30th April 2026. 8:30 PM.
It is a different kind of pain. The whole day I was so busy with work, I forgot today was the last day of April. In the few minutes I got between tasks, I scrolled past the same posts on social media: April is ending, May May is kind to us. And then, between one soft farewell to April and another, the news: the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla had been intercepted in international waters near Crete, its boats seized, its people detained, its attempt at aid folded once again into the old settler-colonial machinery of force. So there it was: people asking May to be gentle, while somewhere on the sea, gentleness was being boarded by armed men.
In the same scroll, I found Coffees for Gaza, asking people for the price of a coffee, which is such a small and devastating unit of measure. A coffee. A coffee: that small office sacrament, that bitter little permission slip to continue. The thing we buy while answering emails, while refreshing dashboards, while telling ourselves we are tired. The thing we hold while answering emails and pretending the world is not on fire. Somewhere, that same amount becomes rice, medicine, a little time, a family not being abandoned completely. This is the vulgarity of distance: our caffeine, someone else’s survival. So, if you can, give one small coffee’s worth away; let it become something warmer than habit.Well. Finally, after work, in the evening, there was a sudden thunderstorm. Unreasonably justified. Violent wind, lightning, and then an orgasmic rain. It unfurled into something wilder while my mother and I struggled to rescue our clothes from the balcony. Later, my mother brought news from downstairs: the dome over the gate light had flown away, and the bulb had been thrown inward, as if even electricity had briefly lost its manners. Since then, it has been cooler. Calmer. My belly, however, is jealous due to its gaseous nature right now, which is to say, even my stomach has chosen metaphor today. Everything inside me is rearranging itself with unnecessary drama. The rain has stopped now, but the trees are still behaving like they know a secret. The streetlight outside has turned the wet road into something almost holy, which is rude of it, frankly, because I am not in the mood for holiness. I am in the mood for lying down like a historical ruin and being discovered centuries later by archaeologists who say, ah yes, here we see the remains of a woman who answered too many emails. April ended while I was working. NaPoWriMo almost ended while I was working. This feels like betrayal, but not by April. By myself, perhaps. Or by adulthood, that badly managed institution. I spent the last day of a month that asked me to write every day staring at dashboards, messages, tasks, little boxes of urgency multiplying like damp insects. Somewhere in between, people were posting their tender farewells to April, asking May to be gentle, kind, soft, bearable. And I, professional fool, scrolled past them like a clerk at the border of feeling. Only later, when the wind began throwing itself against the windows, did I remember. Oh. Today is the last day. The month is leaving. I had imagined I would notice it properly. That I would sit with tea, maybe. That I would look back at thirty poems and feel something cinematic and clean. Closure, perhaps. A word invented by people who have never owned a nervous system. Instead, there was thunder. There was the sky losing patience. There was rain arriving with the kind of confidence I have only seen in women who have finally had enough. And then, suddenly, coolness. As if the world had been slapped and forgiven in the same minute. I stood there listening to it, and for once, I did not try to make it useful. Not a poem, not a lesson, not evidence. Just rain. Just the last evening of April arriving late to its own farewell, drunk on lightning, smelling of wet dust and bad decisions.
NaPoWriMo is a temporary room. For one month, my little weblog, which otherwise sits like an empty corner of the internet with one tube light flickering bravely above it, becomes part of a village. People arrive. They read. They leave small lamps in the form of comments. They say, I was here. I saw this. I carried this line away. It is the only festival my weblog knows. A strange annual fair where everyone puts up a stall made of drafts and panic, where we bring our unfinished metaphors, our stubborn griefs, our weather reports, our dead, our jokes, our gods, our badly behaved childhoods. We barter words. We trade courage. We taste each other’s strange little offerings and say, yes, this has salt, this has smoke, this burned my tongue a little, thank you. And then, as suddenly as it began, the stalls come down. The room empties. The village goes back to being scattered houses with blue-lit windows. But for a month, there was company. For a month, this empty corner had footsteps and the silence had witnesses. For that, I am grateful.
Maybe this is the correct ending? Perhaps, not a grand summation or some neat little ribbon around the month. Just work, weather, a jealous belly, and the old body continuing its strange negotiations with air. April did not end like a door closing. It ended like a storm passing through a tired city and leaving the rooms cooler than before. And maybe that is enough? Maybe May does not need to be kind. Maybe it only needs to leave one window unlatched, one evening unruined, one small hour in which I remember that I am not only the person who works, worries, digests poorly, and scrolls past tenderness. I am also the person who notices rain. Late, perhaps. But still.
~ Oizys.