Dec 31, 2025 – Jan 01, 2026: Nobody Is Here. Happy New Year.

“Nobody Is Here.” Is the chant I chant I have been chanting. It keeps looping, not loud enough to be prayer, not honest enough to be a lie. Things have been happening and I have been wondering where has my zeal for writing gone? I tell myself I am resting, but it feels more like I have misplaced the part of me that initiates things. The page waits without judging, which somehow makes it worse. I open notebooks like I am checking empty rooms, expecting evidence of a break-in, or at least a note saying I stepped out to live. Instead, there is this static ambition, wanting to be precise and infinite at the same time, paralyzing me into doing nothing particularly well. I keep procrastinating while my words are swallowed by the black hole of wanting nothingness and craving the mastery of everything while sewing useless crafts of daydreams. I keep stitching together elaborate inner monologues that never make it past rehearsal, practicing brilliance for an audience that does not exist. It is not that I have nothing to say. It is that saying it would collapse the illusion that I am still preparing. 

I wake up new dreams from the corners of my mind to give them false hope, dress them up like they are going somewhere important, then feed them to the private circus in my head. This dance form, that music form, this job, that protest... each one flashes like a tab I will definitely return to. I try them on for size, admire the version of me who commits, then hang them back up untouched. It is easier to fantasize about momentum than to endure the friction of starting. I confuse curiosity with purpose, stimulation with direction. Somewhere between wanting everything and refusing the cost of choosing, I stall... hovering... entertained and unsatisfied, telling myself this too is a phase, as if naming it makes it temporary.

But there is always that undertow. The quiet probe that starts the moment the fantasy gets comfortable. I do not know enough. I do not know anything. I did not start early enough. I do not have the right origin story. I do not have the clean lineage. I do not have the cinematic struggle that justifies late arrival. I picture myself stepping into those imagined lives and feel immediately overexposed, like I skipped the prologue everyone else memorized but I egotistically assumed only I knew it and no one else. The daydreams try to keep going, but they thin out, go translucent. A needle of insecurity pricks them.. soft pop, after soft pop... until the air is full of nothing but realization. I notice the gaps in my knowledge, the absence of mentors, the way I never quite learned how to belong without performing. Even in my own head, I am an impostor with good intentions. The wind shifts, the circus tents sag, and I am left holding the poles, pretending this was always meant to be a temporary installation.

And I am left with this heavy aftertaste of inertia. Like I have already failed at things I never even attempted. A fear settles in that I won’t do anything, ever... just keep orbiting intentions like they are planets I am not cleared to land on. Sometimes absurd thoughts slip in: when I go out and meet people, can I list daydreaming about hobbies as a hobby itself? Can I present potential as a skill, aspiration as evidence of effort? What are some of the answers that I can rehearse that will sound convincing until they are spoken aloud. And then there’s the worse possibility: the one I don’t joke about. What if I meet people who actually live inside those fantasies? People who are the dancers, the musicians, the organizers, the protesters. What if they watch the mask loosen in real time, see the lag between my language and my life. I imagine the moment of recognition, that polite recalibration in their eyes, and I shrink back into myself, cataloging yet another reason to stay unreal, where at least the performance never has to survive contact with the world.

Hmm. And that’s when the calendar starts to feel accusatory. Because the brand new year arrives, right on schedule, indifferent to all of this. When time itself joins the interrogation. As if the year has been quietly keeping score while I have been rehearsing. I do not arrive at New Year’s Eve hopeful... no. I arrive already defensive, already bracing, already tired of explaining myself to an abstract future that keeps asking what I did with the last one.

So, the new year night is here. The night you think will change everything but you know it does nothing. It has no magic dust. Only remains of firecrackers. The air smells like burnt impatience and borrowed optimism. Everyone is counting down like numbers have ever been responsible for transformation. I stand there pretending to witness a threshold, when really it’s just another seam in time, badly stitched. I make promises the way people leave glasses of water by the bed... a bit symbolic, but mostly untouched. Somewhere a cheer erupts, but it feels prerecorded, like a laugh track for survival. And, this year, like all the previous years, I don’t feel reborn. Earlier, I used to feel briefly paused, like life buffering while deciding whether to resume at the same volume. Now, that feeling has faded too. Still, I stay up. Still, I watch the clock. As if attention alone might convince tomorrow to be different.

Anyway, nobody is here. Anyway, nobody is here. And if someone happens to be reading this by accident: happy new year.

- Oizys.