I smile at her travel videos while skipping meals // She who almost left (full version, broken)

As I start writing this after a mini panic attack on mute, my sister comes to show me her traveling videos. I forced myself to smile at it, to like it, to compliment it, to give a nice idea or two. Like I’m inspired. Like I’m part of that joy. But deep down—I am sad. I am desperate. For what? For things I say I don’t even want? Then why does it still cut so deep?

I feel like a loser.

There it is. The thing I’m not supposed to admit. The thing I try to bury beneath ambition, aesthetics, and all those “it's okay, your time will come” platitudes. But it’s not okay. Not today.

I feel low, and something inside me is screaming that this entire financial gap between us… might be my fault. It’s not, logically. I know that. But try telling that to the version of me that’s staring at my bank balance while my sister sends me three videos from three foreign trips. All in the same month. And I’m still waiting for half of my salary to be cleared.

I’m still scraping. Still negotiating with myself about groceries. Still converting restaurant prices into guilt. While she floats. Buoyant. Unworried. Unbothered. Untouched by this specific kind of tension that hardens in my spine and hums in my stomach like static.

And I hate that I’m angry. I hate that the anger turns to bile. That it chokes me. Because I love her. I love her joy. But God, sometimes I look at the support she gets—the ease, the no-questions-asked financial backing, the soft landings—and I feel rage that could level a city.

There was that Tumblr post, remember?

“One of the most painful feelings a person can have is unadulterated rage at seeing someone else receive the support you needed but never got.” [Paraphrased.]

 I don’t just relate to that. I live it.

It’s violent, the way envy coils around love. The way guilt clings to resentment. The way I keep smiling, keep nodding, keep pushing my feelings down like unpaid bills. I don’t want her life. That’s the sick part—I don’t want to be her. But I want to stop feeling like I was somehow built to always struggle harder. To always be the one who “manages.” The one who’s “doing great” but still can’t afford a long weekend trip without a cost-benefit analysis spreadsheet.

My life looks fine. To others. But I’m exhausted. I’m tired of being the “responsible one” without the results. Tired of watching joy drip from her Instagram stories while I budget phone bills and keep quiet about skipping food to stretch the grocery run.

I hate that money has come between us—not in words, but in silence. In the difference between “Let’s just go!” and “Can I afford it?” In the unspoken truth that I’m jealous of her freedom, not her choices. That she can choose. That she can afford to not be careful. That she doesn’t lie awake calculating how many more years it’ll take before things feel stable.

And still—I get up. I work. I apply to better jobs. I try to dream even when dreams feel like liabilities. I still fake it when she sends another video. I laugh. I suggest another place she should visit. But deep down, I’m mourning the me that never got a soft start. The me that didn’t inherit a runway.

And you know what? I’m tired of pretending that wanting money makes me shallow. Or ungrateful. Or greedy. I’m not greedy. I’m tired. I don’t want yachts and designer bags. I just want to not feel like a failure every time my card declines or I miss out on another plan because I simply can’t afford it.

I want money because I want safety. I want ease. I want options. I want to know what it’s like to spend without spiraling. To breathe without planning. To exist without hustling for the bare minimum.

But right now? I want to leave. Far, far away. From this apartment, this paycheck-to-paycheck existence, this never-ending tightrope walk. I want to disappear into a version of life where my worth isn’t measured by how well I endure.

Let them say I broke. Let them say I disappeared. What they won’t know is—this was never about escaping.

This was about saving myself.

-

So, I finally did what I do best [or, is it?]. Write. Ha, ha. So, here it is. A map of maybe. A fever-dream of longing and a whole existential scrapbook drenched in jasmine and imaginary passport stamps. 

[Edited to add Note: This has a sort-of-sequel in my next post (as a part of NaPoWriMo2025's challenge).]

“She who almost left”
(full version, broken)

I.

I wore cities like scarves —
(no, I only Googled them at 2AM)
soft folds of air and heat,
the light on other people’s balconies.
I still know the names of streets I’ve never walked,
the smell of bakeries I made up.

Journal Entry, July 7th:
I’m going to leave next year.
I’ll start in Istanbul.
I’ll buy a secondhand camera and wear linen.
(Promise?)
Promise.

I practiced goodbyes in the mirror.
“See you when I see you.”
“Take care of the plants.”
(There were no plants.)

Sometimes I find coins in my drawers
from countries I never visited.
I think I bought them on eBay.
For the illusion of memory.
For weight.

therapy note:
client exhibits signs of disassociation from timeline, presents “possible alternate selves” as coping mechanism
delusional? poetic? unclear.

I kept saying:
“Next year.”
“When I have money.”
“When the time is right.”
Years folded into each other
like napkins after dinner.
The time never came.
Or maybe it did
and I didn’t open the door.

II.

I reread the old poems today.
All airports and high-speed trains.
Stamps and silhouettes and wind in my hair.

who wrote this?
was it me?
was it who I wanted to be?

I try to remember
if I ever left.

I think I did.
(I must’ve.)
There’s sand in my closet.
The window won’t shut right.
I hum in languages
I never learned.

But the couch still holds my shape.

And the plant?
Still dead.
Still watered.
Still here.

III.

[handwritten in the margin, barely legible]

*I’m 24 now.
I imagine being 60.
Still here.
Still not gone.
Still making up postcards from countries I never saw.

God —
what if I never leave?*

[scrap torn from an old notebook]

Postcard I never sent
Front: A sunset over Santorini.
Back (unwritten):
“Wish you were here.”
I didn’t know who “you” was.
Maybe me.
Maybe the version who left.

[voice memo, transcribed]

“I feel like I’ve lived so many lives… in my head.
Like there’s a version of me out there —
boarding a train, laughing with strangers,
losing earrings in foreign rivers.
And then there’s this version —
reheating dal.
Folding the same blanket every night.”

I once told someone I’d leave when the jasmine bloomed.
It bloomed.
I said, “Next year.”

I once packed a bag.
It’s still under the bed.
Shoes inside. Untouched.
Dust on the zipper like ash.

[Ticket stub — wrinkled, blank]

Destination: ___
Departure: Always tomorrow
Seat: Window, so I can watch the life I didn’t live

I age in my sleep.
My knees click now.
I tell people I used to travel
just to see how it feels to say it.

I look at the mirror and wonder
if my reflection ever left without me.

[Text message draft — unsent, timestamped 3:08 AM]

“Hey, random thought —
if I vanished,
would anyone notice if I came back
as someone else?”

I see myself at 60 —
reading these words,
finding the old notebook in a box labeled “Misc.”
Smiling at the naivety.
Or weeping because
I never left
and this
was the only way I ever traveled.

[handwriting, frantic, ink bleeding into the page]

No one warned me that stillness could rot.
That a life not left could still feel lost.
That you can fantasize yourself into exhaustion.
That dreams get heavier the longer you carry them.

That I could live everywhere — and nowhere — all at once.

[final note, crossed out, rewritten]

Maybe I left.
Maybe I stayed.
Maybe I became so many possible women that none of them could breathe.

But I remember the airport smell.
I remember the goodbye I never said.

I remember wanting to leave so much,
I forgot to live at all.

And then silence.
Like the page waiting for the next version of you to write on it.
Maybe you do.

Maybe you don’t.

[Found inside a manila envelope labeled “Someday”]

Boarding passes to cities that don’t exist.
A journal entry titled “If I Had Left.”
An email draft saved five years ago: “Dear future me, how is the view?”

She wakes up at 3:17 AM.
No noise. No movement.
Just a sudden knowing:
She is old. She never left.

But the mirrors still show her 24.
The room is the same.
The dust is new.

“Maybe I’ve dreamed so hard of being older and alone
that I became it for a moment —
and it terrified me."

IV.

She scrolls through photos.
Some are real. Some she downloaded from blogs
and filtered to look like her memories.
Her friends liked them anyway.

[Instagram caption – 6 years ago]

“Wanderlust in my veins 🌍✈️”
Location tagged: Berlin
Reality: In bed, under a blanket, ordering risotto.

[scrap torn from the back of a receipt]

I thought freedom meant motion.
I didn’t know you could be trapped
inside the same wish for a decade.

I didn’t know wanting could rot.

She lights a candle.
Jasmine-scented.
Same one from college.
She closes her eyes.

Maybe this is the moment I leave,
she thinks.

Maybe this scent will cling to me in Morocco.
Or in Prague.
Or in the corner of a room I’ll never forget.

I’ll pack it in my bag tomorrow.
I’ll go.
I swear I’ll go.

But then the kettle whistles.
The rice overboils.
The plant leans into the shadows.

And the couch — the couch
remembers her again.

[FINAL PAGE — written as if from the future, but clearly in young handwriting]

I’m 24.
I’ve already seen the woman I’ll become if I don’t leave.
She’s kind. Quiet. She folds laundry like prayer.
But her voice is full of ghosts.
She speaks of places she’s never touched like they were lovers who never wrote back.

I don’t want to be her.
But I love her.
And I fear I already am.

Now it’s just white space.
A page waiting.

Maybe she leaves tomorrow.
Maybe she just writes about it again.

But the suitcase is still there.
And the candle is still burning.

And the plant — somehow — has sprouted a new leaf.

V.

[Unsent Letter, hidden behind the last page of the notebook]

(found folded in half, smudged with candle wax and eyeliner tears)

Dear You,

If you’re reading this, it means I made it.
Or maybe you did.
Or maybe I’m still here and you’re just a better lie I wrote for myself.

Did we ever leave?

Tell me —
Is the sea as blue as I pictured?
Do the trains hum lullabies in other languages?
Does the wind in foreign places whisper our name?
Or did we just stay?
And dream so hard we fractured?

Please be real.
Please tell me we didn’t just rot in possibility.
Tell me we didn’t memorize timetables and never buy a ticket.

Do we still light the jasmine candle?
Do we still water that godforsaken plant?

Are you happy?
Or just better at pretending?

If you left —
write back.
I need to know I existed somewhere
outside these four walls
and this someday-shaped sadness.

If you stayed —
forgive me.
I tried to become more.
I just ran out of courage
between laundry loads and reasons not to go.

Yours — somewhere, always,
Me
(Maybe 24. Maybe 84. Time’s weird in here.)

[On the back of the letter – a hastily drawn map]

“Start anywhere.”

A dotted line connects cities real and imagined:
Kochi — Siberia — Florence — Reykjavik — Home?

In the corner, it says:

X marks nothing. There is no treasure. Only the journey. Only the act of walking away.

[Last notebook page — scrawled diagonally across the whole thing]

Somewhere, there’s a version of me who reads this with sand in her shoes.
Laugh lines from too much sun.
A plant that didn’t die.
A postcard that got sent.

And somewhere else —
a version still waiting
for the jasmine to bloom again.

And somewhere else —
me.
writing this.

hoping you’ll write back.

- Oizys. 

NaPoWriMo 2025 (April 20th): In the Wakeful Hour

From NaPoWriMo 2025 (Day Twenty): What with time’s way of marching inexorably on, we suppose it was inevitable. We’ve come to the 2/3-way point of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Anna Enbom, whose tragedy/ballad poem for Day Nineteen is less tragic (thankfully) than it could be.

Today’s resource is the online galleries of the Tate Modern, where there’s oodles to discover, including a sculpture that sort of makes us think of the Loch Ness Monster holding a beach ball, a swirly bit of op/pop art reminiscent of either candy or a mustache, and this interesting exploration of five different artist-made books.

And now, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Below, you’ll find Theodore Roethke’s poem, “In Evening Air.”

In Evening Air

1
A dark theme keeps me here,
Though summer blazes in the vireo’s eye.
Who would be half possessed
By his own nakedness?
Waking’s my care–
I’ll make a broken music, or I’ll die.

2
Ye littles, lie more close!
Make me, O Lord, a last, a simple thing
Time cannot overwhelm.
Once I transcended time:
A bud broke to a rose,
And I rose from a last diminishing.

3
I look down the far light
And I behold the dark side of a tree
Far down a billowing plain,
And when I look again,
It’s lost upon the night–
Night I embrace, a dear proximity.

4
I stand by a low fire
Counting the wisps of flame, and I watch how
Light shifts upon the wall.
I bid stillness be still.
I see, in evening air,
How slowly dark comes down on what we do.

So, let’s face it: this poem is weird. The rhythm is odd, the rhymes are too, and the language is strangely prophetic and not at all “conversational.” Despite – or maybe because – of this, it has a hypnotic quality, as if it were all inevitable. Your challenge is, with this poem in mind, to write a poem informed by musical phrasing or melody, that employs some form of soundplay (rhyme, meter, assonance, alliteration). One way to approach this is to think of a song you know and then basically write new lyrics that fit the original song’s rhythm/phrasing.

Happy writing!

In the Wakeful Hour

1
The bell is hollow bone.
It tolls beneath the nettled sky at noon.
A beetle hums in praise —
I count the hooves of days.
My hands are not my own.
They bloom in sleep and wither far too soon.

2
O ash-mouth choir, hush!
Do not sing that salt-sick song of men.
The dandelions lie —
They grin, then float, then die.
The well is full of hush.
I drank the stillness. I will drink again.

3
The ink runs backward now.
It tells the tale of something half-remembered:
A ladder made of glass,
A mirror in the grass,
A bird without a brow
That screamed of snow and was, at once, dismembered.

4
I stay beside the wall.
Its breath is warm. It mutters old regrets.
My shadow leaves at four,
Returns at dusk with more
Of me than I recall.
I am the harp that darkness never frets.

5
And moss began to speak—
It whispered through the bark with velvet breath:
“O child of cinder bone,
You walk, but not alone.
The roots remember weak—
Your name is stitched in lichen, not in death.”

6
The moonlight dripped reply,
Each syllable a gleam on trembling leaves:
“I watched you forge your fears
Into a crown of years.
You asked me not to lie—
But truth dissolves in time, like webs in eaves.”

7
Said moss: “I’ve seen you fall.
The same stone finds your foot in every path.
But still you rise, and hum
The tune from whence you come.
The stars forget it all—
But I recall your name. I know your wrath.”

8
Said moonlight: “All things pass.
Even gods are shadows in the end.
Yet still I shine. I wait.
The dusk is not your fate.
The fire sleeps in grass—
And what you break, someday you may still mend.”

9
Now silence bows its head.
The world turns in its sleep and dreams anew.
The moss reclines in thought.
The moon forgets it fought.
But still, where none have tread,
A song begins — and maybe, so do you.

10
The moss grew cold, withdrew.
Its tendrils curled like fingers in a fist.
The moonlight dimmed to bone—
A hush not quite alone.
The wind forgot it blew.
The night bent inward, heavy with a mist.

11
She came with neither cry
Nor crown — her robe was woven out of sighs.
Her hands were pale as ash,
Her feet left pools of brash
Regret. The owls flew high,
And stars looked down but would not recognize.

12
She spoke, or something did.
It might have been the sound of branches weeping.
“I gather what you lose—
The cut, the bruise, the ruse.
I keep what must be hid.
The pain you won’t admit—I’ve been there, keeping.”

13
The moonlight tried to shine,
But shimmer fails when sorrow folds the air.
And moss could only moan,
Its hymns reduced to stone.
The god—half rot, half wine—
Sat down. “You called,” she said. “You called me here.”

14
And no one said a word.
But in that silence, something cracked and bled.
A vine reached toward the fire,
A crow dropped low, then higher—
And somewhere, nearly heard,
A child sang backwards from an empty bed.

15
They called her Achlys,
A name like wind through rusted violin.
Not goddess — not quite ghost,
A flicker more than most.
She weeps in what has been,
Yet plants a spark where endings once had been.

16
And moss began to sing,
A hymn of thorns made soft by shadow’s hand.
The moonlight held its breath,
The dark stepped back from death—
While under everything,
Glimmering under the grief.

Fieldnotes from the Edge of the Unseen

This text appears to originate from a liminal grove where moss hums softly in its sleep and moonlight answers in riddles. The voice shifts: sometimes speaker, sometimes echo, sometimes witness. Meaning moves like water—never still, never certain.

At the heart of the poem is a presence not fully seen but unmistakably felt. A sorrowing figure. A name that surfaces only once: Achlys. She is the death-mist, the unspoken grief, older than memory. Rarely mentioned, never claimed. Not quite goddess, not quite ghost. She does not arrive. She is remembered.

Her most vivid appearance survives in a passing moment on the Shield of Heracles, where she is carved among the Fates and the Keres. She stands “gloomy and dread, pallid, parched, cowering in hunger,” with claws beneath her hands, blood on her cheeks, and “much dust, wet with tears” upon her shoulders.

There is no clear source. No known ritual. No record of worship. Only this: the grief sings. And under it, something glimmers.

- Oizys.