NaPoWriMo 2026 [31st March: Early-Bird Prompt]
Get set...
It’s March 31, or as we like to call with around here, Na/GloPoWriMo Eve. A time when poetic spirits haunt the land, preparing for their month of fun…
Tomorrow, we’ll have for you our first daily resource and featured participant, as well as a daily prompt. In the meantime, here’s an early-bird prompt for those of you whose geographic relationship with the international date line means that April 1 arrives a bit earlier than it does at National/Global Poetry Writing Month HQ.
Start by reading Katie Naughton’s poem, “Debt Ritual: Oysters.” Now, write your own poem in which you refer to a specific writer or artist (or work of literature/art) and make a declarative statement about want or desire. Set the poem in a particular, people-filled place, like a restaurant, bus station, museum, school, etc.
Happy writing!
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Note: I almost did not write today. But that seems to be the theme lately. Almost doing things, almost showing up, almost being present, almost doing it. So I am interrupting that pattern, even if only slightly. This is for the early-bird prompt.
-
Receipt, or Something Like It
At a small restaurant
with metal tables that remember too many elbows,
I sit across from conversations that are not mine.
Plates arrive, leave, return half-eaten—
like decisions people could not fully commit to.
Someone laughs too loudly behind me.
Someone is breaking up near the window.
The waiter writes quickly,
as if speed could prevent anything from spilling over.
I think of Sylvia Plath,
and how she made even hunger sound precise.
I wanted that.
As a child.
Not the tragedy.
Not the spectacle people romanticize afterwards.
But the sharpness.
I wanted language that did not hesitate.
I wanted to say what I mean
before it rot inside me.
The spoon hits the glass beside me;
a small, accidental declaration.
I wanted to respond on time.
Not hours later,
not days later,
not in the quiet safety of a page,
but there,
in the moment the boundary is crossed.
At the next table,
someone says “it’s not that serious,”
and everyone nods like agreement is easier than truth.
I wanted to disagree.
The bill arrives.
Numbers arranged neatly
as if everything can be accounted for.
But there is always something unpaid,
something carried out
without being written down.
I leave before finishing my food.
I want to stop leaving things unfinished.
Outside,
the evening is loud with people
who seem to know exactly where they are going.
I stand there for a moment longer than necessary.
I want to belong to my own decisions.
And for once,
I do not take that statement back.
~ Oizys.
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
NaPoWriMo 2026 [31st March: Early-Bird Prompt] - Receipt, or Something Like It
The Ending of 31st March 2026.
31st March 2026, 20:20 PM
I could not write. I could not write so, so much. So much that has happended and nothing that has happened. Ever since I wrote the previous update, I have been involved politically (joining groups for research and writing, however much I can manage) while my personal life passes by and existential exhaustion plunders the soil of my nature and my surroundings suck the life out of me. The last update was written after my mother left for a trip. And I kept thinking while I was writing that I would use this limited time and extra space to write more and more. But, alas! Anyway, not much value in mourning for voluntarily lost time of writing, right? Unless you are able to extract some gold mine-level write-up from it.
On Sunday, I finally got a haircut, and my mother, who accompanied me, happily teamed up with the hairdresser to rail me to go to a doctor. How do I escape? was the question in my head. One of the reasons I do not like going to doctors, hairstylists, etc. There is a deep, physical connection in those services when we seek them that destroys me because they get to peek under the carpet and point at my rot. I feel crippling shame. Anyway, as usual, I thought that finally, after so long, after so much procrastination and a tumultuous phase of chronically diseased, long, thin, malnourished, constantly falling hair, if I go get a haircut, that will completely change my life, and I will fix all my issues. No. That did not happen. I think a day before this, or two, I kept feeling like my random bouts of the screams in my maladaptive daydreams from those mass-hysteria-like scenarios in my head felt as if some goddess had possessed me, like there was something beneath my skin. I felt this itch to take my skin off to remove that so that constant screaming & triggering in my head would stop. Today, before I started writing this, it popped off. It had been a while since it had popped off; some oozed the day before my mother left. But today, my sister kept poking, needling, scratching, and scrapping me. And it just came out. One can go on smiling, ignoring, and remaining silent only so much in the face of taunting, humiliation, and micro-acts of physical aggression. And they think the violence will never come back and wet their feet, so when it does, they conveniently act surprised and defensive so they can put their manipulative mask on and spin it on you.
But lately, I have been thinking about it, how I am always so late, so tardy when it comes to reacting to violence. How much manipulation is required to suppress your natural, rightful, justified reaction to humiliation? I often think how all that repressed degradation gets lodged in the body like sediment in a river that once flowed freely but now chokes on its own stillness. It does not disappear. No, you think, if you laugh it off or ignore it, it disappears. No. It ferments while it waits so it can find strange, inconvenient exits through trembling hands, sudden bursts, and exhaustion that feels older than your years during the most important or the most embarrassing moments in life. And then, when it finally spills, everyone looks at you as if you are the rupture, not the pressure that built beneath. I keep circling back to this question: what would it mean to respond on time? Not too early, not too late... but exactly when the boundary is crossed. There is a kind of dignity in that immediacy, I think. A clean line. But I was not trained for clean lines, purposefully. I was trained for endurance, for silence stretched thin enough to look like grace. It is a part of the manipulation scheme. And so the body becomes the archive of every insult cataloged, every small violence indexed, and every swallowed word preserved like a fossil. No wonder it screams sometimes and it always wants out, so it itches you from beneath your skin. There is also this strange duality I cannot shake off... how I can spend hours thinking about policy, law, justice, and systems of power and yet feel utterly powerless within the four walls of my own home. Public is clarity, but private is chaos. To such a point that it almost feels fraudulent. Or maybe that’s the point? That the personal is not separate, that all these systems I analyze so neatly are rehearsed, miniaturized, and enacted daily in spaces that never make it to paper.
And still, amidst all this, there is this quiet, stubborn part of me that wants to write. Not to perform, not to impress, but simply to write it all here. To take all this formless heaviness and press it into language, even if the shape, grammar, and punctuation are imperfect; even if it leaks. Maybe that is the only way I know how to resist disappearance. Tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever I gather enough steadiness again, I will return to the questions I have taken up. It all feels connected somehow. The absence of data, the absence of acknowledgement, and the absence of timely response. They may exist on different scales, but they form the same pattern. For now, this is enough. I showed up to the page, even if late. Maybe that counts for something. Maybe that is where it begins again.
After the pop-off session, there was a long bawling session which happened after a long time. Then, I attended one seminar while I cleaned my bed and changed the sheets. The seminar was coming to an end, another meeting of a voluntary group came up. I remember how I had strategically avoided the last one because my inferiority complex had orchestrated and schemed it. But, the bawling session may have released something in me, so I just joined and caught up with the work and started the research. I ate my dinner although a toxic part of me was trying to seduce me into starvation. And after everyone went to sleep, I also nourished my body with some sweets and raw mango and then snacks.
My eyes still feel scratchy so I am pulled towards the bed. But, a couple days ago, I remembered that NaPoWriMo is arriving soon, so I had kept my eye to catch the early bird prompt and kickstart. But, now that I am almost done with the day and I still have work pending from my primary job, I am pushing myself to complete this entry, then complete the NaPoWriMo early bird prompt and then complete my leftover work and go to sleep. It is so calm and silent right now. Summer is slowly arriving. So the windy evenings and nights are back. The windows are slightly open, and the wind keeps slipping in like it knows this room better than I do. There is something about these nights (when the world outside quiets just enough) that makes everything inside louder, but also, strangely, more bearable...? The fan hums, the makeshift curtains breathe, and for once, nothing is demanding anything from me. There is no demand of performance, reaction, justification. Just this soft, in-between space where I can exist without being watched. It is almost ironic how the day was all rupture and noise, and the night has stretched itself into something so gentle. As if the world, after dragging me through its rough edges, is now offering a small apology in the form of wind. I keep thinking about the body again. How it cried today... fully, without negotiation. That does not happen often nowadays and I have also wondered about it that did I lose my ability to go off entirely as a part of "growth". Usually, now my grief is filtered, controlled, delayed. But today it just came, raw and unstructured, like before, like it refused to follow the same old rules. Maybe that is also a form of reclaiming time? Responding, even if late, but still responding. And maybe I have been unfair to myself when I call it “late.” Because what if it was never lateness, but survival? What if the body knew exactly when it was safe enough to let things surface? What if all these delayed reactions are not failures, but carefully timed releases? I don’t know. I am still suspicious of such kindness towards myself. It feels undeserved, almost like I am letting myself off the hook too easily. But then again, who put me on that hook in the first place?
Somewhere between the seminar, the meeting, the food, the crying, and now this quiet writing, I can sense a small shift... not dramatic or life-changing, but it is still a bit noticeable like a knot loosening just a little, little enough to breathe. The NaPoWriMo prompt is still waiting. My pending work is still waiting. Tomorrow will come with its own set of expectations, frictions, negotiations. But right now, in this pocket of time, I am not behind. I am not failing. I am simply here and I am writing, finishing something I started, not abandoning it midway like I often fear I will. That should count. It has to count. Because if I keep dismissing these small completions, these quiet acts of showing up, then I will always feel like I am living in fragments, never in anything whole. Maybe wholeness is not some grand, uninterrupted state. Maybe it is exactly this... broken hours stitched together by moments of honesty. And tonight, I was honest about the rage, shame, exhaustion, the strange, persistent will to keep going anyway. That has to mean something. Right? The wind is getting cooler now. The night is deepening. My eyes are heavy, but not in that suffocating way, more like a gentle pull, like sleep is inviting rather than dragging. I think I will let it, not as an escape, but as a pause. Tomorrow, I will return again to the writing, to the research, to the questions that refuse to stay quiet, to the accountability, to the gaps, to the attempt of making something visible where everything is designed to remain hidden. And maybe, slowly, I will also learn to return to myself on time.Or at least, closer to it. For now, this is complete. 31st March 2026 ends after the noise, with a window open, a body slightly lighter, and a page that did not remain empty. That feels enough.
~ Oizys.
I could not write. I could not write so, so much. So much that has happended and nothing that has happened. Ever since I wrote the previous update, I have been involved politically (joining groups for research and writing, however much I can manage) while my personal life passes by and existential exhaustion plunders the soil of my nature and my surroundings suck the life out of me. The last update was written after my mother left for a trip. And I kept thinking while I was writing that I would use this limited time and extra space to write more and more. But, alas! Anyway, not much value in mourning for voluntarily lost time of writing, right? Unless you are able to extract some gold mine-level write-up from it.
On Sunday, I finally got a haircut, and my mother, who accompanied me, happily teamed up with the hairdresser to rail me to go to a doctor. How do I escape? was the question in my head. One of the reasons I do not like going to doctors, hairstylists, etc. There is a deep, physical connection in those services when we seek them that destroys me because they get to peek under the carpet and point at my rot. I feel crippling shame. Anyway, as usual, I thought that finally, after so long, after so much procrastination and a tumultuous phase of chronically diseased, long, thin, malnourished, constantly falling hair, if I go get a haircut, that will completely change my life, and I will fix all my issues. No. That did not happen. I think a day before this, or two, I kept feeling like my random bouts of the screams in my maladaptive daydreams from those mass-hysteria-like scenarios in my head felt as if some goddess had possessed me, like there was something beneath my skin. I felt this itch to take my skin off to remove that so that constant screaming & triggering in my head would stop. Today, before I started writing this, it popped off. It had been a while since it had popped off; some oozed the day before my mother left. But today, my sister kept poking, needling, scratching, and scrapping me. And it just came out. One can go on smiling, ignoring, and remaining silent only so much in the face of taunting, humiliation, and micro-acts of physical aggression. And they think the violence will never come back and wet their feet, so when it does, they conveniently act surprised and defensive so they can put their manipulative mask on and spin it on you.
But lately, I have been thinking about it, how I am always so late, so tardy when it comes to reacting to violence. How much manipulation is required to suppress your natural, rightful, justified reaction to humiliation? I often think how all that repressed degradation gets lodged in the body like sediment in a river that once flowed freely but now chokes on its own stillness. It does not disappear. No, you think, if you laugh it off or ignore it, it disappears. No. It ferments while it waits so it can find strange, inconvenient exits through trembling hands, sudden bursts, and exhaustion that feels older than your years during the most important or the most embarrassing moments in life. And then, when it finally spills, everyone looks at you as if you are the rupture, not the pressure that built beneath. I keep circling back to this question: what would it mean to respond on time? Not too early, not too late... but exactly when the boundary is crossed. There is a kind of dignity in that immediacy, I think. A clean line. But I was not trained for clean lines, purposefully. I was trained for endurance, for silence stretched thin enough to look like grace. It is a part of the manipulation scheme. And so the body becomes the archive of every insult cataloged, every small violence indexed, and every swallowed word preserved like a fossil. No wonder it screams sometimes and it always wants out, so it itches you from beneath your skin. There is also this strange duality I cannot shake off... how I can spend hours thinking about policy, law, justice, and systems of power and yet feel utterly powerless within the four walls of my own home. Public is clarity, but private is chaos. To such a point that it almost feels fraudulent. Or maybe that’s the point? That the personal is not separate, that all these systems I analyze so neatly are rehearsed, miniaturized, and enacted daily in spaces that never make it to paper.
And still, amidst all this, there is this quiet, stubborn part of me that wants to write. Not to perform, not to impress, but simply to write it all here. To take all this formless heaviness and press it into language, even if the shape, grammar, and punctuation are imperfect; even if it leaks. Maybe that is the only way I know how to resist disappearance. Tomorrow, or the day after, or whenever I gather enough steadiness again, I will return to the questions I have taken up. It all feels connected somehow. The absence of data, the absence of acknowledgement, and the absence of timely response. They may exist on different scales, but they form the same pattern. For now, this is enough. I showed up to the page, even if late. Maybe that counts for something. Maybe that is where it begins again.
After the pop-off session, there was a long bawling session which happened after a long time. Then, I attended one seminar while I cleaned my bed and changed the sheets. The seminar was coming to an end, another meeting of a voluntary group came up. I remember how I had strategically avoided the last one because my inferiority complex had orchestrated and schemed it. But, the bawling session may have released something in me, so I just joined and caught up with the work and started the research. I ate my dinner although a toxic part of me was trying to seduce me into starvation. And after everyone went to sleep, I also nourished my body with some sweets and raw mango and then snacks.
My eyes still feel scratchy so I am pulled towards the bed. But, a couple days ago, I remembered that NaPoWriMo is arriving soon, so I had kept my eye to catch the early bird prompt and kickstart. But, now that I am almost done with the day and I still have work pending from my primary job, I am pushing myself to complete this entry, then complete the NaPoWriMo early bird prompt and then complete my leftover work and go to sleep. It is so calm and silent right now. Summer is slowly arriving. So the windy evenings and nights are back. The windows are slightly open, and the wind keeps slipping in like it knows this room better than I do. There is something about these nights (when the world outside quiets just enough) that makes everything inside louder, but also, strangely, more bearable...? The fan hums, the makeshift curtains breathe, and for once, nothing is demanding anything from me. There is no demand of performance, reaction, justification. Just this soft, in-between space where I can exist without being watched. It is almost ironic how the day was all rupture and noise, and the night has stretched itself into something so gentle. As if the world, after dragging me through its rough edges, is now offering a small apology in the form of wind. I keep thinking about the body again. How it cried today... fully, without negotiation. That does not happen often nowadays and I have also wondered about it that did I lose my ability to go off entirely as a part of "growth". Usually, now my grief is filtered, controlled, delayed. But today it just came, raw and unstructured, like before, like it refused to follow the same old rules. Maybe that is also a form of reclaiming time? Responding, even if late, but still responding. And maybe I have been unfair to myself when I call it “late.” Because what if it was never lateness, but survival? What if the body knew exactly when it was safe enough to let things surface? What if all these delayed reactions are not failures, but carefully timed releases? I don’t know. I am still suspicious of such kindness towards myself. It feels undeserved, almost like I am letting myself off the hook too easily. But then again, who put me on that hook in the first place?
Somewhere between the seminar, the meeting, the food, the crying, and now this quiet writing, I can sense a small shift... not dramatic or life-changing, but it is still a bit noticeable like a knot loosening just a little, little enough to breathe. The NaPoWriMo prompt is still waiting. My pending work is still waiting. Tomorrow will come with its own set of expectations, frictions, negotiations. But right now, in this pocket of time, I am not behind. I am not failing. I am simply here and I am writing, finishing something I started, not abandoning it midway like I often fear I will. That should count. It has to count. Because if I keep dismissing these small completions, these quiet acts of showing up, then I will always feel like I am living in fragments, never in anything whole. Maybe wholeness is not some grand, uninterrupted state. Maybe it is exactly this... broken hours stitched together by moments of honesty. And tonight, I was honest about the rage, shame, exhaustion, the strange, persistent will to keep going anyway. That has to mean something. Right? The wind is getting cooler now. The night is deepening. My eyes are heavy, but not in that suffocating way, more like a gentle pull, like sleep is inviting rather than dragging. I think I will let it, not as an escape, but as a pause. Tomorrow, I will return again to the writing, to the research, to the questions that refuse to stay quiet, to the accountability, to the gaps, to the attempt of making something visible where everything is designed to remain hidden. And maybe, slowly, I will also learn to return to myself on time.Or at least, closer to it. For now, this is complete. 31st March 2026 ends after the noise, with a window open, a body slightly lighter, and a page that did not remain empty. That feels enough.
~ Oizys.
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Yet Again: An Update
17th March 2026. 6:55PM
The cockroach scurried across my notebook just as I was about to write "God is dead," which, given the circumstances, felt like the universe's idea of a punchline. I watched its antennae twitch as it paused over Nietzsche's corpse, and wondered if insects ever lose faith in their own survival. Meanwhile, my phone buzzed with another news alert: another politician caught with his pants down (literally), another wildfire, another war. The cockroach, at least, had the decency to look embarrassed for all of us.
I tried to remember the last time I felt something besides this dull, gnawing static, like chewing on aluminum foil while the world burned. Was it before the layoff? Before the third failed antidepressant? Before I realized the cat’s purring sounded eerily like the hum of a dying refrigerator? The neighbor’s kid screamed bloody murder outside, probably over a skinned knee or a stolen toy, and for a second I envied him. At least his suffering still had edges you could see. Then, I remember how I used to scream like that as a kid but it was barely over a skinned knee or a stolen toy, …more like it was always something bone-deep, airless, siren-loud... the kind of fear that sat on your chest and counted your breaths for you, the kind that made the walls feel closer than they were. Back then, the screaming at least had a direction. It pointed somewhere. Now it just echoes.
The cockroach had vanished, leaving behind a single, gleaming leg stuck to the page like a macabre bookmark. I flicked it off and wondered if this was how deities felt when we stopped believing in them... slightly irritated, mostly just tired, dissolving into the wallpaper of a universe that never really needed them anyway. My tea had gone cold. As always. I drank it anyway. As always. The extra-milkiness in the cold tea infused sugar water pooling under my tongue like a bad confession.
Downstairs, someone was screaming badly. As always. The notes slithered through the floorboards, each one a tiny crushing of hope. I thought about texting my old friend, just to see if she'd remember me, but my fingers hesitated over the screen. One of our last conversations still glowed in my head, where she told me: You don't get to be this sad forever. Funny how the people who leave always sound like bad fortune cookies. Well, in this case, it was me who left. I abandon, abandon, and abandon. Just like how the world leaders are killing, killing, and killing.
I keep thinking maybe the problem isn’t that the world is ending, but that it refuses to end cleanly. It just drags itself forward, shedding skins, wars into ceasefires into wars again, scandals into apologies into book deals, like that cockroach, leaving pieces of itself behind as proof it was here, but never enough to kill it. Maybe that’s what survival really looks like: not triumph, not resilience, just this stubborn, undignified continuation. I draw parallels between my own trauma and survival and recovery with the world's. I imagine, did the world's trauma end for it to start its recovery ever? Or, before it could recover, humans started inflicting trauma again? And, what's gonna happen when it all comes to an end? When the healing starts, because it is not straight. It is messy and
I stare at my phone again. Her name still sits there, unchanged, like a gravestone that occasionally lights up. I wonder what I’d even say. Hi, I’m still here. Unfortunately. Or maybe: You were right. I didn’t get to be this sad forever. It just changed shape, learned new tricks, found quieter places to hide.
The screaming downstairs stops abruptly. Silence rushes in, thick and almost wet, like it has weight. For a moment, I think something terrible has happened. Then a door slams, footsteps, a television flickers to life with laughter, canned and hollow. Of course. Nothing terrible. Just the usual.
I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I let it out slowly, like I’m afraid the air might run out if I’m not careful. The room smells faintly of dust and overboiled milk. The notebook page is still open, the sentence unfinished, the place where the cockroach stood now just a faint smudge.
“God is—”
I stop. Not because I disagree, or because I suddenly believe, but because the sentence feels too neat, too final for something that refuses to resolve. Maybe that’s the real joke. Not that God is dead, but that nothing ever quite dies enough to be done with.
I close the notebook.
Tomorrow, I’ll probably open it again.
~ Oizys.
Monday, March 9, 2026
So Much of Whatever-the-fuck Has Happened So Far
07th March 2026, 3:33 PM-5:16 PM
I actually had neck and shoulder pain, which started as a crick and snowballed into a full-blown, seized-up anchor dragging my entire head down like a molten lava lamp in my trapezius with its rusty hinge that refuses to turn. That tiny, angry knot of wire tightening with every turn, with its parasitic, icy dagger embedded between my shoulder blades. That concrete collar of bodily misery started from Mid-February and lasted till the end of February and beginning of March, which mutually took place over a weekend, which was last weekend. During the chokehold of the concrete collar, as you know, I kept spiralling over my inaction and inability to act. Apart from that, my period did not seem to come. My female reproductive system teased me with all the prior events, such as extremely localised bodily pain across the body, mass hysteria amongst all my selves, a ritualistic pimple on my chin that erupts and oozes out its volcanic lava puss, the stress of just wondering and calculating and understanding the "why" behind the lateness and hoping it is not pregnancy (AS IF!) and the existential, sadistic and masturbatory urge to remove my existence from the world. With that, the mounting pressure of my wretched hair just detaching everywhere, just quiet, traitorous shedding with its violent, silent secession. They say it is just a cycle, just the telogen phase, just a bit of extra stress. But it feels like a slow-motion unravelling, a quiet abandonment of myself, one wretched thread at a time. Finally, the day before yesterday, my uterine lining mustered up its courage to come out; it decided to break its own walls and march into the light with its fanfare of a sharp, uncompromising announcement that the kingdom was shifting. Obviously, the sense of relief did not settle right in, but eventually it did.
The first week of March has been impounding, just seizing. It is a reservoir of heavy, trapped air. The mornings are deceptive, crisp and brittle as glass, only to break by noon into a thick, humid stillness that feels like a hand clamped over the throat of the year. It has acted like a dam built too quickly, holding back the remaining, bitter chill of February while the sudden, aggressive sun of spring tries to burst through. There is always this air that feels thick with unfinished business. Every breeze is heavy, burdened with the scents of dust and the first hint of rain-thirsty earth. It is an impatient waiting, a tension in the atmosphere that refuses to let the week be light.
So, on Tuesday, with a solid 90 minutes to spare, I was suddenly tapped to lead a funding presentation that we were researching and writing on; I’m still not 100% sure if she is my manager or my manager's manager, given the chaotic chain of command. I scrambled to pull it together based on a few hurried pointers. Then, the showstopper: I’m in the middle of presenting, and she starts firing off texts, demanding I completely pivot my approach on the fly. As I was busy actually presenting the last-minute material, I couldn't exactly check my phone, right? She eventually intervened, snatching the reins entirely. The kicker is what is still annoying me. After the smoke cleared, I was actually given feedback for the work, the very work I wasn't technically supposed to be doing, but took over in a panic because I was asked to, and I am an independent team player who knows how to work in a fast-paced environment, and I am a coward who fears being a spoilsport so I just took it and did not question just the way I took the feedback and did not voice all of this. It's safe to say it was a total, chaotic botch-up. With the contract renewal looming and no other prospects, I wish to escape into a daydream of illusory summer and betray my existence.
So, on Tuesday, with a solid 90 minutes to spare, I was suddenly tapped to lead a funding presentation that we were researching and writing on; I’m still not 100% sure if she is my manager or my manager's manager, given the chaotic chain of command. I scrambled to pull it together based on a few hurried pointers. Then, the showstopper: I’m in the middle of presenting, and she starts firing off texts, demanding I completely pivot my approach on the fly. As I was busy actually presenting the last-minute material, I couldn't exactly check my phone, right? She eventually intervened, snatching the reins entirely. The kicker is what is still annoying me. After the smoke cleared, I was actually given feedback for the work, the very work I wasn't technically supposed to be doing, but took over in a panic because I was asked to, and I am an independent team player who knows how to work in a fast-paced environment, and I am a coward who fears being a spoilsport so I just took it and did not question just the way I took the feedback and did not voice all of this. It's safe to say it was a total, chaotic botch-up. With the contract renewal looming and no other prospects, I wish to escape into a daydream of illusory summer and betray my existence.
08th March 2026, 3:52 PM-4:07 PM
This is how I am coping. I close my eyes, and the grey room disintegrates, replaced by a sun-drenched, humming yellow. It is an illicit summer, a forgery of a season that exists only within the hollows of my mind, designed specifically to betray the dull, ticking reality of my existence. Here, the air is lazy; it doesn't move. It lazily hangs like a thick, balmy blanket smelling of jasmine and impending thunder. The sky is too blue, a vibrant, unrealistic hue that never fades into grey. I am sitting by a river that sings in a pitch higher than human ears should hear, the water a liquid sapphire that never grows cold. I have forgotten my name. That is the point. I have forgotten the chores, the ticking clock, the weight of responsibility. I have traded them for the sensation of white-hot sand between my toes and the taste of salt on my lips, even though I am nowhere near the sea. In this daydream, I am a creature of leisure, a ghost inhabiting a perfectly manicured afternoon. The sun is a radiant orb that paints the landscape in golden, impossible light. Trees sway in a wind that only carries the scent of honey, a constant, soothing rustle that whispers, stay, stay, stay. I feel a profound, treacherous joy in this betrayal. I am turning my back on the "real" world, leaving it to crumble behind me while I bask in a sun that never sets. The longer I stay, the more the illusion becomes my only truth—a fleeting, brilliant, dishonest paradise. Tick. Tock. A phone rings somewhere in the distance. The sun flickers. The yellow fades. I open my eyes, and the room is grey again. I am here. But a part of me, a very happy part, has stayed in the sun.
This is how I am coping. I close my eyes, and the grey room disintegrates, replaced by a sun-drenched, humming yellow. It is an illicit summer, a forgery of a season that exists only within the hollows of my mind, designed specifically to betray the dull, ticking reality of my existence. Here, the air is lazy; it doesn't move. It lazily hangs like a thick, balmy blanket smelling of jasmine and impending thunder. The sky is too blue, a vibrant, unrealistic hue that never fades into grey. I am sitting by a river that sings in a pitch higher than human ears should hear, the water a liquid sapphire that never grows cold. I have forgotten my name. That is the point. I have forgotten the chores, the ticking clock, the weight of responsibility. I have traded them for the sensation of white-hot sand between my toes and the taste of salt on my lips, even though I am nowhere near the sea. In this daydream, I am a creature of leisure, a ghost inhabiting a perfectly manicured afternoon. The sun is a radiant orb that paints the landscape in golden, impossible light. Trees sway in a wind that only carries the scent of honey, a constant, soothing rustle that whispers, stay, stay, stay. I feel a profound, treacherous joy in this betrayal. I am turning my back on the "real" world, leaving it to crumble behind me while I bask in a sun that never sets. The longer I stay, the more the illusion becomes my only truth—a fleeting, brilliant, dishonest paradise. Tick. Tock. A phone rings somewhere in the distance. The sun flickers. The yellow fades. I open my eyes, and the room is grey again. I am here. But a part of me, a very happy part, has stayed in the sun.
But this Limerence is the fire inside, a fever-dream muse that consumes as it creates. It is the architect of a million unsent letters, the sculptor of a fantasy world so vivid it makes reality seem a shade of dull grey. It is the relentless, humming hum of a mind that takes an ordinary face and paints it with the brushstrokes of perfection, turning a passing glance into a symphony of longing. It is the terrifying, beautiful addiction to a ‘what-if’ that feels more real than ‘what-is,’ fueling a desperate need to turn pain into poetry and longing into art. To be in its grip is to be a ghost in your own life, haunting the memory of someone who barely knows you, transforming the agony of unrequited hope into the highest, most feverish form of human obsession.
In the intoxicating quiet of the morning, the Limerent Object (LO) crystallises my current being, transforming the amorphous haze of my existence into a sharp, brilliant image of desire. It is a moment of profound, involuntary fixation; a crystallisation where all extraneous noise fades, and the world is reduced to a single, mesmerising point of focus. My thoughts do not just wander; they orbit, fueled by the agonising, sweet uncertainty of whether this intense longing is returned. I feel my own identity beginning to fracture, or rather, to harden around the idea of them, absorbing their imagined essence into the marrow of my daily routine. In this state, I do not just see them; I perceive a curated, pedestaled version of themselves that acts as a mirror for my deepest, unfulfilled longings. It is a creative, albeit reckless, construction of a soulmate, an obsession that dictates my moods, turning the mundane into a thrilling scavenger hunt for signs of reciprocation, while the reality of the person remains comfortably distant, safe from the imperfections of everyday life. This crystallisation is the peak of the fever dream, a beautiful, fragile structure that feels more real than my own skin.
In the intoxicating quiet of the morning, the Limerent Object (LO) crystallises my current being, transforming the amorphous haze of my existence into a sharp, brilliant image of desire. It is a moment of profound, involuntary fixation; a crystallisation where all extraneous noise fades, and the world is reduced to a single, mesmerising point of focus. My thoughts do not just wander; they orbit, fueled by the agonising, sweet uncertainty of whether this intense longing is returned. I feel my own identity beginning to fracture, or rather, to harden around the idea of them, absorbing their imagined essence into the marrow of my daily routine. In this state, I do not just see them; I perceive a curated, pedestaled version of themselves that acts as a mirror for my deepest, unfulfilled longings. It is a creative, albeit reckless, construction of a soulmate, an obsession that dictates my moods, turning the mundane into a thrilling scavenger hunt for signs of reciprocation, while the reality of the person remains comfortably distant, safe from the imperfections of everyday life. This crystallisation is the peak of the fever dream, a beautiful, fragile structure that feels more real than my own skin.
I am suspended in that precise, terrifying moment where the fantasy hardens into crystal, a statue of my own making, frozen at the absolute apex of admiration and despair. I sometimes wish the end to come as a LO: not with the slow, grey decay of fading affection, but with the sharp, crystalline brilliance of a final, consuming obsession. To be at this peak, crystallised LO is to exist in a state of exquisite agony, where every passing thought of them brings both a blinding, heavenly light and a cold, sharp, paralysing ache. To be imagined, idealised, and then gently surrendered to the void, a snapshot in a mind that no longer needs to possess me to love me. It would be a departure untainted by mundanity, a sudden, breath-stealing crystallisation where the pain of separation becomes, for one fleeting moment, a beautifully suspended, untouchable form of longing. I am in the centre of the web I spun, unable to move, unwilling to shatter the sculpture, yet drowning in the weight of its perfection. Sometimes, I whisper a secret wish for the end to come, not out of malice, but from a desperate longing to be released from this "high" that is slowly turning my reality into a ghost. I crave the crash, the slow, agonising, but necessary return to the grey earth, just to feel the blood flowing in my limbs again, rather than this still, breathless, manufactured bliss. Alas, a perfect ending, frozen in time and bathed in the bittersweet euphoria of never truly knowing how it ends.
So, more often than not, I am thrust into the grey reality. The air here is toxic, thick with the damp rot of a thousand unfulfilled promises, yet it is the only air my lungs know how to process. Every day I wake up with the frantic, desperate thought of running; of tearing away from this stagnant, suffocating existence and finding a place where the light doesn't feel like a spotlight of judgment. But then comes the paralysing paralysis, the cold realisation that I am like a deep-sea creature hauled to the surface; my survival depends on the very pressure that is crushing me. I have become part of this crumbling, familiar architecture, and to leave is to evaporate. I am trapped not by locks or bars, but by the terrifying certainty that I cannot breathe anywhere else. It is like being a tree that has grown its roots deep into rocky soil, choking on its limitations but unable to rip itself free without dying in the process. I dream of the open air, of standing in fertile ground, but my very essence has adapted to this arid, unforgiving space. I wither in the thought of transplanting, knowing I am destined to thrive only in this cage I call home. Or when the cage door is open, it has been for years, but I remain perched on the cold metal bar. To fly out is to face a sky I don't understand, a wind that might snap my wings. The familiar, suffocating safety of this cage is better than the unknown, fatal freedom outside. So I sing the same sad tune, waiting for a liberation I am too afraid to embrace. And, other times, I feel like a creature of the deep, stranded on a rocky, dry beach. My survival depends on the very pressure that used to crush me. The idea of navigating the vast, open ocean again is more terrifying than the loneliness of this sand. I will continue to crawl along this shore, wishing for the sea, but terrified to jump back in.
So, more often than not, I am thrust into the grey reality. The air here is toxic, thick with the damp rot of a thousand unfulfilled promises, yet it is the only air my lungs know how to process. Every day I wake up with the frantic, desperate thought of running; of tearing away from this stagnant, suffocating existence and finding a place where the light doesn't feel like a spotlight of judgment. But then comes the paralysing paralysis, the cold realisation that I am like a deep-sea creature hauled to the surface; my survival depends on the very pressure that is crushing me. I have become part of this crumbling, familiar architecture, and to leave is to evaporate. I am trapped not by locks or bars, but by the terrifying certainty that I cannot breathe anywhere else. It is like being a tree that has grown its roots deep into rocky soil, choking on its limitations but unable to rip itself free without dying in the process. I dream of the open air, of standing in fertile ground, but my very essence has adapted to this arid, unforgiving space. I wither in the thought of transplanting, knowing I am destined to thrive only in this cage I call home. Or when the cage door is open, it has been for years, but I remain perched on the cold metal bar. To fly out is to face a sky I don't understand, a wind that might snap my wings. The familiar, suffocating safety of this cage is better than the unknown, fatal freedom outside. So I sing the same sad tune, waiting for a liberation I am too afraid to embrace. And, other times, I feel like a creature of the deep, stranded on a rocky, dry beach. My survival depends on the very pressure that used to crush me. The idea of navigating the vast, open ocean again is more terrifying than the loneliness of this sand. I will continue to crawl along this shore, wishing for the sea, but terrified to jump back in.
08th March 2026, 7:00 PM
So, when will this end? The hours have stretched into a relentless, grey continuum, a slow-moving river where every tick of the clock is a heavy stone sinking to the bottom of my endurance. I find myself standing in a dense fog of uncertainty, straining to see a horizon that refuses to take shape, wondering if this suffocating weight is destined to become the new, permanent shape of things. Every fibre of my being screams for the release of "next," for the sharp, clean break of a new chapter, yet I am anchored in this "now," watching the candle of my patience burn down to the wick. "When will this end?" is no longer a question I ask aloud; it is the rhythm of my breath, a silent, desperate prayer that the storm will finally break and leave behind not just wreckage, but a sky cleared for something new.
Oh, it is Happy International Women's Day.
09th March 2026, 12:20 PM
Oh, it is Happy International Women's Day.
09th March 2026, 12:20 PM
“And this urge to run away from what I love is a sort of sadism I no longer pretend to understand.”
― Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters
“Sometimes, when I lie awake at night, I wonder whether I've lived at all. Is it the same for everybody? Do some people have a greater talent for living than others or do some people never live, but just exist?”
― Autumn Sonata, Charlotte Andergast
“I wept and wept. I had come to believe that if I really wanted something badly enough, the very act of my wanting it was an assurance that I would not get it.”
— Audre Lorde, from “Zami: A New Spelling of my Name,” published c. 1982
“What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak....it was born in the moments when we accumulated silent things within us.”
― Gaston Bachelard
“Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela
To have spent my life holding my hands in tightly hidden fists. To try to understand what it would mean, now, to hold them open. I have always felt ashamed at being witnessed in the act of wanting something I could not have.
― So We Must Meet Apart, By Gabrielle Bates & Jennifer S. Cheng
Raja, I wish I knew
the cause of that malady.
For years I could not accept
the place I was in.
I felt I should be somewhere else.
A city, trees, human voices
lacked the quality of presence.
I would live by the hope of moving on.
Somewhere else there was a city of real presence,
of real trees and voices and friendship and love.
― "To Raja Rao" by CzesÉ«aw MiÉ«osz
“The worst part about anything that’s self-destructive is that it’s so intimate. You become so close with your addictions and illnesses that leaving them behind is like killing the part of yourself that taught you how to survive.”
― Lacey L.
“I’ve noticed before that if you go too long without anyone seeing you, really seeing you, it’s easy to start wondering if you’re really there.”
— Maggie Mitchell, Pretty Is
“I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.”
― Fernando Pessoa
“I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. These are the last footprints of a headache I suppose. Do you ever feel that? — like an old weed in a stream. What do you feel, lying in bed?”
― Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 18 August 1929
“But then what of me remains here?
A sense of tiredness.
I was always tired.
There was never a time I was not tired.
Not when life had its claws in me, or when I escaped from it.
I did not live with intent, I only lived.
But that’s over.”
― Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station
“Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
~ Oizys.
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