8.05AM
There’s a kind of hush that only the first morning of a new month understands. The sky hasn’t had its tea yet. The neighbourhood dogs are still negotiating with the sun. And I’m standing at my window, inventorying the quiet with a fresh schema: field by field, feeling by feeling. November is famous for slow arrivals, cooler air, earlier evenings, festivals packing their bags and checking into the calendar. But beneath the shawl of all that softness, there’s a crispness that means business. It’s a peer review for our routines. Quarter-end energy without the spreadsheets. A town hall where the only agenda item is: What are you building next? There’s a certain theatre on the 1st of the month. This month. The month of November. We print new calendars like they’re absolution. But the truth is a quieter accountant. She opens the same worn ledger, clears her throat, and asks what you’re carrying forward. I never understood why people revered Mondays to be miracles. They’re maintenance. Which is honestly more merciful? I like beginnings that don’t shout. I like the low-battery calm of a dawn that makes you listen before you move.
I woke up extremely early, which is not a November miracle because of my recent messy sleep schedule. And, after my mother left for her morning walk to the temple, I locked myself in the room and mouthed the poem in silence by tearing the throat while the poet thundered at full volume in my earbuds.
The Audit of Beginnings
At 5:59, the sky is a draft
nobody signed,
a thin blue memo stapled to the east.
The kettle coughs,
steam filing its report.
My mug takes minutes like a junior analyst:
first sip, second doubt, third resolve.
I itemize the ghosts:
the laugh I owed a friend,
the text I didn’t send,
the door I closed so softly it learned to apologize.
On page one of the month, I try a new font...
brave...
then write smaller to save space for revision.
Outside, sparrows convene a standup.
Agenda: survival, crumbs, choreography.
They do not pitch rebrands.
They repeat what works.
I’ve been told to “seize the day.”
I prefer to sign for it:
name, date, a promise to store it properly...
cool, dark, away from noise.
Regret walks in late,
drops a folder marked “URGENT”:
all the things I could have done with yesterday’s quiet.
I initial each page,
file under Lessons, Non-Perishable.
The sun clocks in, unshowy.
Light spills like an honest spreadsheet,
columns of mercy, rows of routine,
no macro for courage,
just cells you fill by hand.
And if grace arrives, it is never dramatic.
It looks like rinsing the cup,
like making the bed,
like choosing the smaller heroics first.
By 6:40, the ledger closes.
Not balanced, not perfect—auditable.
I rubber-stamp the morning:
In Progress.
On the margin, I leave a note to self:
Forget clean slates.
Keep clean tools.
Carry forward what hums.
Write today in a legible hand.
— Oizys.
My self-started project of #NovPoWriMo 2025 starts today. I keep thinking about it. The jitteriness of starting something that I oh-so-enthusiastically prepared for. I have, so far, written prompts for fourteen days. I still need to research, craft, and finalise for the rest of the days while I write responses now. This is while I am over-burdened with more work at my primary job, with little meagre increase in salary, while I have committed myself to two different volunteering roles and another volunteering position. And, while I have made myself determined to submit three papers that I have been planning and planning. I have to complete writing, researching, editing, and submit the same by the end of November. And, to top it all off, it is November. The season of sadness. The season of my origin. I don’t mean that dramatically, like no violins, no slow zoom. Just the plain fact that November is where so many beginnings in my life decided to masquerade as endings. Or maybe they were endings, and I recycled the scraps into new first pages, the way thrifty gods make new worlds out of leftover clay. It’s strange. Some months arrive like vendors... peddling light, mangoes, monsoon gossip. But November comes as an auditor. No welcome kit. Just a swivel chair, a pen that clicks too loud, and questions about expenditures of the heart. What have you loved? What did you abandon? Why is your joy always on deferred payment terms? Why is sorrow so liquid in your books? You can’t negotiate with November; it’s already read the footnotes. It knows exactly how many revisions you promised yourself. It knows how many you completed. It knows why your margins look haunted. There’s a baseline melancholy that drags behind me like a poorly archived PDF. If joy arrives, it does so as a footnote like that tiny font, cautious, subject to peer review. Meanwhile, grief gets top billing, bolded, left-aligned. The formatting is biased.
I keep thinking I chose poetry. But days like these make me suspect poetry chose me because I am structurally unsound enough to house it. The beams creak, the roof leaks, but the acoustics are impeccable. Tragedy loves echo, and I’m nothing if not compliant real estate. Then, the month reminds me like a stern manager that I am the one who made this month louder. I volunteered for the noise:
the poems, the papers, the promises. I scheduled my own chaos and then acted surprised when the meeting invite turned up. Productivity theatre is seductive. It makes you think you’re inching towards greatness when you’re actually just tap-dancing in place. Still, some motion is better than freefall. Right? I don’t know.
That’s the part honesty keeps underlined. A reasonable person would scale back.
Pick one commitment, maybe two. Negotiate scope. But I’ve never been good at being reasonable. It feels like a language I can read but not speak. Besides, even if I quit everything, November would still show up, arms crossed, asking for the missing receipts. My accountant-ghost would still demand line items: Who have you become? Where is your proof? Why is the joy ledger still under construction? I think about childhood, how November smelled like old notebooks and burnt incense. How mornings tasted like cold water and oblivion. How the future looked like a given-up spreadsheet with too many errors, too many hidden cells. I was convinced I was going to just scratch the rock bottom with my fingernails for the rest of my life. Laughable and a bit endearing. Now, I believe that November isn’t sad because of the weather or memory. It’s sad because it’s honest. It just reports. The season of my origin. Yes.
6.30PM
Anyway, I made some sandwiches and I ate and fell asleep at around 11AM and woke up at 6PM. My sister told me she had brought some snacks, which we then had, that gave the inside of my mouth a peeling reaction due to the texture and oil. Anyway, it was not that bad. Thank god, I did not eat a lot. I followed it up with some ripe papaya, which soothed the peelings and then of course some tea. The evening just went by like that.
11:30PM
I thought of some other snacks that were leftover, and I ate the remaining of them. While doing the same, I came across a new poem by the poet that I was blasting this morning, and she was reciting a new poem of hers at a big place. It was a chilling recital. Watching that sent me to a downward spiral as usual, which is the case whenever I see people doing something that I always imagine myself doing. I knew better than to click play, but curiosity is an indulgence with no spending cap.
So there I was, sitting under the 12AM haze, watching her stand under a too-bright spotlight that made her look built of vowels and inevitability. She wasn’t extraordinary; she was simply doing it. That’s the part that kills me every time.
The ease of it. The way her breath seemed to know where to go before the line arrived. Like the poem was muscle memory. Like living well had trained the body to speak without flinching. Meanwhile, I sat cross-legged on my bed, clutching my phone like a confession. I envied her composure. I envied her strange, casual intimacy with the room. I envied (ugh, the dirtiest word) the applause that came after. And beneath the envy: that old, disgusting little certainty... that I am not enough to write like her, not enough to speak like her. I envied her strange, casual intimacy with the room. (and I hated how quickly I decided I wasn’t built for that) The feeling arrived like oil on the tongue, coating, rancid, not enough to write like her, not enough to speak like her. Not because I want to be worshipped. (Let’s be honest, I would hate it and bury myself in my cot forever.) But because I want to know what it feels like to read a poem out loud and not shake like a cheap lightbulb in a storm. For a moment, the room went small. The walls leaned in with unsolicited advice. My sister was somewhere in the house watching reels of people folding sweaters, and my mother was softly snoring next to me. The fan hummed its lukewarm empathy. And I just… sat there. Every insecurity came out like a full audit team. Credentials, receipts, performance metrics.
“Are you really writing?”
“If you were serious, wouldn’t you be further by now?”
“What do these pages amount to?”
Blah blah blah.
Not enough, not yet.
Not enough, not yet.
I am not enough not enough yet to write like her, speak like her.
(I refuse the period. I keep the yet.)
My inner critic needs a vacation or at least a performance improvement plan. I keep forgetting that envy is just longing with a bad posture. It hunches. It mumbles. It wants to be seen but shows up in the wrong outfit. The recital ended, the applause rolled out, and the video cut to silence. I stared at the black screen, caught somewhere between wanting to write and wanting to throw my notebook out the window and become a tree. Trees don’t submit papers. Trees don’t volunteer for five things. Trees don’t negotiate with November. Anyway.
I got up. Rinsed my face. Sometimes you have to perform care until it believes you. Outside, the night felt like a misplaced comma. The sky couldn’t decide whether to brood or bloom. A few kids in the street were bursting cheap firecrackers left over from the last festival... late submissions, just like me. Their laughter was shrill and uncomplicated. I envied that too, but less aggressively.
My inbox, of course, had opinions. A gentle reminder here. A needy (timely!) reminder there. I swear, digital life has more alarms than wisdom. I opened my laptop, thinking I would write, but instead I ended up scrolling:
submission guidelines,
poetry blogs,
deadlines,
call-for-papers,
CV advice,
somebody’s thread on “how to get your life together by 25.” [Oh my god.]
Too late.
Next slide.
Then I caught myself spiralling into the familiar narrative:
Everyone is ahead.
I am late to my own life.
I have wasted too much time.
I am running behind a train, and I am not even sure I want to board.
And then, by some small mercy, maybe the leftover tea, maybe the leftover courage, I stopped. I forcibly, non-consentingly, involuntarily reminded myself:
No one can occupy my timeline.
Not even me, if I keep comparing it to someone else’s.
The poem that the woman read onstage was hers, born of her very specific wounds.
My poems are born of mine.
There is no competition here except survival.
So I closed the tabs. Turned off the fan. Grabbed my notebook, even though my hands were trembling like they were rehearsing an earthquake. I wrote... slowly, badly, honestly. I wrote the kind of draft that looks like it needs medication. The kind of draft that apologises as soon as it arrives. But a draft is a draft. It lives. And I think that counts. I had some work to do for one of my volunteering roles, which I completed successfully. I had two submissions to make for one of my volunteering roles, in one of which I had to severely cut off my words for the submission. It hurt me a bit, but I did it. The night grew colder. I switched off the lights and sat in the dark, waiting for some grand epiphany. Of course, nothing came. Epiphanies work flexi-hours. They respect no service level agreement. All I got was a thin whisper: Carry forward what hums. The disgust doesn’t vanish, but I have to carry forward with hope that it just relabels from Verdict to Variable. I’ll measure again tomorrow. So I did. I closed the notebook and my borrowed laptop. Let it rest freely on my table like a small, warm cat who unapologetically takes her space. And I slept... not peacefully, not dramatically, but enough. November will pry my ribs open again tomorrow. It always does. But maybe this time I’ll be ready with sharper tools. Hope I do.
I am not enough like her; I am enough like me if I keep showing up.
~ Oizys.
