All roads lead to rome. Mine lead to rot.

On Saturday, I am spiralling down the depression-anxiety-low-self-esteem trifecta again, with bouts of anger throwing my body around like it owes me something. I am not eating, not really, but then I down two bags of chips as if salt can fill a perpetual hole that I have created. It only accelerates the migraine, makes the room tilt, makes my stomach revolt until I am spinning and puking and sitting there with the familiar shame of having failed at even taking care of this one body. This utmost self-disrespect. 

And while I was binging chips, I binged the new seasons of Lidia Poët.¹ I had watched the first season quite early, some time back, so returning to it felt strangely comforting... like opening a room I had once lived in, now with dust settled on the furniture. There is something tender about watching a new season of a show you already know. You do not enter it as a stranger. You come back with memory, with expectation, carrying your old self and meet whatever version of you is watching it now. Obviously, watching the show gave me a complex. Of course it did. How could it not? There she was, fighting against a hegemonic, archaic, patriarchal, utterly misogynistic system to practice law, pushing through a world that kept telling her she had no place in it. She was witty, restless, disobedient, intelligent in that sharp, almost dangerous way. She went through so much, wanted so much, lost so much, and still kept walking into rooms where she was not invited. She argued, investigated, desired, succeeded, failed, tried again, succeeded, AND never seemed to lose her ground completely. She did not shrink just because the world demanded it. All things I am not. Or at least, all things I tell myself I am not when the trifecta has me by the throat. Depression says: you have no energy. Anxiety says: even if you had energy, you would ruin everything. Low self-esteem says: and anyway, who do you think you are? So I sit there, watching this woman fight entire systems, while I cannot even fight the urge to destroy my body with salt and shame. I watch her refuse to disappear, and I feel both admiration and resentment blooming in me like something poisonous. It is not that I do not want her bravery. I want it so badly that looking at it hurts. I want that stubbornness, that clarity, that refusal to back down. But in me, everything brave feels buried under fear. Everything fierce feels delayed. Everything possible feels like it belongs to some other woman, in some other life, in some better-lit room. And then there was the scene with the prosecutor. That scene gave me such fluffy, flowery feelings that I almost, almost got over my depression for a while. Ridiculous, no? A few minutes of chemistry and suddenly the walls had curtains, the air had perfume, the body remembered it was not only a burden but also a place where warmth could live. There was something soft and cozy and quietly sexy about it: not loud, not vulgar, not desperate to prove itself. Just charged. Gentle. Human. I know, I know. I have never really spoken up about this. About love. About sex. About intimacy. How can I? I have a complicated, tangled, almost embarrassing relationship with all of them. I want them and fear them. I mock them and ache for them. I pretend to be above them, then one tender fictional moment comes along and I am undone like a teenager hiding a love letter under her mattress. But their chemistry—his softness, his understanding, the space he gave her to be messy, difficult, brilliant, impulsive, and still entirely herself—it did something to me. It is rare for me to hold on to a couple like this. Rare for me to latch on. Usually I watch romance like someone standing outside a lit house in winter, pretending I am only passing by. But this felt warm enough that I stopped walking. Ah. Like I said, I almost, almost got over my depression. Almost. Because even those soft, cozy feelings eventually curdled into insecurity. Then jealousy. Jealousy of what, exactly? A fictional story? Historical shadows? A couple who may or may not have existed like this? A love written by other people, performed by actors, lit by professionals, edited into perfection? Sick and silly me. It is like they say, all roads lead to Rome. But for me, all roads lead to rot. Even beauty finds a way to bruise me. Even tenderness becomes a mirror. Even a scene that should have made me sigh and sleep peacefully instead opened some small, hungry room inside me where all the old questions were waiting. Why not me? Why not my life? Why am I always watching from outside? Why does softness feel like something I must earn by becoming someone else first?

I keep ruminating over lost opportunities. All I could have done. All I could have been. All I could have seen. All I could have said. All the doors I did not knock on because fear had already locked them from inside. There is a special cruelty in imagining alternate versions of yourself which is brighter, braver, calmer, sharper, and easier to love; and then returning to the one sitting on the floor, nauseous, angry, pitiful, sad, pathetic, ugly, disgusting, fearful, useless, unworthy, and afraid. I tell myself I have no one. Maybe that is not entirely true, but it feels true in the hour when the room goes quiet and my thoughts become a committee of ghosts. They sit around the table of my mind and audit my life with merciless precision. Here is where you failed. Here is where you waited too long. Here is where you should have spoken. Here is where you should have left. Here is where you should have become someone else.

So, on Sunday, I fantasize and daydream as my life loses weight with time. It is a quiet, persistent theft, the way the mirror seems to hold a slightly different reflection each morning which is softer, more tired, but still mine. I sleep on my bed by the window, watching dust motes drift through the afternoon light, and let my mind wander. I build worlds that feel steadier than the one I am standing in. In these daydreams, I am not wasting myself away. I am trying to become lighter, to disappear, and to breathe without the old heaviness pressing against my ribs. I imagine the edges of my life, once sharp and demanding, turning soft and pliable, like an old photograph left in the sun. I paint over the fading colors with vivid scenes of places I have never been: streets carrying the scent of jasmine, shores where the sea crashes with enough force to remind me I am awake. It is a comfortable delusion, this fabric I weave, a soft blanket around shoulders that have forgotten how to carry themselves gently. I tell myself that the weight I lose is not always flesh, not always proof of absence. Some of it, I hope, is the armor I no longer need. The anxiety, the regrets, the iron chains of should have, perhaps they are not gone, but they are loosening. Perhaps that is enough for now. Sometimes, I fear the silence that fills the gaps. The cold reality that creeps in when the daydream fades. But then I take a breath, thin as it may be, and return to the room, to the window, to the light. The story is still mine. No, it is not a perfect one and not even a brave one, always. But it is still being written in the margins of a life that is not weightless yet, only learning. Slowly and stubbornly, how to be held.

~ Oizys.

¹ In one of the two latest seasons, there was a mention Sappho somewhere, which felt like one of those coincidences too pointed to ignore. I had been thinking about Sappho recently too... thinking, rather foolishly and tenderly, of getting a sapphic flag phone case. But alas, my fear remains the most efficient censor I know. My current phone cover broke a little during a trip I took in December 2024, and I have carried it like that ever since. Do not ask me why. Laziness, partly. Sentimentality, maybe. But mostly, I am scared and skeptical. My family has a talent for becoming selectively nosy about the smallest things and then preserving those details like evidence for a future trial. A phone case is never just a phone case in such a house. It becomes a question, then a suspicion, then a weapon. So the broken cover stays, I guess. Ugly, loyal, and safer than honesty. The sapphic flag phone case goes into the box of things I will do when I leave and teleport away... so, like, never? Yeah, that sounds about right!