19th May 2026. 00:35 AM.
today, as i made a sandwich which i was supposed to make on sunday night, but monday night it is, i thought again about the strange violence of delay. not the cinematic kind. not the kind with music swelling in the background and a woman finally throwing open the doors of her house with one suitcase and a jawline sharp enough to cut patriarchy in half. no. the other kind. the kind where you watch thousands of videos on pinterest because the body is hungry but the mind cannot decide what is worth feeding. the kind where you stand in the kitchen with a dizzy head, an empty stomach, and no particular desire to continue life, and still assemble bread, filling, sauce, whatever else the internet convinced you would make the evening survivable. it came out underwhelming. of course it did. what else could it have done? save me?but i sat down and ate it. this is not triumph. please do not clap. i am allergic to inspirational readings of basic survival. sometimes eating is not victory. sometimes eating is just the body filing a complaint against disappearance. while eating, i noticed my phone cover was crumbling down. i did not think much of it at first. it has been breaking for a while. the edges are tired. the back has started giving up. the whole thing looks like it has survived a small domestic war, which, to be fair, it has. i kept using it because it still technically protects the phone. ugly things are useful like that. broken things know how to continue without making a scene. i finished eating. i scrolled pinterest for a while [i have deactivated instagram for some time now, it's been over a week, i believe]. then, for some reason, i had this unfamiliar urge to come and write. unfamiliar, because these days writing does not arrive like a calling. it arrives like a survivor crawling out from under rubble and saying, unfortunately, i still have notes. i am tired of this burrowing of tunnel. i am so tired of the idea that escape is something you dig quietly, with bleeding hands, while still showing up to meetings, paying bills, answering messages, cooking underwhelming sandwiches, pretending to have opinions on things that are not directly related to whether you will make it out alive. why do things not end when you stop? why, when you stop fighting for one second, do they not simply collapse out of respect? why do they instead take revenge by becoming heavier? this is the part no one tells you properly. stopping does not stop the machine. exhaustion does not pause consequences. grief does not clear your calendar. burnout does not pay rent. abuse does not say, “oh, she is tired now, let us withdraw our forces.” no. abuse is administrative. it keeps records. it sends reminders. it charges interest.
i am in a stuck-but-not-dead phase. not healed. not liberated. not fully hopeless either. more like: trapped, furious, articulate, dissociative, overworked, under-credited, financially squeezed, emotionally starving, and still annoyingly capable of wanting things. that is the insult, really. that wanting has not died yet. some days i feel like a ruin with appetite. a corpse with preferences. a woman who says she wants to vanish and then spends twenty minutes comparing phone covers online because apparently even despair has aesthetic standards. the sentence “when i leave” as both prayer and threat. when i leave, i will sleep. when i leave, i will buy the things i like without making them explain themselves. when i leave, i will put colour on my objects. when i leave, i will not need ugliness as camouflage. when i leave, i will have a room with a lock, a kitchen with silence, a life where no one converts my breathing into evidence. but there is another fear sitting beside that sentence. the fear is: what if “when i leave” becomes a museum of postponed selfhood? what if i have placed so much of myself in that future room that the present has become only a storage unit? what if i keep embalming my desires for later and later never develops the manners to arrive? the counterforce is: wanting has not died yet. this home of mine is not just family or a mere household. it is court, prison, propaganda machine, archive, surveillance apparatus and you know what happens when you question the state machinery. so, please remember, i am writing from inside a house where abuse, control, noise, secrecy, mother-silence, sister-return, and family mythology have political weight. nothing here is “just personal.” the personal became political long before i learned the slogan. the personal was already political when my body learned which footsteps meant danger, which silences meant punishment, which rooms could be entered and which truths had to be buried alive.
in my “no miracle exit” post, i have made, for you all, the most important argument of the current arc: abuse's job is not only to hurt you; but it's job is also to steal the labour needed to leave. this is why people stay. not because they love pain. not because they lack self-respect. not because they are stupid, weak, dramatic, dependent, confused, addicted to suffering, or whatever else people say from the safety of distance. people stay because leaving requires the very resources abuse has been eating for years. money. sleep. clarity. documents. confidence. time. privacy. a nervous system that can complete a task without setting itself on fire. then, my work is just the office-version of domestic exploitation, the same old script wearing office clothes: invisible labour, stolen credit, last-minute urgency, junior-woman infrastructure, “just this once” becoming a whole economy of extraction. the family teaches you to become useful without becoming visible. the workplace simply monetises the training. and somewhere in the middle of this, i am supposed to have hope. haha, don't worry, it's pathetic and i have it. and, my hope is not clean. i clearly hate motivational hope, and rightly so; it would sound obscene in this archive. my hope is more like: leaving a message unread, drinking water after punishing the body, wanting pizza. wanting sea air. wanting a room with a lock. wanting one morning where no one’s mood enters my bloodstream before breakfast. writing the ugly sentence. keeping the tab open. not vanishing. and then there is fiction.
since my last post on 15th may, i have kept my lidia poët/pierluigi fixation alive, like one keeps a candle alive during a power cut. not because the candle is enough, but because darkness is rude and someone must resist it. it is not “just fangirling.” i resent that phrase sometimes. “just fangirling” is what people say when they want to make women’s intense readings of desire sound unserious. as if the whole history of literature is not men staring at women and calling it philosophy. this fixation is proof that i am still alive—shamefully, unfortunately—enough to be moved. but it is also a cruel mirror of what my actual life does not contain: recognition, charged presence, softness, risk, being wanted without being interrogated. fiction rescues me, then invoices me. brutal. accurate.
i keep thinking about lidia and pierluigi. how he is never simply a romantic possibility; he is also a test of the world’s conditions. can a woman be loved without being absorbed? can she be desired without being domesticated? can she be held without being converted into wife, mother, symbol, property, compromise? lidia’s freedom and liberty has to remain unconditional. inevitable. non-negotiable. that is the centre. that must always be the centre. always. and still, because i am human and therefore embarrassing, i think about the scene in season 3, episode 1. i think about the way she called him her young werther. i think about the surgery. about him saying he would not have had it without her. what a heavy weight of love. to choose to live because someone made life desirable again. to let another person become the thin bridge between your body and its own continuation. i think of that earlier moment too, in previous season's episode, when after she helped him with the injection, he told her, sad-flirty, to remove the ribbon from her neck. and when she asked whether he hated it, he said no. it would give him the desire to live again. ridiculous man. devastating line. and then he does live. for her? because of her? beside the idea of her? who knows. fiction is clever. it gives you enough evidence to ruin your week and not enough evidence to win in court. the writers put her with jacopo in the end, “unhappily in love,” and of course i understand the logic. fourneau proposed marriage, and from the beginning it was clear that lidia was not a woman of marriage, family, children. jacopo made that mistake once and learned. but as any desperate shipper who ships a ship destined to sink knows, we like asking useless questions. why could fourneau and lidia not be “unhappily in love” together? yes, yes, i know. there was risk. there was blackmail. there was reputation, law, violence, exposure. there was always the threat of being caught and compromised again. pierluigi himself was blackmailed. their intimacy was not happening in a private world. it was happening in a world where a woman’s desire could be turned into a public document by morning. maybe that is why their soft subtextual interactions in the last season hit harder. desire under surveillance has a special voltage. “after today nobody will think we ever liked each other.” that line has been following me around. he says he cannot do anything less than maximum penalty. she asks, “you can’t or you won’t?” and then he half-smiles, softly, terribly, and wishes her luck, which she returns too. and then there is that ultra-misogynistic tirade. god. that performance of public cruelty. that convenient masculine mask. probably because he was blackmailed by the judge. maybe strategic, maybe necessary, maybe not, but still ugly. still something that has to be said in the language of the enemy. still proof that even when a man helps, the structure often asks him to borrow its mouth. after the verdict, he gives her that small nod, that small smile, while lidia, surrounded by her people, joyfully screams in and for her own liberty, and every woman’s liberty. and maybe that is the correct ending. not romance, but liberty. but i also keep thinking of the previous episode. before the proposal. before the motel. before the public scandal fully eats them. that dinner scene where lidia is lost and they talk about how to continue the relationship. she says that once grazia is free, it will all be good. almost as if the future can be negotiated into softness if the case ends correctly. almost as if one woman’s freedom might create enough room for her own. and he asks, what if grazia gets convicted? there it is. the blade under the tablecloth. because if grazia gets convicted, then what? what happens to the relationship then? what happens to the plan? what happens to the version of love that depends on justice arriving on time? it will not work, he seems to know. and yet he says to her, he hopes with his full heart that she is right. that is what ruins me a little. just love as both a declaration and doomed hope. love that can see the wall and still says, maybe the door will appear because you believe in it. they almost break up there, i think. or something close to breaking. something loosens. something understands itself as temporary. and then in the next episode, when lidia feels betrayed by grazia, she goes to him because she does not know where else to go. that matters. she does not go because she has become smaller. she does not go because she is ready to be contained. she goes because even the freest women need somewhere to put their pain for one night. she goes because calm is not the same as surrender. she goes because being held, for a moment, is not the same thing as being owned. she feels calm with him. and they kiss. and of course someone sees. of course. because women like lidia are never allowed even one unwitnessed softness. by the next day, the newspaper has made a private tenderness into public evidence. desire becomes scandal. intimacy becomes weapon. a kiss becomes a political event. and then enrico, her brother, throws her out. that is the cost. not metaphorical. not aesthetic. actual consequence. actual exile. that night, pierluigi visits her at the motel and proposes. and this is where the ache becomes complicated, because the proposal is tender and terrible at once. he is trying to protect her, perhaps. trying to repair what exposure has damaged. trying to give a shape to what the world has made dangerous. but the shape he reaches for is marriage. of course it is. the oldest respectable cage. velvet-lined, socially approved, sometimes loving, often fatal. she says, “you matter to me.” and he says, “and i love you.” both sentences are true. that is the problem. “you matter to me” is not nothing. it is not cruelty. it is not rejection disguised as kindness. it is lidia naming attachment without surrendering the rest of herself to it. but “i love you”, no matter how pure and beautiful, arrives carrying furniture, law, future, expectation, respectability, possession, rescue, debt. maybe he does not mean it that way. maybe he means only his heart. but men do not love in a vacuum. they love with history standing behind them, tapping its foot. so yes, maybe the correct ending is not romance, but liberty. maybe that is what makes me ache. because i want the charged look and the freedom. the tenderness and the open door. the hand extended and no cage hidden inside it. greedy, greedy girl. wanting both love and liberty. imagine.
before i started writing this, i was searching for a phone cover. this is so pathetic, no? small. domestic. almost stupid. a phone cover. a sandwich. a ribbon. a tab left open. a little object that should not matter enough to become a paragraph, let alone a confession. but women’s lives have always been littled like this. our issues are flattened into “unimportant” because they happen near kitchens, beds, mirrors, phones, cupboards, menstrual calendars, family dinners, shared rooms, inherited silences. the domestic has always been treated like the footnote of history, even though the whole empire keeps being built there. so no, the phone cover is not just a phone cover. the sapphic flag phone case is not really a phone case. it is visibility. colour. self-permission. danger. evidence. future-self. not yet, but mine. the broken case is safety through ugliness. the new case is honesty with consequences. and i am not brave enough yet. or maybe bravery is the wrong measurement. maybe i am strategically alive. maybe camouflage is not cowardice when the house is a surveillance state. maybe the ugly phone cover has been doing more work than anyone gives it credit for. it has protected the phone. it has protected me. it has allowed me to want in private. but it is crumbling now. and that feels rude. symbolic. unnecessary. a little too on the nose, frankly. like the universe has no subtlety and no literary editor. the cover is falling apart before i am ready to replace it. which is, unfortunately, the story of everything. the life is falling apart before the escape is ready. the body is falling apart before the plan is complete. the hope is falling apart before the miracle exit arrives. but maybe the question is not whether i am ready. maybe the question is whether the broken thing can continue protecting me. maybe there comes a point where safety through ugliness stops being safety and becomes another way of disappearing. i do not have an answer yet. i only have a sandwich that did not save me, a phone cover that is losing its structure, a fictional man who found the desire to live again because a woman removed a ribbon from her neck, and a woman—me, unfortunately—who keeps saying she does not want to continue and then continues in small, irritating ways. burrowing, surviving, eating. scrolling. writing. working. rotting. not leaving. wanting. keeping the tab open. waiting. not vanishing.
~ Oizys.
today, as i made a sandwich which i was supposed to make on sunday night, but monday night it is, i thought again about the strange violence of delay. not the cinematic kind. not the kind with music swelling in the background and a woman finally throwing open the doors of her house with one suitcase and a jawline sharp enough to cut patriarchy in half. no. the other kind. the kind where you watch thousands of videos on pinterest because the body is hungry but the mind cannot decide what is worth feeding. the kind where you stand in the kitchen with a dizzy head, an empty stomach, and no particular desire to continue life, and still assemble bread, filling, sauce, whatever else the internet convinced you would make the evening survivable. it came out underwhelming. of course it did. what else could it have done? save me?but i sat down and ate it. this is not triumph. please do not clap. i am allergic to inspirational readings of basic survival. sometimes eating is not victory. sometimes eating is just the body filing a complaint against disappearance. while eating, i noticed my phone cover was crumbling down. i did not think much of it at first. it has been breaking for a while. the edges are tired. the back has started giving up. the whole thing looks like it has survived a small domestic war, which, to be fair, it has. i kept using it because it still technically protects the phone. ugly things are useful like that. broken things know how to continue without making a scene. i finished eating. i scrolled pinterest for a while [i have deactivated instagram for some time now, it's been over a week, i believe]. then, for some reason, i had this unfamiliar urge to come and write. unfamiliar, because these days writing does not arrive like a calling. it arrives like a survivor crawling out from under rubble and saying, unfortunately, i still have notes. i am tired of this burrowing of tunnel. i am so tired of the idea that escape is something you dig quietly, with bleeding hands, while still showing up to meetings, paying bills, answering messages, cooking underwhelming sandwiches, pretending to have opinions on things that are not directly related to whether you will make it out alive. why do things not end when you stop? why, when you stop fighting for one second, do they not simply collapse out of respect? why do they instead take revenge by becoming heavier? this is the part no one tells you properly. stopping does not stop the machine. exhaustion does not pause consequences. grief does not clear your calendar. burnout does not pay rent. abuse does not say, “oh, she is tired now, let us withdraw our forces.” no. abuse is administrative. it keeps records. it sends reminders. it charges interest.
i am in a stuck-but-not-dead phase. not healed. not liberated. not fully hopeless either. more like: trapped, furious, articulate, dissociative, overworked, under-credited, financially squeezed, emotionally starving, and still annoyingly capable of wanting things. that is the insult, really. that wanting has not died yet. some days i feel like a ruin with appetite. a corpse with preferences. a woman who says she wants to vanish and then spends twenty minutes comparing phone covers online because apparently even despair has aesthetic standards. the sentence “when i leave” as both prayer and threat. when i leave, i will sleep. when i leave, i will buy the things i like without making them explain themselves. when i leave, i will put colour on my objects. when i leave, i will not need ugliness as camouflage. when i leave, i will have a room with a lock, a kitchen with silence, a life where no one converts my breathing into evidence. but there is another fear sitting beside that sentence. the fear is: what if “when i leave” becomes a museum of postponed selfhood? what if i have placed so much of myself in that future room that the present has become only a storage unit? what if i keep embalming my desires for later and later never develops the manners to arrive? the counterforce is: wanting has not died yet. this home of mine is not just family or a mere household. it is court, prison, propaganda machine, archive, surveillance apparatus and you know what happens when you question the state machinery. so, please remember, i am writing from inside a house where abuse, control, noise, secrecy, mother-silence, sister-return, and family mythology have political weight. nothing here is “just personal.” the personal became political long before i learned the slogan. the personal was already political when my body learned which footsteps meant danger, which silences meant punishment, which rooms could be entered and which truths had to be buried alive.
in my “no miracle exit” post, i have made, for you all, the most important argument of the current arc: abuse's job is not only to hurt you; but it's job is also to steal the labour needed to leave. this is why people stay. not because they love pain. not because they lack self-respect. not because they are stupid, weak, dramatic, dependent, confused, addicted to suffering, or whatever else people say from the safety of distance. people stay because leaving requires the very resources abuse has been eating for years. money. sleep. clarity. documents. confidence. time. privacy. a nervous system that can complete a task without setting itself on fire. then, my work is just the office-version of domestic exploitation, the same old script wearing office clothes: invisible labour, stolen credit, last-minute urgency, junior-woman infrastructure, “just this once” becoming a whole economy of extraction. the family teaches you to become useful without becoming visible. the workplace simply monetises the training. and somewhere in the middle of this, i am supposed to have hope. haha, don't worry, it's pathetic and i have it. and, my hope is not clean. i clearly hate motivational hope, and rightly so; it would sound obscene in this archive. my hope is more like: leaving a message unread, drinking water after punishing the body, wanting pizza. wanting sea air. wanting a room with a lock. wanting one morning where no one’s mood enters my bloodstream before breakfast. writing the ugly sentence. keeping the tab open. not vanishing. and then there is fiction.
since my last post on 15th may, i have kept my lidia poët/pierluigi fixation alive, like one keeps a candle alive during a power cut. not because the candle is enough, but because darkness is rude and someone must resist it. it is not “just fangirling.” i resent that phrase sometimes. “just fangirling” is what people say when they want to make women’s intense readings of desire sound unserious. as if the whole history of literature is not men staring at women and calling it philosophy. this fixation is proof that i am still alive—shamefully, unfortunately—enough to be moved. but it is also a cruel mirror of what my actual life does not contain: recognition, charged presence, softness, risk, being wanted without being interrogated. fiction rescues me, then invoices me. brutal. accurate.
i keep thinking about lidia and pierluigi. how he is never simply a romantic possibility; he is also a test of the world’s conditions. can a woman be loved without being absorbed? can she be desired without being domesticated? can she be held without being converted into wife, mother, symbol, property, compromise? lidia’s freedom and liberty has to remain unconditional. inevitable. non-negotiable. that is the centre. that must always be the centre. always. and still, because i am human and therefore embarrassing, i think about the scene in season 3, episode 1. i think about the way she called him her young werther. i think about the surgery. about him saying he would not have had it without her. what a heavy weight of love. to choose to live because someone made life desirable again. to let another person become the thin bridge between your body and its own continuation. i think of that earlier moment too, in previous season's episode, when after she helped him with the injection, he told her, sad-flirty, to remove the ribbon from her neck. and when she asked whether he hated it, he said no. it would give him the desire to live again. ridiculous man. devastating line. and then he does live. for her? because of her? beside the idea of her? who knows. fiction is clever. it gives you enough evidence to ruin your week and not enough evidence to win in court. the writers put her with jacopo in the end, “unhappily in love,” and of course i understand the logic. fourneau proposed marriage, and from the beginning it was clear that lidia was not a woman of marriage, family, children. jacopo made that mistake once and learned. but as any desperate shipper who ships a ship destined to sink knows, we like asking useless questions. why could fourneau and lidia not be “unhappily in love” together? yes, yes, i know. there was risk. there was blackmail. there was reputation, law, violence, exposure. there was always the threat of being caught and compromised again. pierluigi himself was blackmailed. their intimacy was not happening in a private world. it was happening in a world where a woman’s desire could be turned into a public document by morning. maybe that is why their soft subtextual interactions in the last season hit harder. desire under surveillance has a special voltage. “after today nobody will think we ever liked each other.” that line has been following me around. he says he cannot do anything less than maximum penalty. she asks, “you can’t or you won’t?” and then he half-smiles, softly, terribly, and wishes her luck, which she returns too. and then there is that ultra-misogynistic tirade. god. that performance of public cruelty. that convenient masculine mask. probably because he was blackmailed by the judge. maybe strategic, maybe necessary, maybe not, but still ugly. still something that has to be said in the language of the enemy. still proof that even when a man helps, the structure often asks him to borrow its mouth. after the verdict, he gives her that small nod, that small smile, while lidia, surrounded by her people, joyfully screams in and for her own liberty, and every woman’s liberty. and maybe that is the correct ending. not romance, but liberty. but i also keep thinking of the previous episode. before the proposal. before the motel. before the public scandal fully eats them. that dinner scene where lidia is lost and they talk about how to continue the relationship. she says that once grazia is free, it will all be good. almost as if the future can be negotiated into softness if the case ends correctly. almost as if one woman’s freedom might create enough room for her own. and he asks, what if grazia gets convicted? there it is. the blade under the tablecloth. because if grazia gets convicted, then what? what happens to the relationship then? what happens to the plan? what happens to the version of love that depends on justice arriving on time? it will not work, he seems to know. and yet he says to her, he hopes with his full heart that she is right. that is what ruins me a little. just love as both a declaration and doomed hope. love that can see the wall and still says, maybe the door will appear because you believe in it. they almost break up there, i think. or something close to breaking. something loosens. something understands itself as temporary. and then in the next episode, when lidia feels betrayed by grazia, she goes to him because she does not know where else to go. that matters. she does not go because she has become smaller. she does not go because she is ready to be contained. she goes because even the freest women need somewhere to put their pain for one night. she goes because calm is not the same as surrender. she goes because being held, for a moment, is not the same thing as being owned. she feels calm with him. and they kiss. and of course someone sees. of course. because women like lidia are never allowed even one unwitnessed softness. by the next day, the newspaper has made a private tenderness into public evidence. desire becomes scandal. intimacy becomes weapon. a kiss becomes a political event. and then enrico, her brother, throws her out. that is the cost. not metaphorical. not aesthetic. actual consequence. actual exile. that night, pierluigi visits her at the motel and proposes. and this is where the ache becomes complicated, because the proposal is tender and terrible at once. he is trying to protect her, perhaps. trying to repair what exposure has damaged. trying to give a shape to what the world has made dangerous. but the shape he reaches for is marriage. of course it is. the oldest respectable cage. velvet-lined, socially approved, sometimes loving, often fatal. she says, “you matter to me.” and he says, “and i love you.” both sentences are true. that is the problem. “you matter to me” is not nothing. it is not cruelty. it is not rejection disguised as kindness. it is lidia naming attachment without surrendering the rest of herself to it. but “i love you”, no matter how pure and beautiful, arrives carrying furniture, law, future, expectation, respectability, possession, rescue, debt. maybe he does not mean it that way. maybe he means only his heart. but men do not love in a vacuum. they love with history standing behind them, tapping its foot. so yes, maybe the correct ending is not romance, but liberty. maybe that is what makes me ache. because i want the charged look and the freedom. the tenderness and the open door. the hand extended and no cage hidden inside it. greedy, greedy girl. wanting both love and liberty. imagine.
before i started writing this, i was searching for a phone cover. this is so pathetic, no? small. domestic. almost stupid. a phone cover. a sandwich. a ribbon. a tab left open. a little object that should not matter enough to become a paragraph, let alone a confession. but women’s lives have always been littled like this. our issues are flattened into “unimportant” because they happen near kitchens, beds, mirrors, phones, cupboards, menstrual calendars, family dinners, shared rooms, inherited silences. the domestic has always been treated like the footnote of history, even though the whole empire keeps being built there. so no, the phone cover is not just a phone cover. the sapphic flag phone case is not really a phone case. it is visibility. colour. self-permission. danger. evidence. future-self. not yet, but mine. the broken case is safety through ugliness. the new case is honesty with consequences. and i am not brave enough yet. or maybe bravery is the wrong measurement. maybe i am strategically alive. maybe camouflage is not cowardice when the house is a surveillance state. maybe the ugly phone cover has been doing more work than anyone gives it credit for. it has protected the phone. it has protected me. it has allowed me to want in private. but it is crumbling now. and that feels rude. symbolic. unnecessary. a little too on the nose, frankly. like the universe has no subtlety and no literary editor. the cover is falling apart before i am ready to replace it. which is, unfortunately, the story of everything. the life is falling apart before the escape is ready. the body is falling apart before the plan is complete. the hope is falling apart before the miracle exit arrives. but maybe the question is not whether i am ready. maybe the question is whether the broken thing can continue protecting me. maybe there comes a point where safety through ugliness stops being safety and becomes another way of disappearing. i do not have an answer yet. i only have a sandwich that did not save me, a phone cover that is losing its structure, a fictional man who found the desire to live again because a woman removed a ribbon from her neck, and a woman—me, unfortunately—who keeps saying she does not want to continue and then continues in small, irritating ways. burrowing, surviving, eating. scrolling. writing. working. rotting. not leaving. wanting. keeping the tab open. waiting. not vanishing.
~ Oizys.
This is amazing “
ReplyDeleteThank you so much. Nice to see a familiar face from NaPoWriMo.
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