september 7th. 1:40 AM - 4:05AM. sunday night - monday morning.

september 7th. 1:40 AM - 4:05AM. sunday night - monday morning.

i try to write and fail. i set in my mind to start a blog post one day covering whatever has happened and then the distance between my set mind and unwilling body becomes larger and larger. fueled by disgusting, dangerous intrusive thoughts; disheveling, deranged maladaptive daydreaming; daunting reality; destructive environments; dull work; and my little, thin, disappointing life choices hitting me from all ways everyday. i keep thinking i will write when my head becomes a little quieter. a stupid bargain. my head has apparently interpreted 'quiet' as an unconstitutional demand. since i was twelve. or ten.

so far, since my last weblog update, nothing big has happened. i have been swamped with work, one coworker with her only true achievement of weaponized incompetence has been a menace trying to maneuver me. an old colleague has come back who would put the former colleague's maneuvers to shame. recently they collaborated to frustrate me to oblivion for a simple task of nomenclature i asked their support for. nomenclature. naming things. apparently we have reached a point in my working life where the naming of things can become a small bureaucratic war. maybe adam had it easy. one of my other coworkers has moved on to another project and we don't talk anymore. no bad blood though. so, i miss her companionship and camaraderie a lot. my manager is... well a manager. present in the metaphysical sense, i suppose. emails exist. meetings occur. managerial substances move through the atmosphere. nothing particularly useful comes out of this weather system. her habit of not paying attention to issues that i escalate and then over-dumping it on me last-minute has been aggravating me.

this coupled with my mother trying to persuade me to apply for jobs my father wants me to apply for and pushing me everyday while i try my best to survive. a job tab open. another job tab open. some examination. some vacancy. some thing father heard about from someone somewhere and therefore it must now become a possibility i am morally obliged to want. i sometimes think half my life has been other people arriving at my door carrying futures for me and becoming offended when i don't immediately crawl inside them.

meanwhile, i have been exploring the depths and scepters of communist-socialist history from USSR, Cuba, Congo, and then whichever country/person/party/split/revolution one footnote throws me into next. because, naturally, one cannot simply read one thing. one thing has a name inside it and the name has a history and the history has a disagreement and the disagreement has fourteen people who despised each other over the correct route towards liberation and suddenly it is 2 a.m. it all started with watching some photographs, speeches, and interviews of fidel castro and che guevara. its so random. my interest was randomly piqued about their friendship. so many people of who only i knew their names and now after reading more and more, i have been gaining so much understanding of the world functioning, society, human oppression, the bizarre plumbing underneath things i had previously accepted as just... things. why certain states like the u.s., israel, france, britain behave[d] the way they did. why certain countries like afghanistan, iran, congo, palestine became laboratories for everybody else's "ideology" and greed. why a person i had once stored in my head as [NAME FROM HISTORY] apparently spent their entire life walking through an argument which has outlived them. how land, labour, money, empire, class, female body, and violence keep appearing in each other's family photographs. 

and there are all these embarrassing little recognitions. 
oh. 
ohhh. 
wait. 
that is what that was? 
and, the more i read and understand, the more there is to know. 

i knew things, obviously. or knew the school books' embalmed versions of things. names in paragraphs. revolutions reduced to dates, countries made into shapes on maps, dead people flattened into two ideological sentences which could be underlined before an exam. and now. now they keep acquiring organs. motives. failures. uglinesses. contradictions. enemies who had enemies who later became friends with somebody's enemies. sometimes i feel terribly stupid. sometimes i feel like i have found a trapdoor underneath the world and instead of climbing through it properly i am crouching there with forty tabs open. 

and then there are things i come across which don't leave me alone afterward. i keep thinking about the letter ayatollah ruhollah khomeini sent to mikhail gorbachev. what a strange historical object to encounter at 1 or 2 or whatever a.m. on a laptop. khomeini writing to the leader of the soviet union in 1989, basically looking at the ideological illness of the USSR while it was still standing and telling gorbachev that whatever he was searching for could not be solved by turning westward and that the problem went deeper, into materialism itself, and then inviting him to look towards islam. there is something almost eerie to me about letters sent towards collapsing things by people who do not yet know exactly what shape the collapse will take. or perhaps they know a shape. i mean, people knew the shape of the collapse of ussr will take. everyone thinks they know the shape. a letter travelling from tehran to moscow. gorbachev receiving it. me finding it nearly four decades later because i apparently cannot read normally anymore.

and samantha smith. oh samantha smith. a ten-year-old schoolgirl from maine becoming frightened of nuclear war and doing the remarkably uncomplicated thing adults somehow make impossible: she wrote to yuri andropov and asked him, essentially, are you going to have a war? why? do you want to conquer us? and he wrote back. then invited her to the soviet union. and she went. eleven years old and she went. her courage, oh. i don't mean courage in that inflated quotation-image way people use the word after somebody has already become safely historical. i mean physically. a little girl getting on a plane and going to the country she had been taught enough fear about to write its leader asking whether he planned to destroy hers. walking around there. meeting soviet children. seeing them as children. allowing herself to find out something by going near it. i think perhaps this is why she keeps needling me. because i have spent so much of my life frightened from stationary positions. i research. i imagine. i rehearse. i construct the entire geography of danger and escape inside my skull and then continue sitting exactly where i was sitting. samantha just wrote the fucking letter. then she went. there is also something unbearable about knowing how enormous the machinery around her was. reagan. andropov. nuclear arsenals. propaganda. governments manufacturing each other into monsters large enough to justify more weapons. then this child entering the thing with the embarrassing question adults had buried beneath strategy: if neither of you says you want war then why are you preparing so enthusiastically for one?

children are humiliating like that. sometimes they accidentally uncover the entire fraud because nobody has taught them yet which ridiculous premise everybody has agreed not to question. maybe, because children have no dignity?

and then, years later, the ussr ends. not even necessarily the grand geopolitical collapse as it usually gets presented to us with flags lowering and maps changing colour and commentators declaring the end of eras. i mean the actual strange administrative lastness of it. here's the transcript hosted on .su. the supreme soviet. december 26, 1991. people sitting in a room and having to conduct a meeting while the state to which the meeting belongs is disappearing. imagine having an agenda for the end of your country. there is something so sickly human about bureaucracy surviving until the final second. a. t. alimzhanov is presiding. there are speeches. formal language. the soviet flag over the kremlin has already been lowered. the first and last president of the ussr has resigned. this enormous political project which contained generations of struggle, revolution, liberation, belief, terror, sacrifice, bureaucracy, war, childhoods, songs, queues, science, prisons, apartments, dead people, living people, millions upon millions of ordinary breakfasts has arrived somehow inside parliamentary procedure. and near the end alimzhanov wishes them a happy coming new year. says they will meet again, if not there then somewhere else. somewhere else. god. then he asks deputy nosov if he wants to speak. nosov does. "dear comrades!" and he says their decisions are illegal and invalid. that only the congress of people's deputies of the ussr has the right to decide them. (noise in the room.) that parenthesis. i just cannot get over nosov'slast cry and the parenthesis. a whole country has reached its grammatical ending and somebody responsible for producing the transcript has to put the noise somewhere, so history receives nosov's last cry and (noise in the room.) then the presiding officer essentially says the meeting is closed. all good. all good! and that is it. how does anything end like this? perhaps everything does and afterward we manufacture the ceremony. i don't know why i assumed the death of a state would know it was the death of a state while it was happening. maybe i expected history to possess better dramatic instincts. thunder. somebody saying the correct final sentence. an orchestra somewhere understanding its cue. but there they were discussing procedure, objecting to legality, exchanging new year wishes. people still had somewhere to go afterward, presumably. coats to put on. somebody must have been hungry. somebody perhaps had plans for new year's. the ussr ceased to exist and everybody still had to get home.

this is the kind of thing that has been happening to my brain lately. history has become less historical the more history i read. which is inconvenient. i used to think time made events solid. now everything seems terribly porous. countries look permanent until suddenly you are reading the transcript of their final meeting. ideologies look like enormous impersonal nouns until you find somebody's letter. the cold war becomes arrows on a map until an eleven-year-old girl goes to summer camp. and people become names until you look too long. then they become people again. terrible development for someone already prone to thinking about everything past the point of usefulness.

which, actually—

there was some new development around the people i was lurking around while i was flailing around the far-left internet and that kept some rooms of my mind occupied and took me in a ride to make me understand more and more of this weird political-internet underbelly i wrote about in the previous weblog. the suspected things, the people, people around those people, organisations, affiliations, accusations, who-followed-whom-before-who-unfollowed-whom, ideological genealogy being performed through instagram stories like some deranged family tree. i am saying development because i don't know what other word accommodates something simultaneously happening outside me and inside my already over-chewed suspicions. and of course every new thing made old things look slightly different. this is the irritating thing about learning. the furniture moves when you aren't looking.

something i dismissed three weeks ago develops a second head because now i know one additional name. somebody's old sentence becomes stranger. a photograph becomes worth staring at. a coincidence becomes either less coincidental or embarrassingly more ordinary. i go back. read again. search again. find another document. now i am staring at the internet like an auntie peeping from behind a curtain except the neighbourhood feud is ideological and half the neighbours may or may not be imaginary.

anyway.

while i have been doing all this extremely important work of becoming a poorly trained online archivist of everybody else's political lives, my own life has been throwing forms at me.

i have been selected for two more courses which i am attending, studying, working, giving exams, preparing capstone projects for every week, an old colleague has returned with a volunteer opportunity to help his organisation and a workshop from which i was rejected has come back to give me a place and expects me to submit a draft within upcoming days. rejection apparently has an appeals court. i don't think i felt any happiness though. not in an ungrateful manner. just exhausted manner. and, so much at once and i just remember my work contract ends the end of this month and i don't know if i want to survive. because surviving means facing the fact that i didn't procure any other work/contract. because surviving means i have to continue here. because surviving means i have to continue taking this humiliation while being a silent casualty of weaponized incompetence of others and ignored management with no one to take my side. because surviving means also facing the fact whether they will increase my fee or not, because the last time they did not increase at all.

and money is such a humiliatingly material thing. i can philosophise myself into dust but rent, salary, fees, contracts, loans, deposits, groceries, bills after bills after bills, bank accounts, applications... they remain stupidly solid and grow bigger. you cannot existential-angst your way into financial security. extremely inconsiderate of capitalism. no?

this month started with my father's birthday. i did not remember that it was until my father sent pictures of his office celebrating and my mother's & sister's wishes followed. mine didn't. i don't know what to do with this sentence so i will leave it there.

the week ended with a scuffle between my mother and my sister over some food my sister and i decided to order on friday night. saturday morning, well i woke up at 3 pm, it was an off day. i felt disgruntled with my mother too so we did not speak much. by the night, i had become sick. the whole day, intrusive thoughts of various unwanted worries and shame-laden memories, voices of abuser people kept assaulting me mentally and at late evening, as i sat to have my first meal of the day, dinner, after a shower, i got my period. perfect timing from the uterus. applause. although i should have predicted but i never learn. shame on me. i tried my best to not throw up and combust due to my headache. and today, my sister left to spend the night at her friend's house and said she will come back tomorrow. my mother was asleep when she left, so she had told me and asked me to pass it on, the message, as she had heard that my mother and i had majorly started speaking while i prepared my lunch. after which mother went to sleep. it was in the late evening when i told my mother and apologized that it had slipped my mind or else i would have said it sooner. she was sitting up and she sat for a minute. i think she wanted to share a look with me to start a conversation. but i delivered the message and quickly turned my head. she left the room. i did not have dinner tonight.

*

anddddd... i finally sit down to write.

some of my old existential angst and dread-like thoughts came back to me as a pang. i think they did the final push and made me start penning. maybe, nowadays, writing begins for me only when something becomes sufficiently unbearable that even maladaptive daydreaming cannot digest it anymore. then my fingers are handed the leftovers. 

i am still stuck in this room, on this chair, on this table, this laptop, this job, this city, this state, this country, this part of the world, this family, this community, this lineage that has made me such a misfit for itself and made sure i will carry this misfit-ness everywhere, in me, if i ever go. sometimes i wonder, if i can, ever? ...go? there has been so much going in my head for a person who has barely gone anywhere. sometimes i think, by now, we can all agree here, i have mistaken thinking about escape for escape itself. researching places. imagining rooms. imagining work. imagining myself walking in streets where nobody knows whose daughter i am. rehearsing the grocery shops. the window. a kettle. some ugly rented mattress. freedom apparently furnished in my head by a kettle. then i return, although i never left, and the chair is still underneath me.

i feel like folding into a crumpled paper, shrivel up to into non-existence. what ever is this life and where did i go so wrong in it? will there be a trial for this? for this cage that i have somehow domesticated myself for? will there be a judge, jury, executioner? what is the punishment for this? or do people who keep withdrawing into themselves eventually become so small in the world's eye that there is nobody left to even pronounce them missing? is that the punishment? if one keeps closing the door, then another door behind it, then another, does the world eventually accept the architecture and stop knocking? how long can somebody hide inside their own boundaries before everybody outside learns to walk around the shape where they used to be? is this how one gets forgotten? slowly enough to be alive for it? is this death?

i think... that is what scares me. disappearance has always sounded to me like an interesting event. somebody leaves. or, somebody dies. or maybe, somebody is lost. there should be a before and an after. but, i guess, there are disappearances which happen quite administratively. incrementally. nobody files anything. you answer fewer messages. your friendships become old chats you scroll through once in six months. coworkers move to other projects. somebody stops telling you something because last time you didn't answer properly. family learns which subjects will receive silence. you stop going out. people stop asking. and then one afternoon you discover the world has very politely adjusted to your absence while you were still technically occupying it. horrible. absolutely horrible. and abhorrent. isn't it?

i try to find life in me somewhere. i feel like i have sucked all my blood dry looking for life within me but alas, i feel i have died within this body. within it, many rooms. and i lied somewhere no one can find me. i keep searching for the dead body perpetually. lost. maybe that is why i keep writing rooms? room inside room inside room. closet acquiring closets. the miseritorial cot. this stupid chair. the same table. the house. the country. oh, this country. sometimes i don't know whether these are metaphors anymore. maybe i have been describing one architecture from different distances. zoom in: skull. zoom out: bedroom. zoom out: family. zoom out: community. state. country. world. somewhere between these scales a very small thing is lying down pretending to research communist history.

me, hello.

maybe i keep acquiring vocabulary because words can enter places my body cannot. ussr. cuba. congo. revolution. exile. struggle. bourgeoisie. liberation. organisation. all these enormous travelling words entering a room where their reader cannot even travel to the next city without first negotiating ten invisible borders. ridiculous arrangement. i know. and still i read.

this must mean something, i suppose. or i want it to. or i am just making it up for the sake of giving this miserable excuse of a blog update a closure. i feel there is still apparently some small scavenger inside the corpse collecting things. a name. a paragraph. an opportunity. another course. a workshop which rejected me and then returned. a volunteer project. some half-written weblog. maybe this creature is life. maybe life is giving it too prestigious a title. perhaps it is simply habit with a pulse.

i don't know. this is important.

sometimes i think of all the versions of me my daydreaming has manufactured and feel embarrassed that they have lived more than i have. they travelled. spoke. argued. loved people. left people. stood on stages. wrote books. had apartments. had political courage. had courage-courage. did revolutions. loved. built. they knew where to place their hands. they knew what to say when humiliated. they did not turn their head when their mother wanted to look at them. they knew when to speak up to their fathers. what a population. and here is their exhausted country of origin. i sit. the problem with imagining so many lives is that eventually your own begins looking like the rejected draft. annotations everywhere. [move.] [say something.] [apply.] [leave.] [eat.] [answer mother.] [finish work.] [become a person here.] and i keep ignoring editorial suggestions from reality. today's was: eat dinner. ignored that one too. i don't know where i am going with this. nowhere, presumably. geographically consistent with the rest of my life. haha! but perhaps i wanted a record that these days happened because days which happen entirely inside one room begin losing their borders. saturday becomes sunday because sleep said so. august becomes september because the computer corner changed numbers. father's birthday happens through photographs sent to a phone. somebody leaves a project and disappears. a contract approaches its end. blood arrives. mother leaves the room. sister goes to her friend's house. history happens magnificently elsewhere and time here passes through notifications.

and i am frightened that one day i will look back and discover i spent years waiting for my life to become sufficiently life-like before participating in it. what qualification does a life require before i agree that it has begun? another job? another city? another room? money? permission? courage? love? acceptance? when? how? why? me? when? i have asked when so many times that the word has become furniture too. perhaps that is what i am doing tonight. inventory. in this sad little store of mine called life.

chair: one.
table: one.
laptop: one.
body: allegedly one.
life: whereabouts unknown.

~ oizys.