9:10 am.
i woke up earlier than usual today morning. why? did i fall asleep early last night without committing the usual, ritualistic, daydreaming with the phone in my hands trying to unsuccessfully hide it from my mother and then silently wither away into some distressed sleep after some rigid, stiff, pseudo-masturbatory vomit? maybe. maybe not.
anyway.
i woke up. i did the morning necessaries. and by the time, i reached the tea cup on the dining table against that hideous dining wall with hideous tiles of even more hideous tiles, the animosity between the mother and daughters had dissipated and the general family gelling had dawned. discussions about the day, everyone's work, timings, when will everyone be in or out.
actually.
it may have dissipated yesterday maybe when my sister asked me to accompany her to the doctor and while returning back home we bought some grapes. and after we came back, we sat together, mother and daughters, on the same dining table discussing the hilarious incompetence of the doctor. my father came up. i froze and remained shriveled all while he was having a discussion with mother and sister which they found hilarious but i had long stopped laughing.
anyway. he left. mother and the daughters continued their discussion. but what had dissipated between us somehow found some place in me. after we all retired to our rooms, my mother tried continuing the innocent talk but what had been conserved within me in that small place was germinating, so i put an end to the questions of "oh is that coworker joining?", "oh have you decided which laptop to buy?" by saying i have no time. as she left the room, my frustration took a leap over my conscience and my hand slapped the mouse as it had been acting up because i had worked too much the whole day on the laptop. not that i wanted to intentionally produce a sound and give it to my anger publicly for my mother to hear, but there was a small moment where i did think if she heard.
that horrible little second after making a noise in anger. not guilt fully. but, something meaner. the consciousness of being heard.
while i finished my work, she had finished her dinner and was about to retire. and i replaced her at the dining table while she went to sleep. when i finished my dinner which did calm my frustration a bit, my mother had fallen asleep. i was supposed to work. but, i couldn't resist my body wanting to plop down and get buried under covers like a quiet, peaceful, hidden dead body done with the little life it had to live for the day.
morning!
as i woke up, my mother pleasantly greeted me. funny how families regenerate overnight. some tiny domestic lizard-tail phenomenon. cut something off in the evening and by tea time the next morning there is conversation again. nobody says sorry. nobody says we are okay now. somebody asks what time you will leave. somebody complains about traffic. tea is poured. resurrection accomplished.
after our morning discussion i came across a video where a man was talking about how to write, i couldn't focus and absorb it. so, i came back to my half-room and i watched the video. in between my fingers involuntarily would pause the video as my bouts of daydreaming would command them to. a sentence. pause. another face in my head. pause. some imaginary room. some imaginary conversation. some version of myself who apparently has all the time in the world. then back to the man explaining writing. but i ended up completing the whole video and i wrote two lines in my notebook before starting this blog. the steps, he suggested, were: observe, react, narrate. very simple. suspiciously simple.
9:10 pm.
so, i opened a new draft to write my next blog post. but, alas! work, too much work that i ended up making a to-do list in a spreadsheet. everyone's coming and going, lunch, an unusual afternoon sleep strayed me away from writing. of course. observe, react, narrate, nap.
in the evening, as everyone's coming back was approaching, i stumbled upon a story and i read it. i will be honest, it had been a bit since i read something that gave me this experience. first, the writing was such that my understanding of the story coagulated with my emotions as i read it. i flew through the story without feeling myself flying through it. there was none of that labour i sometimes feel while reading where i can hear my own brain dragging sentences behind it. this one entered softer. somewhere beneath language perhaps. by the time i understood that something in me had been affected, it had already occupied the place. maybe it resembled some of my heavily ruminated daydreamings so it coalesced inside me, sort of?
yes. maybe.
there are stories which feel familiar because you recognise what happens in them. this one felt familiar in a more humiliating way. i recognised the weather of it. that is probably what broke something open. the quiet. the waiting. two people trying to occupy some tiny pocket of existence while everything around them keeps acquiring weight. language becoming insufficient and then becoming too much. words from one tongue bleeding into another until even speech stops behaving like a proper border. i liked that. or perhaps liked is too cheerful a word. i understood it bodily.
there was rain in the story, or the feeling of rain even when there wasn't rain. translucent fabric. dampness hanging on things. concrete. water caught somewhere. tiny insects of water on surfaces. that sort of atmosphere where the city is not openly screaming yet but something has started rotting inside its mouth. nothing needs to explode. sometimes a place only needs to become harder to breathe in. that is sufficient. the people inside it shrink accordingly. curfews. parapets. rooms. closed doors. distances which could technically be crossed but which have become morally, politically, spiritually kilometres long. and meanwhile two people are still trying to look at each other.
awful. beautiful also. but awful. because the separation was not some giant wall you could point toward and say, there. enemy. obstacle. tragedy. it lived everywhere smaller... in vocabulary, in a pause before saying a word, in whose language arrives first or gets lost first when someone is frightened, in memory losing its original pronunciation, in the body understanding danger before the mouth has assembled a sentence for it, in a city slowly becoming suspicious of the people living inside it. that got to me. especially the language. because what a miserable thing, to have the outside world insist upon clean divisions while the inside of you remains badly mixed. i think, badly is unfair. beautifully contaminated. languages getting tangled under pressure because the body does not care for ideological neatness. memory certainly doesn't. love even less. and i think that is where the daydreaming recognised its relative.
mine also likes impossible little enclosures. two people somewhere they should not be. in one room. maybe a stairwell. big a terrace. crowded train compartment. some city imagined badly from photographs. some temporary place carved out of the world where outside rules become muffled for an hour. then somebody has to leave. there is always leaving. or almost leaving. or the threat of leaving sitting in the room before anyone says it. the slow burn and build up always builds up to that leaving. sometimes i think my daydreams have spent years rebuilding the same doomed country under different names, same border, same ache, but different wallpaper. and this story had wandered too near it.
so when i finished, i had a soft release of cry that came out of that. not sobbing or even cinematic. some leaking like eyes doing their small mutiny. it felt like a scream with no sound. and it spruced and sprung up my daydreaming that i had not dreamt for a while now. suddenly those old inner rooms had electricity again. faces returned. voices. those stupid scenes i have repeated enough times that they probably have grooves in my brain now. and because the story had put that slow grief into me, the daydreamings also came back altered slightly. wetter somehow. quieter. less concerned with dramatic rescue. more with people sitting beside each other while the world makes their sitting beside each other progressively harder. this is probably embarrassing to write. good.
anyway.
one after the other people came and interrupted and one of my classes started. so, i had to tape down my cries. there is something so degrading about having to schedule emotion around institutional obligations. cry until 7:28. class at 7:30. camera off. mic muted. yes ma'am. present. i tried crying it out a bit before it started. tried pushing the feeling out quickly like one can evacuate water from a sink before someone comes to inspect the kitchen. it didn't work. feelings apparently dislike deadlines. so some of it remained. behind my eyes. inside my throat. somewhere down the sternum maybe. and there it sat while the class began and somebody spoke and slides moved and words appeared and i took notes like a person whose body had not five minutes ago been trying to grieve a fictional life because it had confused it with several unlived ones of her own. which is perhaps the whole problem. fiction does this dirty work sometimes. it finds the thing you have spent months disguising from yourself and gives it different names, different city, different people, different weather. you relax because technically none of it belongs to you. and then some tiny sentence moves. and there you are. caught!
09th September.
10:20 am.
i tried writing more yesterday but there's just so much work. i will try to write more today but i don't think i will be able to.
11:30 am.
i woke up early again today because i had a class. and, today, as well, there is so much work while completing side projects and searching for new jobs. all while this new story has engined my daydreaming, this particular daydreaming that's engulfing my sentience and taking all my time. making me cry while i try to stimulate with myself but i end up throwing my phone away and burying myself deep under covers burrowing into those daydreamings. i wish death would trick me into this and lap me up with its tongue and take me away forever.
not even violently. please.
something almost animal about it.
some large indifferent thing finding me half-asleep and already folded enough and carrying me elsewhere before i have the time to become afraid of being carried. maybe that is the fantasy beneath so many fantasies. not being brave enough to leave but being removed. being exempted from the act of departure. because then departure requires decision. and decision requires a self! and my self has been outsourced to so many imagined people lately. one of them says something. the other looks away. there is some rain somewhere. and a room with a weak yellow light. someone's shirt clinging damp to their back. some language failing at the exact moment it is required. then i am gone for twenty minutes. forty. an hour. work tab still open. spreadsheet still open. messages accumulating. emails waiting. real people asking real questions from the other side of the screen. and i resent them for interrupting something that does not exist. this sounds deranged when written plainly.
perhaps because it is.
i have always known maladaptive daydreaming steals time but sometimes stealing sounds too active, too theatrical. lately it feels more like seepage. my time just leaks somewhere. no burglary. no broken lock. i look up and the morning is dented. then afternoon. then night. and what exactly have i been doing? working, yes. reading, yes. replying to people. attending classes. applying for things. maybe eating. but between all these things there are these soft collapses where my brain slips into another architecture and comes back carrying grief from people who were never born. the body apparently cannot tell. it cries anyway. it tightens anyway. it gets aroused anyway, which is another humiliation. oh, the humiliation in arousal. sometimes i begin with the crude bodily intention of trying to stimulate myself and within minutes it mutates into something else entirely. no sex really. or sex has become some poor doorway through which loneliness, fantasy, shame, tenderness, possession, fear, all rush in without tickets. then the phone feels disgusting in my hand. i throw it away. turn over. pull the covers up and disappear into scenes i have already watched from inside myself a hundred times. same people. same almost-touch. same leaving. always leaving. perhaps that is why the story infected this particular daydreaming so efficiently. it gave atmosphere to something i had already built badly. suddenly my old scenes had weather. damp walls. political unease. mixed language. tired streets. a city which could punish two people simply by making every ordinary meeting difficult.
excellent.
as though my brain needed production design. and i keep returning to the imagined tenderness of people who cannot safely remain in tenderness for very long. why? i don't know. maybe permanence disgusts the mechanism somehow. if they could simply be together, then what would i do with them? send them grocery shopping? make them discuss electricity bills? perhaps yearning requires obstruction to stay alive. perhaps my brain has understood this and become a corrupt little municipality issuing permits for suffering. no uncomplicated intimacy approved within city limits. there must be a border, a family, a language, a war, a train leaving at 6. somebody married to somebody else. somebody dying. somebody unable to say the word.
something.
there is always some fucking checkpoint. and outside these scenes, i am supposed to procure employment. this is almost funny. my contract ends at the end of this month and every day i open job portals like a minor ritual of self-threat. scroll. save. maybe apply. close. reopen. read description. experience small spiritual death at "fast-paced environment". continue. side projects. courses. capstones. workshop draft. volunteer work. current work. future work. imaginary life. all fighting for the same badly maintained acreage inside my head.
i think perhaps this is why i wanted to write this at 11:30 in the morning. not because anything has happened. nothing happened. that is always the stupid part. nothing happened and i am exhausted by events. inside me whole cities have been evacuated before lunch. outside, someone has asked me to update a spreadsheet.
11th September.
12:03 AM.
the whole day went by.
morning started early again today. i did some work. and i blocked those people who were having an online dispute about who is a better revolutionary by using expletives. it got a bit disgusting, my stomach revolted. there is only so much revolutionary machismo one can witness before the revolution begins resembling several men yelling outside a tea stall except now everyone has read marx and has access to quote-tweets.
maybe that is unfair. anyway, blocked.
my manager texted me early and asked if i could lead a project in my city.
i was filling up my appraisal form trying to boast as much as possible with my inferiority complex. an interesting clerical exercise. please describe your accomplishments while every molecule inside you submits supporting documentation proving you are mediocre.
i had to sit with that text. but i am thinking why i did not panic much. i did sit and think and eventually lied that i have left my state altogether for personal issues. left my state! look at her. apparently somewhere in some managerial chat window i have achieved geographic mobility. it stayed a bit with me but then it did not make me shiver, make me jittery, angry, crazy, puke. (__) there was also the disgusting embarrassment of the lie itself. how quickly it came. almost practical. somewhere inside me there is apparently an emergency bureaucrat constantly prepared with documentation for a life i am not living. yes, she has left the state. yes, personal reasons. thank you for understanding.
meanwhile she is going to come to the same city and same state. there is something pathetic and a little delicious about lying that i have escaped. for a few seconds there, in somebody else's understanding of me, i had. the daydreaming kept me occupied. i had some rice for brunch and my daydreamings engulfed me into a sweet sleep and i missed a meeting! actually missed it. not metaphorically. not spiritually. calendar meeting. people. work. gone. i woke up with that horrible post-sleep displacement where the room has become darker and the phone contains evidence that time continued without your permission.
i feel like quitting this job and not telling anyone at home. will they notice? can i procure another job immediately? if i pretend to work they might not notice. right? right? i can wake up. open laptop. sit at table. stare seriously at something. type intermittently. attend imaginary meetings perhaps. tell mother yes work is a lot today. complain strategically once or twice. everybody already understands work through closed doors and laptop screens anyway. perhaps employment itself has become sufficiently theatrical that unemployment can impersonate it for a while. and i can give job hunting full day might end up finding something? maybe. maybe i would wake up with a purpose then. job portals from morning till afternoon. applications. cover letters. tests. follow-ups. rejection emails arriving like automated condolences.
still.
movement.
i want to leave. this job. this circumstance that has trapped me in this job with this family in this country. sometimes these things collapse into each other so badly that i cannot tell which one i am actually trying to flee. the job becomes the family because the family is why losing the job terrifies me. the family becomes the country because leaving one seems to require somehow leaving the other. the country becomes the job because every vacancy reminds me what passports, cities, salaries, qualifications, caste-class-family geography, all the invisible little border police of one's life permit and do not permit. and then there is me in the centre behaving as if the correct linkedin listing will solve the architecture.
maybe i don't even want another job. i want another consequence on another morning by another table. a life where leaving one workplace does not threaten to expose every other dependency underneath it. but unfortunately one cannot search for "complete alteration of circumstance, immediate joining" on a job portal. or maybe one can?
location: remote.
so after ignoring all the piling up work that mounts on me, i daydreamt and daydreamt and reached the end of day. the strange thing about daydreaming for hours is that afterward i feel simultaneously over-lived and unused. inside, so much happened. outside, nothing got done. someone was held. someone left. somebody cried against a shoulder that does not exist. there were conversations with excellent timing. i said things without stuttering. somebody understood them correctly. whole emotional governments rose and collapsed.
then i look at my laptop. thirty-seven unread messages. 4 unfinished tasks. spreadsheet. reality has terrible production value.
no dinner did i have. took a shower and sat down to finally write. this blog post is becoming the only proof i have that the day occurred at all. because otherwise what happened today? i lied that i had left. then spent the day proving i hadn't.
~ oizys.