The [Perecian] prosaic life

The hum of the window while the wind cradles it. A half-wet towel abandoned on the chair. The way light bends off a cheap steel spoon. These are the things that never make it into anyone’s newsfeed, never headline the day, and yet they are the stubborn background against which everything else happens. Spectacular events like wars, crises, deaths, disasters get attention, applause, outrage. The big teeth of attention. But these crumbs are the texture of a life. The towel, the spoon, the drafty window. The undertow that moves the visible. Habit is a kind of anesthesia; it numbs you until you stop seeing. You stop seeing. You sleep with your eyes open. You stop knowing. You stop being seen. So I practice waking: counting the clicks of the fan, naming the shapes the light invents on the wall, listening for the seam in the room where wind gets in. Noticing the small is a way of waking up. There is a mother-tongue folk song from childhood I cannot remember fully, only the two lines I repeat with my mother and sister... the rhythm stays, the words have emigrated. My mother’s name carved in faint scratches on the underside of steel utensils. The rhythm of a ceiling fan thudding the same beat, night after night; its unambitious drumline keeping time with nothing. They are nothing, they are everything. The unnoticed holds the weight I didn’t know I’d stored there.

What if the real archive of a life is not in the milestones, but in its crumbs: the receipts that curl in the bottom of a drawer, the dust motes visible only in a certain slant of light, the way the fan clicks just before sleep? I write them down. Not because they’re important, but because they are.

Endnotes

1. “Habit as anesthesia” is a thought I keep meeting and arguing with. Georges Perec once asked, in an essay on the overlooked everyday: Where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space? I’m not answering him; I’m taking inventory. Perec’s inventory isn’t just sociological. It’s psychoanalytic in its hunger. It is about refusing the erasure of desire in routine. Freud would call it repetition compulsion on how the everyday dulls us, but also protects us from being overwhelmed. Klein might see in it the good/bad breast resurfacing in domestic scraps on how the ordinary object (like a towel, spoon) is a stand-in for the “object a” — banal, yet charged with unconscious memory. To name the towel is to name absence, loss, the mother’s body long gone. Habit anesthetizes but noticing breaks the narcotic, lets desire leak through.

2. This post is a page from the same notebook where I stockpile crumbs: bus numbers, spice labels, the names of colors the evening tries on. If it feels like a list, that’s on purpose. The list keeps me awake. So, writing inventories is a defense, a ritual, even a form of free association. Maybe my notebook [this weblog, this diary, this logbook, this corner of the internet] is what Winnicott would call a transitional object where I carry scraps so I don’t lose the self, I pour scraps into it so I don’t pour them out of myself. Which makes me think... Perec’s own obsessive lists were not just literary games but perhaps can be perceived as symptomatic, a way of keeping neurosis at bay: the anxious cataloguing of a man trying to domesticate absence, to turn the infraordinary into a shield.
3. I like to think Perec’s lists were never neutral. Born in 1936 to Polish-Jewish parents in Paris, his father killed in the war, his mother deported to Auschwitz and never returned, Perec grew up in foster care and silence. The infraordinary for him was not trivial but existential: cataloguing chairs, streets, tickets was a way of insisting on survival, of building an archive against erasure. His inventories read like a child’s desperate tally, a proof that the world was still there, and so was he.

4. The digital age complicates this. If Perec longed to preserve crumbs, today the internet floods us with them: breakfasts tweeted, coffees photographed, train delays live-blogged. But instead of waking us, the avalanche numbs us. A parody of Perec is a documentation that collapses into noise. Maybe that’s why the notebook still matters: paper slows the hand, turns noticing back into presence, rescues the crumb from the scroll.

NovPoWriMo 2025?

Poetry has its own seasons. April has NaPoWriMo... but November? I want to claim it for myself. I mean, which sad poetess wouldn't? I’m calling it NovPoWriMo.

I have decided to challenge myself with another poetry month on November as well. I have decided to call it NovPoWriMo. I know that by the end of October's challenge, I will itch for me and I don't want to waste that itch, so I want to keep a scratch ready. Let's do some brainstorming:

Purpose: Is this mainly for my own writing discipline, or do I want to invite others in? If it’s personal: curate prompts, keep it intimate, structure for daily output. If it’s community-facing: make banners, set up link-ups, encourage others to tag along. Let's keep it personal for now. Tone: Serious, lyrical, raw? Or playful and experimental? That will shape prompts and visuals. Let's do serious, lyrical, raw.

I will make a a sticky intro post (“Welcome to NovPoWriMo 2025”) explaining what it is. This becomes my hub. Decide on a label (#NovPoWriMo 2025). Every poem gets that label, so any reading can click and binge. Add a little graphic/banner (“NovPoWriMo — 30 Poems in November”). Maybe a simple “NovPoWriMo” page on top menu linking to all posts tagged. 

I don't want to stumble into November blank. I want to pre-curate the scratch. 

Prompts: I will be drafting a list of 30 prompts/themes now. They don’t have to be rigid, just sparks...

Flexibility: I will NOT be forcing myself to stick to prompts if inspiration strikes; but having them might prevent my burnout.

Buffering: I should probably write a few drafts in October. That way, if November gets busy, I am not panicking.

IF I see someone joining in, they are free to share the images for others to display on their blogs (“I’m doing NovPoWriMo 2025”), so my very old-school blog community vibe is maintained and I will make sure to link-up posts everyday and participants can drop their links in the comments.

What's going to be the rhythm and execution? The daily routine is to post a poem every day (or close — allow myself grace days). No fixed timing, bombs can drop at any time. 

By December, I want a trail of 30 poems; rough, raw, lyrical; a body of work stitched together by November’s restless nights. There will be a collected index page of all poems. And, reflect with a post (“How the first NovPoWriMo was”). 

I’ve created a dedicated NovPoWriMo 2025 page which will serve as the hub: banners, prompts, daily index. It’s now part of the Navbar too.

Wish me luck!

~ Oizys. 

OctPoWriMo 2025

Hi.

I discovered Maria's blog during NaPoWriMo 2025 and decided to subscribe… and I can’t tell you all how grateful I am that I did. Over the past few days, I’ve been restlessly searching for a new poetry challenge. This year’s NaPoWriMo left my fingers aching for more! It was my third year participating (since 2023), but this time it felt especially intense and deeply productive.

And today, as if by serendipity, Maria's post about OctPoWriMo (& other amazing Writober 2025 challenges) landed in my inbox. Now I absolutely cannot wait to dive in!

You should join us too on Maria's blog: #OctPoWriMo2025.

Also, if you want some "old is gold" poetry content, here's OctPoWriMo 2012 - 2022.

- Oizys.

The [Kleinian] nondescript life

The mug is an obedient moon. It orbits my hand while the tab bar tides in and out, twelve open, twelve closing, twelve returning like guilt. If I breathe, the foam quiets. If I scroll, it hisses. I keep calling this vigilance. It keeps sounding like fear. Today, I am going to test a small superstition: one act, one hour, one voice. No echo. Not today.

Sunday went well. An unexpected session of cooking and having lunch with my mother and sister. Followed by a strong afternoon sleep. When I woke up, my mother had already left for her trip. My sister went out for evening snacks and came back with the soft rustle of packets and her friend whose laughter fit the room like a borrowed light. They talked. I added two sentences, late. We hadn’t spoken in a while; the awkward began to melt, not pretty, just melting the way ice does in a sink you forgot to empty. We talk about nothing much. She is, annoyingly, both: the one who does the dishes and the one who brings the wrath. Holding both without downgrading either is the upgrade: from halves to a whole person. I practice holding the two in one face. The friend left. We went to our respective rooms and came out after a while for dinner. Doors locked. Lights out. Each bed waiting for sleep. My mother isn’t here, so I have the room to myself and the old noise for company, and I sit down to write the thing that has been circling me like a mosquito I refuse to kill.

"Nondescript". I was reading something recently about a freedom fighter while searching for another one who left his home at the age of eight. I could not find the latter. But, about the former... He called his childhood ‘nondescript’—his father seldom there. That was the hook. This idea, this bit, this theme was circling in my mind ritualistically, a combination of nothing-to-look-back-to in life, going away from what-/who-ever is in my present, inferiority complex, my mediocrity, my banality.

Nondescript is how the house looks whenever I look around. The ringtone I’ve refused to change since 2013. The cupboard’s cumin ghost. The bus pass number I still know by heart. The beige switchboard with one missing screw and another just coming out. The fan that clicks every fourth turn. Nondescript is the fan’s fourth-click. I didn't mind until guests or friends came; then the click was all I could hear. The house answers my hiss with its own; click, click, click; until ordinary becomes an alarm. By nondescript I don’t mean empty. I mean the kind of life that refuses a headline but keeps receipts. By evening the house resets to default: beige, obedient, unremarked until the fan insists on being heard. The metronome of dread. I log the details like a field worker, as if naming the small could make the large less sharp. From one missing screw to a missing father is a vulgar leap, I know. The point is not scale; the point is texture. Texture is what splitting erases; I’m writing it back in: naming both the milk and the click. So I open a ledger of the unremarked: objects, then outcomes, then the parts of me that learned to keep quiet. On quiet evenings the room is the good breast: tea, sleep, a soft hum. On clicking evenings it withholds and I imagine sour milk that curdles on in the wires. I keep them split so neither cancels the other.

Mediocrity is the school prize I never won; the way an unframed certificate curls at the corner until it becomes its own shrug. Banality is a life already telling me it will never go anywhere. The inferiority complex is the way I erase myself a little each day so the finite end feels closer. Nothing to look back to, so I make everything up. I borrow pain, other people's stories, heritage, legacy and embellish castles in Spain while my own life idles outside the gate. I watch other people’s lives on trains, in queues, in rooms where they know what to do with their hands and something in me fogs the glass and traces a better face. I start small. A different childhood. A father who shows up on time. A city that spells my name correctly the first try. In one version I’m the one who left at eight; in another I’m the one who stays and makes tea and is thanked for it; in a third I’m a rumor with a passport. I call it imagination so I don’t have to call it hunger.

This is where I confess the theft.

This "stealing pain" has now become the shadow-economy of my nondescript life: when my days feel beige or gray, I shoplift color from someone else's disaster. Laundering someone's pain to give mine "texture", then pretending it's about justice. I steal pain like a bargain hunter: not the whole coat, just a button to stitch on my plain jacket. Spoiling is its love language. A headline here, a statistic there, a father who wasn’t there for someone else, a grief shaped like a window I could lean out of. The button holds for a day. Then the jacket is still plain, and the button aches like it remembers another garment. The fan clicks every fourth turn. I count... four, eight, twelve... like rationing biscuits in a famine. When the room is this nondescript, someone else’s grief arrives like spice, bright and unforgivable. I sprinkle too much. [Then call it empathy.] Envy doesn’t just want the coat; it wants the fabric to fray so no one wears it. Maybe it isn’t empathy; maybe it’s envy: the old attack on the good breast. When my own cupboard is beige, I raid someone else’s color and call it solidarity. I keep their names off the page. Where facts matter, I source them. I do not speak as them. If their pain doesn’t change my next action, I put the buttons back in the jar. I describe my own plain jacket. Like... a boy who left home at eight; I wore his departure like a borrowed coat to warm my ordinary hallway. Or, a woman’s court date; I pinned her number to my chest to feel important, then forgot to call. And sometimes, a city I have never seen; I pronounced it correctly and thought that was solidarity. The switchboard studies my face and refuses to learn it. My daydreams queue up anyway, polite, well-behaved, asking for a stamp. I stamp them. I become my own forged document, valid in my pocket, questioned at every border. Banality signs the bottom in a careful hand. Inferiority passes it across the counter without meeting my eyes. Mediocrity carries my bag and forgets it on the last step. And still there is the itch to run. I don’t mean the cinematic exit; I mean the smaller escapes I map on receipts: the path from bed to sink where I can change the screw; the path from phone to sister where I can say tea tomorrow, yes or no; the path from tab to tab to the one that quietly asks for fifty words and gets them. Sometimes I only run a sentence long. Sometimes the sentence is enough to move the air. Maybe that’s what nondescript means for me: not a lack of story but a refusal to perform it at volume. A life that whispers and has to be leaned into. A room that clicks until I get up and touch it. I will still daydream, I know; I will still press my nose to the glass of other people’s days. But the fingerprints I leave tonight are mine. Call it a trial run at reparation: mend one small thing I’ve imagined I ruined, even if all I broke was the air. One act. One hour. One voice.

This is depressive-position courage: fix one small thing I’ve fantasised I spoiled. I fetch the screwdriver, seat the stray screw, and the fan forgets my name; I remember the room as whole. For tonight, good and bad drink from the same cup. No echo. Early on we learn in halves: the soothing half and the persecuting half. A Kleinian lens calls them part-objects—the good breast and the bad. Adults relive the split in quieter ways: tabs that comfort, rooms that accuse.

For tonight, the room is one room.

~

Reference to Melanie Klein and her "good breast" and "bad breast" concepts within her broader Object Relations Theory. This theory describes how infants initially perceive the mother's breast as two separate "part-objects"—one satisfying and "good" [good breast: nourishing, protective], and one frustrating and "bad" [bad breast: persecutory, withholding]—through a process called splitting. Early on we split care into a “good breast” that feeds and a “bad breast” that withholds; adulthood replays that split until we can hold a person—or a room—as both. Because, a single room that can both soothe and annoy without turning persecutor. Adult life replays that split until we can hold both together; then small acts of repair (reparation) become possible. The reparative impulse belongs to the depressive position: the wish to repair the damaged loved object. When we manage that, envy eases, guilt can be used, and small acts of repair become possible.

- Oizys.

I wish I had a voice.

(Sometime in the last weekend of August - First weekend of September)

I wish I had a voice.

I wish this sound trapped inside me screaming just came out. Just escaped the inferiority complex within me which keeps my voice attached.

The interview email came and I accepted it and they postponed it without further scheduling the night before. I have been writing by hand, preparing for that interview that never got scheduled yet, as if shaping letters on paper could shape my future. It is a good feeling though. Ink drops pressed on my palm. But instead, I have been busy tracing the case of the political prisoner, the morning came and I waited till the afternoon and saw the news, he is not getting out.

I keep spiralling into his case, his life, his family. Going as far back as possible. Where was he born. His house. His street. His family. His grandparents. His parents. His friends. His co-prisoners. His brothers. His co-revolutionaries. What he had done. What he has been doing. Where was he born? Which hospital? What time of day? Was it raining? What was the name of the midwife who delivered him? Did his parents cry with joy, or were they already fighting? What color blanket wrapped him first? Who visited the hospital? Which car brought him home? What road did they drive on? What trees lined that road? What did his childhood room look like? What posters were on his walls? Did he chew pencils? How did he start reading? How did he learn all those languages? Did he secretly cry at night? What was the first lie he told? The first secret he kept? What did his handwriting look like in grade 2? Which teacher scolded him hardest? What lunchbox did he carry? Who sat next to him on the bus? Which street did he ride his bicycle on? Who were his neighbors? Did he ever break a window with a cricket ball? Which girl broke his heart in school? Did he walk home slowly after, or run to hide the tears? Did he scribble her name in the corner of his notebooks? What songs did he listen to on repeat? Did he write then too? Does he still have them? How did he grow into a man? What shoes did he wear for his first job interview? Who was the boss who first saw him as talented? Or lazy? What were the meals he skipped? The drinks he downed? The mistakes he buried? Who held him at his weakest? Who betrayed him? Who laughed at him? And now… his family, his house, his brothers: who came before him, what they carried, what wars they fought, what secrets sit unspoken in their graves. His grandfather’s hands, rough with labor. His grandmother’s lullabies. The unbroken chain of choices and accidents that led to him: standing, breathing, alive in my orbit. And then I look at his present: what he’s doing now, what he’s hiding, what he’s showing. His letters, his words, his periods. His sighs in empty spaces. His dreams. His ghosts. His sins. His every breadcrumb. It’s bottomless. The more I dig, the more the soil caves in. 

And it never ends with him. When the spiral exhausts itself, someone new arrives. They seep through the cracks of my skin, sit beside me in silence, judging, smirking, as if they know my every thought. I daydream them into being until they take over the room. I start curating myself for their gaze: how they would hear me, how they would know me, how they would approve of me. I birth them in my mind, and then live in the shadow of their invented judgment.

I feed my inferiority complex with such maladaptive daydreaming about people who are revolutionaries. Excavating their lives until I can physically feel myself sitting next to their 10-year-old selves. My mind latching onto them as a proxy for its own stuckness, with this meticulous, relentless mapping of his story versus the hollow, fragmented, delayed mess of my own. People who burn and burn and do not stop burning until the world feels their fire. And, right now, he is the fodder.

And here I am, inhaling their smoke second-hand, choking on words I never even manage to say. My voice buried under my ribs while theirs echoes in courtrooms and cells, in manifestos written with their blood and their hunger, their demolished houses and their desecrated tombs. Sometimes I pretend I am one of them (half-a-martyr in my fantasies) my name whispered in a protest chant, my silence mistaken for strategy instead of fear. 

But the truth is less romantic, mostly banal: I refresh the news, dig into archives, collect fragments, imagine dialogues that will never happen. And, he? He sits behind bars, every fibre of his being refusing to pay the cost of his defiance. While he studies, reads, writes, connects, helps people, perseveres. I sit behind my screen, in my half-a-room, my time paying the cost of my avoidance. We are not the same, but my mind insists on tethering me to him, like if I shadow his suffering long enough, I’ll inherit his courage, his knowledge; like if I just inhale every morsel of information about him, I'll become even half virtuous as him.

I don’t.

I only inherit the weight. The heaviness of knowing, and the shame of doing nothing with it. The ever-growing, voracious, venomous, visceral inferiority complex. And maybe that’s why my voice refuses to come out. Because it knows it is not worthy. Because it knows all it can produce are broken echoes of someone else’s fight.

But still... something inside me rattles against the walls of my chest. A sound trying to fracture its way out. A noise that could, maybe, one day, become a voice.

Or maybe not. 

Maybe I am destined to keep researching people who had the audacity to act while I only have the audacity to think. And maybe my “thinking” is nothing more than a sophisticated form of running away, dressing up my avoidance in the language of solidarity. I can convince myself that watching a trial from afar, translating a press release, reading every single footnote in an old report is in itself an act of resistance. It is not. It is me, stuck.

The interview that keeps getting postponed is a mirror of me. Postponed without further scheduling. A future that never arrives. A possibility that dies in the waiting.

And so I sit with the prisoner’s story, weaving it into my own. Pretending the chains on his hands explain the knots in my throat. Pretending my silence is solidarity, when it is just silence.

But maybe silence, too, has its record. Maybe somewhere, somehow, even this unspoken sound counts. It keeps score.

Even if it doesn’t... at least I wrote this down. At least I gave the noise inside me some place to live, if not outside, then here.

And now I am sitting here again, typing when I should be studying or working or atleast looking for a new job, typing when I should be moving forward with something, anything, but I keep convincing myself that tracing the lives of other people who fought harder than I ever will is “important.” Important for what? For who? I don’t know. It is not like my interview tomorrow will forgive me for knowing the birthdate of a man rotting in prison on the other side of the world. It is not like my interviewer will give me points for memorizing the way his ailing mother cried when he was denied parole.

I tell myself this is research, this is awareness, this is solidarity. But really, it is just procrastination wearing a martyr’s mask. I have been writing too much by hand, pretending to prepare for that interview that never got scheduled yet, pretending that neat notes equal progress, while I drown in everyone’s history but my own. And even in that, I am never alone. I keep birthing new figures, conjuring them until they sit beside me, watching, snickering, rewriting me. I curate my words, my tone, my very posture as if they were in the room, measuring me. They are never real, but they control how real I am allowed to feel. And when the mask slips, all I see is me: failing again, wasting again, running again. Why am I like this? Why do I keep filling my head with other people’s suffering instead of facing my own emptiness? Why do I let their cages feel heavier than the chains I’ve built around myself?

The truth is, I don’t know. I only know I’m tired, and guilty, and terrified of opening the exam paper tomorrow with a head full of history that has nothing to do with me.

But I will probably keep scrolling tonight. Keep searching his name. Keep letting myself drown in everything except what I am supposed to be doing.

Maybe one day I’ll call that a voice. For now, it’s just noise.

I should stop now. Before I start imagining how many people will outlive me without ever knowing I was here.

Noise that pretends to be thought. Thought that pretends to be resistance. Resistance that pretends to be survival. Survival that pretends to be life. It folds and folds until I can’t tell where one excuse ends and the next begins. And all of it feels heavier than the silence I started with.

I should stop now. I really should stop now. But the truth is I don’t want to. The truth is I would rather keep spiralling than face the blank page of my textbook, the blank page of my future, the blank page of myself. The truth is the prisoner feels more alive in my head than I do in my own body. The truth is maybe I don’t want a voice at all... maybe I only want an echo.

And maybe this is the echo.

And maybe this is all I’ll ever have.

And maybe that’s fine. And maybe it isn’t. And maybe I’ll keep saying maybe until it loses all meaning, until the word itself becomes just another kind of noise. 

Maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe. 

Even they sit here with me, the ones I birthed, staring as I unravel. My ghosts outnumber me.

Until my mouth fills with it, until my head fills with it, until there is nothing left but the sound of a word that never decides, never commits, never arrives.

And still I can’t stop. I can’t stop circling his name, his case, his prison walls, because if I stop looking at him I will have to look at myself, and I think I would rather die than do that.

And so I stay here, in the repetition, in the delay, in the comfort of knowing that tomorrow will come and I will fail again, and tomorrow will come and I will spiral again, and tomorrow will come and nothing will change, nothing will change, nothing will change.

And I don’t know if I want it to.

I should stop now. I should stop now. I should stop now.

But I won’t.

But I won’t.

But I—

Because stopping feels like admitting there is nothing beyond this. Because if I stop, the silence will be too loud, louder than the noise, louder than the scrolling, louder than the prisoner’s name, louder than the sound in my chest that refuses to come out. Because the silence will remind me that I am not him, I am not them, I am no one, I am nothing.

And so I stretch the words like a thread about to snap. I stretch them thin across the night. I stretch them until they cut into my fingers. I stretch them until they cut into me. I don’t even want answers. I only want the ache of asking. I only want the heaviness of turning questions over like stones, again and again, until my hands are raw. I only want the punishment of staying awake with my own unfinished sentences.

And maybe that’s all I’ve ever wanted: not resolution, not freedom, not even a voice, but the exquisite torture of circling the wound and calling it living.

Maybe this is living.

Maybe this is dying.

Maybe there is no difference.

And if there is... oh, please don’t tell me. Let me stay here, tangled in the noise, swollen with the ache of it, swollen until I burst into nothing at all.

nothing

at all

nothing at all nothing at all nothing...

the page stares back

the page opens its mouth

the page swallows me

I am

I was

I am not

Interview tomorrow

(cancelled)

case yesterday

future never

handwriting without a reader

questions without an answer

voice — no voice — no voice —

just

noise

noise

noise

my chest rattles my chest rattles my chest rattles—

let me out

let me out

let me out

or don’t

or don’t

or—

or don’t

or don’t

or—

o—

—

…

noth

ing

not

i

ng

breath.

breath.

breath.

stopstopstopstop

(still going)

sto—

st——

s

—

SCREAM.

silence.

SCREAM.

smaller scream.

smaller—

s—

…

hands shaking.

h a n d s

shak—

can’t hold it

can’t

can’t

CAN’T

CAN’T

c a n ’ t

…

void.

VOIDVOIDVOID

echo.

e   c   h   o

echoechoechoecho—

STOP.

no.

STOP.

NO.

no—

n—

—

Some couplets that I kept reading throughout the time I wrote this post:

"हज़ारों ख़्वाहिशें ऐसी कि हर ख़्वाहिश पे दम निकले,

बहुत निकले मेरे अरमान लेकिन फिर भी कम निकले।"

("Thousands of desires, each so intense it could take my life,

Many of them came true, yet still — far too few.")

- Mirza Ghalib

"ग़म-ए-हस्ती का 'असद' किस से हो जुज़ मर्ग इलाज,

शमा हर रंग में जलती है सहर होने तक।"

("The sorrow of existence, Asad, has no cure but death,

Yet the candle keeps burning, in every hue, until dawn.")

- Faiz Ahmed Faiz

~

I think they are still watching me. I don't know what to do. I just know how to scream "STOP" in my head. Please go away. Please.

- Oizys.