October 7. 1 AM.

It’s too late to be awake, too early to be anything else. The building hums with the quiet of everyone else’s decisions... sleep, surrender, silence. My laptop screen is the only thing still breathing in this room. I keep telling myself I’ll go to bed after I finish this sentence, and then I keep finishing new ones. It feels like cheating the clock: small thefts of consciousness from a day that never quite belonged to me.

I woke up to a meagre hike that left a taste in my mouth of a bleak future. The day continued to sour as the crusty scalp became crustier, deepening the headache that came from too many skipped washes. The hours unfolded like a badly folded letter with corners not quite meeting, edges smudged with anxiety. The bank issue resurfaced unresolved, and amid too much work, I couldn’t even gather the courage to pick up their call. I’ve been waiting over a month for that interview that got rescheduled without a date, and after the hike, I mustered up enough courage to type a follow-up email... only to save it in drafts. I dragged myself through the checklist, even doing some extra for tomorrow in case I wake up empty. Later, guilt pushed me to respond to the bank with a typed apology to replace my silence. Anxiety hummed its usual static on the jitteriness meter; I kept imagining what new bureaucratic horror they’ll unfold tomorrow. My only prayer: that I never have to visit the bank physically.

And through all of it, I could feel the paracosm slipping more and more... those little fractures between thought and speech widening until even my own words felt misaligned. It’s annoying as hell, honestly, like my head keeps buffering mid-sentence while the world expects fluent performance.

Breakfast and lunch didn’t happen, so just a bag of salted chips and papaya dusted with more salt was the first meal of the day after I was done with the above by evening. Eventually, I showered and covered myself in lotion, hoping routine might coax the mood into motion... but it didn’t. The skin feels wrong tonight, prickled by the pants meant to comfort. The hike doesn’t feel like growth at all; it feels like pity dressed as progress. I almost thought, why did they even bother?

Today was heavy in the strange way light can be: when it floods too bright, too fast, and leaves you blinking. I tried to keep pace; emails, deadlines, the performative choreography of being fine; but underneath it, there’s this faint static, like something unsaid knocking from the walls of my head. I don’t know if it’s exhaustion or awareness, but lately I feel like a copy of myself running a few seconds behind the real version. Maybe this is what happens when life runs on delay, you end up chasing your own echo. There’s no conclusion tonight, no moral or metaphor waiting to be written. Just the quiet hum of machinery, the ticking cursor, and the taste of old tea that somehow made it through the day. Maybe tomorrow will have softer edges. Maybe not. For now, I’ll let the sentence end before the night does.

(cursor blinks once, patient as ever)

~ Oizys.