrub the floors, bear the weight, serve the tea, stay quiet. And here we are... exhausted, holding up ceilings that were never meant to hold us. The house. The rot. The inevitable collapse. My house still stands, and I, in it. But the wallpaper peels. It smells wrong in the mornings, like something sweet has died in the vents. I keep opening windows and pretending fresh air is enough. The landlord says it’s just age. I don’t have the energy to argue that it’s grief.

They say we’re all pretending not to notice how deeply exhausted we are. They say we’re told to be resilient, as if we’re not already bruised from how long we’ve had to hold everything together. Outside of this circle of trust, the narrative is slick and manicured. The world is fine. Growth is inevitable. Everyone just needs to hustle harder. Trust the system. Everything will be okay. It’s a lie wrapped in QR codes and hashtags and mental health webinars hosted by the same corporations that break you down. I once watched a CEO in a turtleneck talk about work-life balance while sipping a turmeric latte named after a Sanskrit word he couldn’t pronounce. That’s when I knew: they’re not trying to fix us. They’re trying to pacify us. I know better now. The truth rarely comes in bold fonts or corporate slides. “Self-care isn’t selfish,” says the carousel post by a billion-dollar wellness brand. Meanwhile, my non-profit pays only 50% of my salary, no insurance, nothing to cover therapy. The only affordable ‘care’ is staying very, very still and hoping my feelings expire quietly. They weaponize wellness, market our survival instincts back to us with pastel fonts and lavender-scented lies. I don’t need a mindfulness app. I need rent control. I need healthcare. I need for rest not to be treated as a privilege or an act of rebellion. I need systems that don’t treat burnout like a personal failure.

Capitalism doesn’t break you in one clean blow. It erodes you with coffee-stained teeth, dry eyes, polite smiles in Zoom meetings, pretending your value isn’t shrinking by the hour. Maybe that’s why they want us too tired to write. Maybe that’s why they flood the world with noise, so we forget how radical silence can be when it’s filled with our own words. They don't want our grief documented. They want it internalized, made polite, made private. But I’ve stopped being polite about it.

It slinks in during the third hour of insomnia. It tastes like metal and sounds like something breaking underwater. I don’t always want it. But I want to be someone who can carry it, even when it’s heavy. Even when I’d rather drop it and run. Maybe that’s what writing this is. Lugging the truth to the page, letting it sit there and stink up the room. Letting it breathe. Letting it be. This writing is a physical labor. Grotesque. Viscous. Cathartic. Writing is not (just) a performance, it’s a purging for me. Letting the words bleed. Writing it feels like butchering something that once lived inside me, pulling sinew and cartilage out through my throat, hoping the mess makes sense on paper. Truth has a smell. A sound. An aftertaste. Truth stinks like copper and mold. It clings to the curtains. I can’t always breathe after I write, but I can finally sleep.

They told me rage was unbecoming. So I stitched it into essays. Let it leak through margins. I wrote like someone trying to dislocate a bone on purpose just to prove it still existed. Like I was testing if my pain still made a sound. My sadness kept waxing. My truth kept howling. Always nearly full, always on the verge of spilling. And somehow, I kept writing: half-mad, half-moon, never empty. And maybe that’s all I’ll leave behind. Not a masterpiece. Just a trail of blood on the page that says: I was here. I didn't quit. I wrote it anyway. Maybe God didn’t show up because She was too busy writing Her own diary entry. Maybe She’s tired too. Maybe She’s in a room somewhere, sobbing over us like unfinished drafts. Or maybe not. Maybe She’s the one whispering: write it anyway. I am kidding, there is no God. Or maybe truth is the only god left: feral, ungoverned, hiding in backrooms and diaries, still refusing to kneel. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? That’s what humans do. We find something unmanageable; love, fire, death, rain; and we crown it. We build temples to what we can’t tame. We call it divine when it doesn’t listen back. We put it on a pedestal and weaponize it against anyone who dares to question. Maybe that’s what we’ll do to truth too. Put it in a museum. Etch it on stone. Forget how much it once hurt to hold.

And maybe that’s all any god ever was. Just something someone couldn’t bear to feel alone with.

- Oizys.