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.

The Skin Breaks As The Closet Keeps Acquiring Closets

August 17, 2026, 14:00 PM.

The last entry ended abruptly. Not artistically abruptly, no matter how much I try to poeticise it. And, not even the kind of abruptness one manufactures and later calls an ending because the blank underneath it looks deliberate enough. I wanted to continue because, of course, I had more things to say. But alter[real]ego had me strangled by then, and eventually I did what I almost always do when I am being strangled by something that only half-exists: I stopped. Which is also how most of my daydreams end.

Rarely does the revolution succeed. Rarely does the play receive its thunderous applause, rarely does the imaginary interview reach the devastating sentence I had apparently been building towards for forty-five minutes, rarely do I finish explaining myself to whichever phantom tribunal I have summoned for that day's proceedings. Instead: Mother calls. My sister says something. Manager pings. Father shouts. A door opens. Someone asks where the charger is.Somebody needs something completely reasonable from me. And an entire civilisation disappears.

It is humiliating how little reality is required to defeat fantasy, no catastrophe, no history arriving at the doorstep with blood on its shirt. Just someone saying my name from the other room. Maybe that is why the last entry ending where it did now seems appropriate. My writing has started resembling my daydreaming in form too: elaborate private architecture continually demolished by the banal. Half a room. Half an argument. Half a revolution. Half a self.

A lot has happened since July 22.

This sentence irritates me because every diary ever written after a period of silence probably contains some variation of it. A lot has happened. Meaning: a lot happened and I did not possess the discipline to convert any of it into language while it was happening. And I did think about writing.Constantly, actually. 

Something would happen and immediately another thing would grow around it in my head. A metaphor, usually a weird one. Something involving diseased water, peeled skin, insects, puppet strings, mildew, an organ kept alive outside the body. I would think, I should write that down. Sometimes I would imagine the paragraph so completely that apparently my brain considered the labour finished and saw no reason to involve my hands. Then work. Then daydreaming. Then procrastination. Then work because I procrastinated. Then daydreaming because work had made me miserable. Then procrastination because the daydreaming had consumed the time in which I was supposed to work. A wonderfully self-sustaining ecosystem.

I keep wanting to describe myself as incapacitated, because incapacitated sounds almost medical. Dramatically mechanical, even. One imagines a machine with an important wire cut. It absolves the machine of having to explain itself. But perhaps I am not incapacitated. Ofcourse, I am not. Perhaps I am a stagnant pond desperately inventing diagnoses for why it does not flow.

There were days when I wondered whether I should keep this thing going at all. The blog, I mean. Although "this thing" could comfortably contain several other things too. What is the purpose? I write and then I delay publishing what I write. I think and then I daydream about having thought. I become briefly convinced that writing itself is a political act and then become suspicious that I have only found an unusually flattering description for sitting alone in a room.

The closet drama keeps acquiring closets.

I have spent an unhealthy amount of time in the last few weeks crawling through corners of the far-left internet. "Crawling" is the correct verb because "reading" suggests that I approached any of this like a normal person. I did not. I found one thing, which produced fifty-five tabs, which produced a name, which produced an accusation, which produced a document, which produced another name, which produced fifteen people calling the first person a revisionist and six people calling the fifteen people revisionists and somebody, somewhere, inevitably, calling everybody involved state agents. I had lived a vulgarously sheltered life. Vulgarous is probably not a word. It can be one here. I should put it in my dictionary.

Sheltered not merely in the ordinary sense of having been protected from particular kinds of suffering, although yes, that too. Sheltered in the more embarrassing epistemological sense. My reality had been so tiny and so thoroughly furnished by my own interiority that I sometimes mistook what failed to enter it for what did not exist. There is a particular violence in discovering that reality has been radical without your permission. I want to say familiarising myself with it has been skin-breaking. Not eye-opening. I hate eye-opening. Eyes open every morning and accomplish remarkably little. Skin-breaking. As though the membrane separating the world I understood from the world that had been there all along did not expand politely but split.

And somewhere in these nooks and corners I found things brewing [or appearing to brew; the internet is exceptionally good at making both those conditions look identical] that may be organic, may be infiltrated, may be theatre, may be paranoia reproducing itself through screenshots, may be state interference, may be several of these things at once. I don't know.

This is important: I don't know.

The temptation of this particular rabbit hole is that every absence of proof can begin to feel like proof of sophistication. If something cannot be verified, perhaps that means it has been hidden. If someone contradicts themselves, perhaps they are an operative. If they are too consistent, perhaps they have been trained. Soon uncertainty itself starts wearing a trench coat. Still, some of what I found disturbed me enough that I could not simply close the tabs and return unchanged to my tiny republic of invented conversations. 

There was this guy I used to follow some time ago. He would go on and on about things I could barely understand then. Theory, organisations, betrayals, lines, deviations, histories inside histories. I eventually stopped paying attention. Partly because I genuinely did not understand him. Partly because understanding requires sustained attention, and sustained attention has never stood much of a chance against my own private cinema plus whatever minor interruption reality sends to collect me. My mother called. My sister spoke. Life happened in millimetres. And whatever he was talking about disappeared behind it.

Somehow I found him again when I reactivated my Instagram account. This time I began digging into who he actually was, or at least who the internet claimed he was. Then why certain people called him a revisionist. Then what revisionist meant in the mouths of those particular people, because apparently even accusations have dialects. Then who was accusing whom and from which organisation and according to which historical split and why a disagreement from several decades ago was still alive enough to bite people in 2026. And because rabbit holes reproduce sexually, this led me back to a girl I used to follow too, who made similar content. I started digging into her. Then into the people around her.Then into inconsistencies. Then coincidences.Then posts that looked different after I had learned other things. And now I have a theory. Which I do not trust. That last part may be more important than the theory. She might be connected to something deliberate. She might not be. What I am looking at might be a state operation, might contain one somewhere inside it, might merely have acquired the aesthetics of one after being passed through enough suspicious people, or might be nothing more sinister than the ordinary incoherence of human beings online. There is something terrifying about acquiring a political vocabulary capable of explaining hidden structures, because eventually the vocabulary itself begins asking to explain everything. A hammer discovers nails just like a psychoanalytic patient discovers mothers just like a newly radicalised idiot discovers psy-ops. So now I am trying to learn the difference between becoming less naïve and becoming impossible to convince. I do not yet know where that border is.

Maybe that is what has changed most since the last entry. The private theatre has not disappeared. I still lose hours inside it and I still become someone else with better sentences and better courage and a life conveniently arranged into scenes. But reality has become harder to keep outside the theatre. It keeps entering through the emergency exit. Mother calling. Sister talking.Work accumulating. A massacre or multiple on a screen while I doomscroll to almost-death. A document written decades before I was born.Some stranger's political accusation. A name. Another name. History refusing to remain history. Perhaps interruption was never the opposite of the daydream. It was reality trying, however thinly and banally, to get in.

And perhaps this is what skin-breaking actually does: it does not merely familiarise me with the brutality outside, but it also makes me hyperfamiliar with the wreckage inside which is my broken will, and my almost comically un-goal-oriented life, and the humiliating distance between everything I can now name and everything I can actually do. It is one thing to realise that the world requires repair. It is another to realise that I cannot even seem to get out of my miseritorial cot. Miseritorial. Another word that probably does not exist. A cot that has somehow become both misery and territory. Repair the world? I cannot even reliably leave the house.

Sometimes getting out of this house, this town, this state, going somewhere else and attempting to carve out a shape of myself that I can miserably fit inside feels revolutionary enough. Not revolutionary in the heroic sense. No banners, masses, halts, seizure of anything. Just the extremely pathetic revolution of acquiring a room somewhere else and discovering whether I exist differently when certain walls are no longer around me. I have spoken fervently before about home as a miniature site through which the logic of the state remains alive: authority, obedience, surveillance, punishment, dependence, the regulation of movement, the endless production of permission. I still believe there is something there. But the unpleasant consequence of learning how to intellectualise your conditions is that eventually you become extremely articulate about your cage. You can identify its architecture, trace its genealogy, point to the bars and explain which historical process manufactured the metal. You can write a very convincing paragraph about why the lock exists. And you are still inside it. Maybe that is worse? Ignorance at least allows suffering to remain shapeless. But, once suffering acquires vocabulary, it develops edges. You can walk around it, measure it, compare it against theory, qualify it, find precedents, give it footnotes, and locate yourself beautifully inside structures of domination and understand, with increasing precision, why you have become the person lying motionless in bed. And then what?

Knowledge is supposed to contain some emancipatory promise, right? Naming the thing is supposed to weaken it. Consciousness is supposed to be the beginning of action. But consciousness without access to action can curdle into something else entirely. Fatalism, maybe. A very educated despair. There is a peculiar cruelty in being able to explain the machinery that is crushing you while having no access to the lever that stops it. Worse: sometimes I suspect the explanation itself begins functioning as a substitute for reaching for the lever. Intellectualisation becomes another private theatre. Instead of daydreaming about becoming somebody else, I analyse why I cannot become somebody else. The fantasy has simply gone to university. So the skin breaks and underneath it I do not discover revolutionary muscle. I discover another skin. Then another. And somewhere beneath all of them, apparently, a person who is very tired.

This is where I become frightened of despair not merely as a feeling but as a position. A place one can begin living in. Because despair is strangely comfortable once it manages to convince you that it is realism. It tells you that you have finally stopped being naïve. That hope is bourgeois sentimentality. That aspiration is merely insufficient analysis. That because the structures are enormous and you are small, immobility is the only intellectually respectable response. 

And then you stay in bed. Perpetually giving in starts masquerading as having understood. 

I don't want that. I don't want to become so familiar with the impossibility of things that impossibility becomes the only thing I am capable of recognising. Perhaps this is another border I have to learn: the one between political clarity and fatalism. Between understanding constraint and worshipping it. Between knowing that individual will cannot repair a world and deciding, therefore, that my own will is of no use whatsoever. Because right now even the smallest imaginable escape feels obscenely large. Leave the house. Leave the town.Leave the state. Find somewhere else. Just somewhere else. Earn enough.Survive enough. Become enough of a shape that I can occupy my own life without constantly spilling out of it.

I keep calling these small things because history has made me ashamed of their scale. Somewhere people are organising under conditions I can barely comprehend, people are resisting things vastly more brutal than the domestic claustrophobia I keep converting into prose, and here I am imagining geographical relocation as revolution. But, I hope, scales do not cancel one another. Maybe, getting out is not the revolution. But, I hope, it is simply mine. And, I hope, the danger is not that I have mistaken leaving for liberation. The danger is that I understand perfectly well that leaving will not liberate me completely, and use that knowledge as another reason never to leave.

And then there are the things I had apparently already encountered. This might be the strangest part. Long before this recent political burrowing, I had written about political prisoners. I remember reading about one man in particular [born into an English family, studying Chinese, eventually becoming intensely involved in Maoist politics, went to the University I desperately wanted to go to] and finding his life interesting enough to preserve somewhere in this little archive of mine. I had read the words. I had looked up the history. Presumably I had understood the sentences individually. And yet I don't think I understood them. There are things you meet years before you arrive at them.

You see a person, a word, an event, an ideology and you register it. Maybe you even become temporarily fascinated by it. Then life drags you down five hundred unrelated roads and the thing sits somewhere in the sediment of your head, apparently dead, until one afternoon another tiny piece of information falls on top of it at precisely the correct angle and suddenly the whole buried structure lights up.

Oh.

That is what that meant. I have been having a lot of these ohs lately. Even embarrassingly basic words. Bourgeoisie, for instance. Obviously I knew the word. I could have given you a definition. I had encountered it in books and essays and political arguments, probably nodded solemnly at it dozens of times throughout school and college. But knowing the dictionary arrangement of a word and having the thing it names become perceptible in the world are completely different experiences. For weeks I have been flailing around the far-left internet with what I now realise was often a very surface-level understanding... grabbing terminology with both hands while half of it leaked through my fingers. And then today I watched one video and something clicked. Of course, not everything. I don't think understanding usually arrives like lightning anyway. And that is another fantasy I have inherited: that knowledge, first, enters as revelation, one spectacular and momentary intellectual orgasm after which you are Changed Forever™. I think, most understanding is much more boring than that. Somebody tells you something once and you don't get it. Then you encounter it again six months later and still don't get it. Then you read three pages about something apparently unrelated.Then somebody uses the same word differently. Then you watch a badly edited video at an inconvenient hour. Then five years of miscellaneous information quietly move half an inch inside your skull and suddenly something that had been sitting in front of you all along develops depth. And, comprehension is less an opening eye than erosion. Relentless contact wearing away whatever prevented the thing from entering.

Which means those political prisoners I once read about have begun returning to me differently too. Their imprisonment is no longer merely an interesting historical cruelty I can put in a paragraph and mourn from a safe chronological distance. Once you begin understanding even a little more about what people were organising against, what states believed they threatened, what ideological traditions they belonged to, what kinds of movements existed around them... the biography rearranges itself. Details I had previously treated as trivia acquire political gravity. And this should be satisfying. You know... Sometimes it is. For approximately thirty seconds I get the tiny stupid pleasure of: wow, I understood something. Then, almost immediately, the pleasure rots.

Because every new piece of understanding also reveals the acreage of what I do not understand. How far behind am I? That question has been following almost every intellectual excitement lately. Not merely behind other people [which is already an efficient way of poisoning curiosity] but behind history itself. Behind words I have apparently been using without having really inhabited them. Behind people who reached these questions years or decades before I knew there was a question. Behind my own previous self, even, who occasionally stumbled across something important, looked directly at it, wrote it down, and then wandered away because she did not yet possess whatever neighbouring pieces would have made it intelligible.

It is a strange humiliation: discovering evidence that reality had been trying to teach you things before you were capable of being taught. And that is why understanding rarely feels purely happy to me.Every oh contains another sentence underneath it: How did you not see this before? And then another: What are you looking directly at now that will take you another five years to see?

~ Oizys.

'The' Closet Drama

July 22, 2026. 11:20 PM

What’s a closet drama? Well. It is a play you read. Yes, that’s it. It is meant to be read by one solitary reader. Academics believe that women writers who couldn’t use their ‘voice’ employed this form of art/writing to put forth their political stances. One very well-known practitioner of this form is Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle-on-Tyne (1623–1673), who explored this tool and came to be known as one of the best-known women playwrights.¹

How did I get to know about this? Well, the past few days have been engulfed by maladaptive daydreaming about being a playwright² because the nonprofit organization I work for is doing an event, and it has plays. And yesterday, my manager asked me to conceptualize some endings for a last-minute new play in the line-up.³ She told me today that my endings were nice and hoped the director of the play [also, my big boss] would go for the first one. I liked the last one better, which was co-developed by another co-worker and me. 

Anyway, this set of daydreaming about being a playwright transitioned well from the last set about the mysterious video editor. I was searching for him recently to look up his recent work, and I found out he has been working for this very courageous, anti-establishment, subversive stand-up comedian. My daydreamings faded into him. I have been thinking a lot about his life. You know how the more you trace a person’s life backwards, going as far back as possible to pinpoint at what point they got induced with so much courage to make the choices they make. And you feel that cyclical force between their choices and courage that makes your cowardly brain a little bit cartoonishly dizzy. And when the machine of maladaptive daydreaming takes a break, the interval is occupied by its frenemy, comparison, which just makes you falter until the machine resumes.

Anyway. Whilst this has been happening in my head, the world is burning [still],⁴ and my country has been waking up. My country has been going to the streets. I am anyway a slow person in all aspects, as opposed to this exponentially advancing era. And if you are someone who, after a lot of dopamine struggles, has forgone the tech tools of this era, like Instagram,⁵ then you will understand that I could not grasp the intensity and the importance of this movement happening on the streets around me. But I will never expect, of course, that people condone my [self-?]isolatory cowardice. Why should they... all while they use their bodies on physical sites of fascism to dismantle all the structures of oppression? 

While I am stickied in my half-room, waiting for [more than a month] something to hit me so I could fantasize about becoming the next great literary mogul after I word-vomit in my unindexed Blogspot blog. I am no Emily Dickinson. Although I do have a trunk with some books. And I keep my writings hidden. But not in the trunk.⁶

Anyway. I feel it is impossible for me to be complicit in all of this because I am not morally bankrupt, of course. But my cowardice keeps me from turning my site of complicity into a site of solidarity.⁷ And I also wholly acknowledge that it is not an excuse in a state of fascism. In a state of fascism, if you dwindle around and do not resist, then you are a state apparatus, whether you like it or not.

I tried staying away from everything and just mindlessly slaving away for a morally bankrupt nonprofit that is organizing an event by creatively censoring its feminist politics for a morally bankrupt funder. They are dancing, singing, clapping, speechifying, performing, discussing, panelling. All while, in the city they are organizing it in, people are being arrested, detained, killed, molested, pelleted, beaten. 

By the way, this is the same event I was “invited to” very late, and I didn’t go.⁸ What if I had gone there? Would I have gotten anything done at work, all while being very much aware of the paralyzing ability my awareness has? I mean, any social situation can neuter the social animal in me. Just imagine, just collapsing and flailing. Did I make a better decision by not going? But what if I had gone, and that experience could have thrust me into something entirely different? 

Anyway, these questions do not matter. I mean, they do. But only for intangible feelings like regret, which only materializes to stagnate. 

While I dwell on these useless, mindless debates in passing, and the maladaptive daydreamings run in the background, subsuming my mind and body by nibbling on real life, real life still leaks in. Mother still knocks, and the inner hellish self-doubt–self-surveillance machinery in me keeps looking back at the door while the maladaptive daydreamings ushers me in.

I always draw lines to connect the home being a mini-state, the micro-oppressive bricks that keep institutional fascism alive and kicking. Is it wrong for me to draw parallels between my mother’s sudden descent into religious madness—all while, whenever she talks to me, she cribs about days passing, nights wearing down, and each date being a cross she has to bear—and the collective descent into religious madness in the society around me, as welfare is steadily dismantled while the fascists suckle on shards of democracy and dissent, and the hairy godmen dance around half-naked with sermons full of hatred, misogyny, hypercapitalism, and communal poison.

~ Oizys.

—

¹ Margaret Cavendish was a prolific poet, playwright, philosopher, fiction writer, and essayist who published under her own name. Her works include Poems, and Fancies and the closet drama The Convent of Pleasure.
² One idea that’s been permeating my brain revolves around the dowry-box trunk that my mother brought when she was married off to my father. That is where I store my books. Consider this a pre-emptive footnote 6 reference.
³ Yet again, the banality of my MDD hit me with a sock full of coins because I could not think of anything on my own.
⁴ Iran war latest: Tehran reacts after Trump's power plant warning - as president 'honours' killed troops // Israel is building a miles-long earthen barrier inside Gaza, entrenching its division
⁵ Am I the only one who feels like I am looking at stale, old self-brain-vomit when I go back to Instagram? It has become unscrollable for me.
⁶ For those who don’t know: Emily Dickinson’s profession as a poet was unknown to almost everyone during her life, and the poems we devour today were published posthumously. After her death, her sister Lavinia discovered hundreds of poems, including hand-sewn fascicles and loose sheets kept in a locked chest, with no instructions about what should be done with them. And she was a very productive poet during the Civil War in the United States. So, you get my overall reference. Also, a footnote 2 reference.
⁷ A reference to the previous blog where I quoted Nat Raha. What a hypocrite I am.
⁸ A reference to the previous blog: they asked me so late and tried to spin it as my fault, but I did not allow them.

Some musings on 'no miracle exit' [29th April 2026 - 9th May 2026]

29/04/2026, 19:50 PM
the body being trapped in the present
The shadows in this room have begun to whisper, mapping out a layout that defies Euclidean geometry. I have checked the door. It’s just a painted mural on cold concrete and the windows are only flickering screens showing a sunny day that never shifts, never changes. If teleportation were real, I’d be in a field of wild lavender right now, feeling the actual sun. Instead, I am just waiting for the final flickering, wishing I could simply will myself elsewhere. A blink. A breath. The sensation of tearing through the air. But there is only here. And I am not going anywhere.
-

30/04/2026, 01:56 AM
teleportation as escape
The morning tea still tastes like the long, tedious, beautiful commute it took to get here. If only teleportation were possible. If only I could step into a glass booth in New York, exhale the scent of rain on concrete, and inhale the salty, impossible air of a cliffside in Santorini, all in the time it takes to click my heels. To cease to be here, and instantly be there. To tear the tapestry of space-time and skip the messy, dusty threads in between. But it is not. Instead, I am bound by the laws of thermodynamics, by the agonizing, beautiful, slow-motion truth that to get to a new place, I must physically inhabit all the old places in between. I must watch the scenery blur, feel the weight of a suitcase, and endure the anticipation. If teleportation were possible, we wouldn’t have postcards. We wouldn’t have the desperate, sweet longing for a destination. We wouldn’t know the joy of arrival. We’d only have perfect copies of ourselves, appearing at our desks, at our dinners, in our lovers’ arms, forever wondering if the "us" who woke up this morning actually survived the commute. But it is not. So I will keep my atoms right here, in this chair, and I will be grateful for the slow, messy journey. I will let the world exist at a distance. I will let the space between here and there remain, filled with everything I am not yet, but might become.
-

30/04/2026, 01:57 AM
the space between here and elsewhere
I am so scared. he is screaming out loud. I can hear the walls vibrating. Why is he doing that? It’s not just noise, of course, that is a primary issue, but it is also like tearing paper in my brain. My heart is acting like a trapped bird, beating against my ribs, just thump-thump-thumping so hard I can feel it in my throat. Why is it so hot in here? I can’t catch my breath, it’s like there’s not enough air in the room, like someone is squeezing my chest. My knees feel like water. I just want to shrink, to shrink into nothing, to crawl into a drawer and lock it. Stop it, stop it, stop it. I can feel my hands shaking. I am trying to hold onto my own hands but they are still shaking. Why is he screaming? Did I do something? Is it my fault? No, please, it is not my fault. Everything is too loud. The air feels thick. The walls are closing in, they are literally moving closer, I swear I can see them. Why is my face wet? Oh, I am crying. I need to breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, I can't breathe. The sound feels like a physical weight, pressing down until there is nowhere left to turn. Every nerve is on edge, waiting for the silence that won't come. It’s hard to focus on anything else when the air is filled with that sound, making it impossible to find a steady thought or a moment of peace. Please, just let there be silence.
-

09/05/2026, 01:19 AM
teleportation is not real
I am writing this days later, but my body does not understand dates. It still thinks it is trapped in that room. It still checks the walls. It still listens for the next raised voice the way people listen for thunder after lightning. There is a cruelty in the ordinary continuation of things. The fan keeps turning. The phone charges. Someone somewhere is chopping coriander. A dog barks, a pressure cooker whistles, a neighbour drags furniture across the floor, and the world has the audacity to remain functional. Meanwhile, some part of me is still standing there, small and alert, waiting for silence to prove it is real. I keep thinking about teleportation. Not the glamorous kind. Not glass booths or blue light or arriving in Santorini with perfect hair and no luggage. I mean the ugly, desperate kind. The kind where the body says: remove me. Not tomorrow. Not after explanation. Not after I have packed a bag, justified myself, made arrangements, behaved sensibly, thanked everyone for their concern. Just remove me. Please. One clean tear in the fabric of here. But there is no such mercy. There is only the body, stubborn and biological, refusing to become mist. There is only the long route out: one breath, then another; one room survived, then another; one morning coffee after a night that did not end properly. Maybe that is why travel feels holy to me. Because distance has to be earned. Why? Because the road proves that leaving is possible, even if it is slow. Why? Because every train platform, airport gate, bus window, and tired suitcase says the same old thing in different accents: You were there. Now you are here. Maybe teleportation would rob me of that evidence. Maybe I need the road because the road leaves witnesses. Ticket stubs. Bad tea. Dust on shoes. A song overheard in a cab. The absurd dignity of dragging luggage across broken pavement. The proof that I crossed something and remained myself. Or maybe I am romanticising inconvenience because the alternative is admitting how badly I wanted to disappear. Both can be true. Please...? Tonight, I do not want lavender fields or Santorini cliffs. I want a room that does not pretend to be a trap. I want a door that is a door. I want windows that do not perform sunlight, but allow it. I want silence without waiting for it to be broken. I want to arrive inside my own life and not flinch. Until then, I will stay with the slow laws of matter. No vanishing. No perfect copies. No miracle exit. Just this body. These atoms. This breath. Still here. Not going anywhere yet.
-

09/05/2026, 01:19 AM
the long route out

Tomorrow my sister will come back home. Or that is the version of the sentence I am allowed to write. According to my mother, she left. According to my mother, she is in the country. According to my mother, many things are true if said firmly enough and repeated near the kitchen sink. But I know she is not. Do not worry. I will not tell anyone. Especially now, when I am not speaking to my mother. There is a strange discipline in silence. People think silence is empty, but it is not. Silence is a room full of labelled boxes of things you know, things you suspect, things you were told not to repeat, and things you figured out anyway because families are terrible at hiding the shape of their own lies. I keep my mouth closed and somehow still feel accused. The house has its own intelligence. It knows who is missing. It knows which slippers have not moved. It knows the difference between a person travelling and a person being edited out of conversation. Tomorrow, she will return, and everyone will behave as if geography is a minor clerical error. Maybe there will be tea. Maybe someone will ask if she ate. Maybe someone will say, “You have become thin/fat,” because that is how love enters cultured homes for the women when it has forgotten the front door. I will not ask where she was. Not because I do not care. Although, I know. But, because I care enough to know that sometimes the truth arrives tired, carrying its own luggage, and the kindest thing you can do is not inspect the baggage at the door. Still, I am angry. Not the loud kind. The clean, cold kind. The kind that sits upright at the dining table and remembers every contradiction. The kind that does not shout because shouting would make it too easy for everyone to call it emotional and move on. I am not speaking to my mother right now. And, this too is a language.A bitter one, yes. But honest. More honest than the carefully polished sentences passed around this house like steel plates. I do not know what tomorrow will bring. Maybe relief or theatre or another version of the story I am expected to swallow without chewing. But I know this: my sister will come back home. And when she does, I will look at her face first. Not for proof, confession, justification, love, support, longing, sisterhood, betrayal. Just to see whether she has returned whole. Everything else can wait.
-

09/05/2026, 03:55 PM
the laws of matter
Why is it that people grow up under one roof, and one abuses the other, and the abuser always gets to go on and have a life? They go on. That is the part that feels obscene. They go on to other countries, other rooms, other photographs. They stand in front of monuments. They eat something pretty from a ceramic plate. They laugh with friends on trips. They make memories. They make videos. They make themselves understandable. Meanwhile, the abused one rots in the corner. Not just poetically. Actually. Rotting is not always dramatic, well, sometimes it is and sometimes we make it, to make rotting sufferable. Sometimes it looks like sitting at a desk and answering emails. Sometimes it looks like doing laundry. Sometimes it looks like being productive enough that no one can accuse you of collapsing, but not alive enough to call it living. I sit. I rot. I work. I write. I labour. I do all the ordinary things required to keep a body officially functioning. And still, some part of me remains in the corner where I was left. I look at this site within my own walls and I recognise the blueprint of society. This is how it works.Home is the first state. Home is the first court, the first police station, the first prison, the first propaganda machine. Home teaches you who is allowed to speak, who must lower their eyes, who gets believed, who gets explained away, who must preserve the family’s dignity by swallowing every sharp object placed in their mouth. Home is where oppressors rehearse. Before the world calls them charming, complicated, misunderstood, promising, emotional, stressed, young, human, the home has already given them a stage. And before the world calls the abused one difficult, bitter, unstable, dramatic, ungrateful, too sensitive, too much, the home has already written that script too. I have seen it, inside these walls. The same architecture. The same excuses. The same redistribution of sympathy. The person who harms gets a future. The person harmed gets a personality diagnosis from people who never witnessed the violence, only the aftermath. And the aftermath is always so inconvenient-looking. It does not photograph well. There are no cute reels for learning to breathe again after someone has made your own body feel unsafe. No aesthetic caption for flinching at footsteps. No travel montage for being unable to leave because every ounce of strength is spent surviving the room you are already in. People who have physically, verbally, emotionally, sexually, psychologically abused and violated me get to go on. They get to travel. They get to have friends. They get to sit around tables and tell stories where I am mostly painted as the villain. And people know those versions. That is another violence. Not the first one, no. Maybe an extension of this one. But it has teeth. The story leaves before you do. It reaches the room early, shakes hands, orders tea, takes the comfortable chair. By the time you arrive, wounded and late and trying not to shake, everyone has already been introduced to your caricature. The villain. The liar. The mad one. The problem. The one who destroys peace by naming the war. And what can you say then? How do you explain abuse to people who are already suspicious of your mouth? How do you narrate violation without being cross-examined by people who think neutrality is a virtue, when neutrality is often just cowardice wearing clean clothes? The abused are expected to provide perfect testimony. No contradictions. No rage. No ugliness. No memory gaps. No inconvenient timing. No grief that makes others uncomfortable. We must be articulate, but it cannot rehearsed. We must be broken, but it cannot messy. We must be honest, but please not too detailed. We must be hurt, but do not accusing. We must be forgiving, preferably. We must be quiet, ideally. And if we cannot do that, then perhaps we are unreliable. Perhaps it was not that bad. Perhaps both sides. Perhaps family. Perhaps move on. Move on. What a clean little phrase like a broom pushed over blood. People say it as if movement is available to everyone equally. As if leaving is only a question of courage. As if the abused body has not been trained, over years, to freeze before it can run. As if money, health, work, friendship, housing, documentation, shame, exhaustion, fear, and the slow erosion of self are not also locks. All we get are strange corners of the internet with ;ittle digital cupboards where we can place our unbearable sentences and weird anonymous rooms where we fantasise about teleportation because the actual routes out require energy we were never allowed to keep. The body is not merely tired. It is harvested and cultivated and systemically kept tired. That is the part people do not understand. Or, refuse to understand for their own peace. Abuse steals labour before labour can become escape. It takes sleep, concentration, confidence, appetite, time, decision-making, tenderness, memory. It takes the clean morning in which a person could have applied for a job, called a friend, planned a move, studied, saved money, built a life. It takes the future in small daily withdrawals. Then the abuser returns and asks why you have nothing. Why are you still here? Why are you like this? Why can’t you be normal? Why don’t you do something with your life? As if they did not stand at the door of that life and charge a toll in fear. As if they did not keep coming back to break the tools. As if they did not benefit from your stuckness. Because that is the design, isn’t it? It's intentional. Keep the abused close enough to access. Weak enough to control. Ashamed enough to stay silent. Isolated enough to doubt their own memories. Exhausted enough to fail at escape. Then step outside and become a person among people. Tell sob stories. Receive comfort. Go on beautiful trips. Let friends say, “You deserve happiness.” Upload the sea. Upload the mountains. Upload the laughing, forgiven face. And somewhere, in a room no one is filming, the person they harmed is trying to convince her nervous system that the door is real. I hate this. I hate the injustice of it with a clean, ancient hatred. I hate that survival makes the abused look smaller while impunity makes the abuser look well-adjusted. I hate that the world loves a healed survivor but distrusts a bleeding one. I hate that pain must become literature before anyone will sit with it and sit with the discomfort. 

And still, I write. Not because writing saves me. Well, maybe momentarily. But, not tangibly. Let us not be sentimental. Writing does not unlock doors. It does not pay rent. It does not erase hands, words, threats, rooms, nights. It does not make the body forget what it had to learn. But writing does one stubborn thing. It refuses the official record. It says: no. No, that is not what happened. No, I was not born difficult. No, my silence was not proof that nothing occurred. No, their happiness is not evidence of their innocence. No, my corner is not my natural habitat. No, I am not a villain because I remember. Tonight, I do not want revenge. Revenge would still keep me tied to the architecture. I want exit. I want witnesses who do not ask me to bleed politely. I want a life where my labour finally returns to me and my body. I want friends who know my story from my mouth. I want a room where no one weaponises volume. I want mornings that belong to the future and not to recovery. I want my body to stop mistaking peace for the brief pause before harm resumes. And yes, I still want teleportation, not to disappear forever. Just to stand once, even once, in a place untouched by their version of me. A field. A train platform. A rented room with a working lock. A city where no one knows the family mythology. A small table near a window. A cup of tea going cold for ordinary reasons. Somewhere I can say my own name and not hear it returned as an accusation. Until then, I remain here. Not because here deserves me or I forgive the walls or the story is over. But because even rotting things know something about soil, even corners gather dust into evidence, even a body trained for fear can one day relearn distance. I am not the version they carried into other rooms. I am the witness they failed to kill. I am the archive with a pulse. And one day, when I leave, it will not be teleportation. It will be slower. Messier. More humiliating [for them]. More real. I will cross every inch of the distance they said I could not survive. And when I arrive, I will know this with my whole, exhausted, disobedient body: I did not vanish. I escaped.
-

~ Oizys.

30th April 2026, after the rain, when the April ends

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.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 30] - Archivists of Lost Girls or, The People Who Remove Childhoods

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 30]

Day Thirty

Well, it’s happened again. We’ve come to the last day of another National/Global Poetry Writing Month. We’ll be back tomorrow with a final featured participant and some housekeeping details, but in the meantime, congratulations to all who have made it to the end! And if your output has tapered off or been spotty — no worries! The best thing about Na/GloPoWriMo is that every day you write a poem, you get a poem-shaped prize.

Our featured participant today is words with ruth, where you’ll find a complex, tender response to Day 29’s past-and-present prompt.

Our final feature resource is poet and professor Judy Jordan’s YouTube videos covering individual poems and discussing poetic craft.

And now, here’s this year’s final (optional) prompt. In his poem, “Angels,” Russell Edson speaks of these spiritual warrior-messenger-guardians as if they were a type of endangered animal. Brief as it is, the poem is disorienting in its use of flattened diction, odd similes, and elliptical statements. Today, try writing your own poem that discusses a real or mythical being or profession (demons, firefighters, demonic firefighters) with the same sort of musing yet dispassionate tone.

Happy writing!

-

My offering for Day Thirty. My final offering of this year: 

Archivists of Lost Girls
or, The People Who Remove Girlhoods

The people who remove girlhoods do not wear uniforms.
This is one reason they are difficult to report.
They arrive gradually, like mildew, or relatives.

At first, they only take the unnecessary things:
the belief that adults know what they are doing,
the habit of sleeping without strategy,
the blue eraser shaped like a fruit
nobody can identify anymore.

They are careful workers.
They do not remove the whole girlhood in one afternoon.
That would be inefficient and might attract birds.

Instead, they begin with the corners.

A birthday becomes a budget.
A classroom becomes a ranking.
A body becomes a subject
people discuss in lowered voices.

Later, they return for the larger furniture:
the fearless laugh,
the unlicensed hunger,
the talent for asking questions
without apologising first.

By then, the childgirl has usually learned to help them.

She folds her own brightness.
She labels the boxes.
She says,
No, no, it is fine,
I was going to become careful anyway.

There are museums where removed girlhoods are kept.

No one has found them.

Some say they are stored under government buildings.
Some say inside mothers.
Some say they migrate at night in the mouths of street dogs.

The archivists of lost girls work mostly underground.

This is not symbolic.

The rent is cheaper there, and sorrow keeps better without sunlight.
They are a small profession, with poor chairs and excellent handwriting.
Their work involves cataloguing the girls who misplaced themselves
between instruction and obedience, 
between the first blood and the first apology for taking up space.

Each girl is assigned a number, a weather condition,
and one object found near the disappearance.
Ribbon.
Trinkets box.
Library card.
Half a guava.
A sock with the elastic gone.

The archivists do not speculate.
Speculation leads to poetry, and poetry leads to funding cuts.

Instead, they write:
Subject last seen laughing without lowering her voice.
Subject last seen believing the body was private property.
Subject last seen asking why three times in one afternoon.

These are considered high-risk behaviours.
There are shelves for the girls who became useful.
There are drawers for the girls who became quiet.
There is a locked cabinet for the girls who became mothers 
before becoming themselves.

No one opens it without gloves.

The people who remove girlhoods deny everything.
They point to photographs as evidence.
See?, they say. There she is, smiling.
This is considered a strong defence.

At the back of the archive
sits Oizys,
minor goddess of grief, anxiety, and other inherited furniture.

She is not the director.
This is a common mistake.

She is only the woman who stamps each file
RECEIVED
in red ink and sometimes, when nobody is watching,
adds:
STILL BREATHING.

The archivists dislike this.
It is not standard practice.

Hope, like mould, spreads through paper if left unattended.

Occasionally, however, a grown woman will be found
standing in a stationery shop, holding a packet of glitter pens
with unnecessary tenderness.
Or crying because a school bell rang in a movie.
Or buying mango candy from a man on a bicycle
though she has no girl with her and no reasonable explanation.

These incidents are rare but significant.
They suggest that removal is never complete.
They suggest that somewhere inside the adult
a small illegal person is still refusing evacuation.

The people who remove girlhoods are aware of this problem.
It keeps them awake. Not from guilt.
From professional concern.

Once a year, usually in April, a grown woman arrives asking to see her own file.

The archivists are polite.
They offer tea in a cup labelled
EVIDENCE.
They explain that lost girls are not returned to the public
without proper identification.

The woman produces a scar, three unfinished songs,
a fear of raised voices, and the exact smell of her school corridor after rain.
The archivists confer.
This is often enough.

Sometimes, from a box marked
MISCELLANEOUS LIGHT,
they return to her, one laugh, creased but usable.
One question with its teeth intact.
One small, illegal hunger.
The woman signs where indicated.

Oizys watches from the back desk,
chewing the end of a government pencil.

She knows the archive is incomplete.
This is why she keeps writing.

~ Oizys.

-

And a note I wrote to mark the ending of NaPoWriMo 2026: 30th April 2026, after the rain, when the April ends.

Thank you to everyone who read, visited, commented, and left a little light in this otherwise quiet corner of the internet. For one month, this weblog became a village again... noisy with poems, grief, jokes, weather, witness, and strange little offerings. May our paths meet again next year.

29th April 2026. 9:57 PM.

29th April 2026. 9:57 PM.

Tomorrow is the last day of NaPoWriMo. Last year, I remember writing a more openly heartfelt closing post. This year, I do not know yet what kind of ending this April will allow. It has been hotter, angrier, more interrupted, more crowded with news, rooms, bodies, windows, and small refusals. So I am preparing this tonight and leaving the door open for tomorrow’s mood to enter.

This April contained: windows left open against instruction, sirens, a cup with tea-darkened edges, pasta, news alerts, mother’s voice in the kitchen, father’s lunchbox, shoulder carrying yesterday’s argument, crows, heat, unfinished sentences, poems posted late, comments from strangers who became a temporary room, one notebook pretending not to know how much of the month it has swallowed, the strange daily embarrassment of still wanting language to do something, and the small stubborn ritual of returning to the page anyway.

And then there was one. I do not know yet what April has made of me this year, except that I kept showing up, late sometimes, tired often, but here. Maybe that is not a victory. Maybe it is just attendance. But some months ask for attendance like proof of life.

So I am preparing this tonight and leaving space for tomorrow’s prompt, tomorrow’s mood, and whatever weather the room decides to bring. Maybe the final poem will be gratitude. Maybe it will be exhaustion. Maybe it will be one more inventory of what survived.

For now: one more night before the last poem.

There is still the country, refreshing itself with the confidence of a bad machine. There are still people elsewhere being counted badly or not at all. There are still people elsewhere being counted badly or not at all. There is still the poem, which does not save them, which does not save me, which has the decency not to lie about this. But it remains on the table. A small stubborn object. A witness with ink on its hands.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 29] - After Opening the Same Window

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 29]

Day Twenty-Nine

Happy Wednesday, all, and happy penultimate day of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

Our featured participant for the day is Sunra Rainz, whose response to Day 28’s six-line-poem prompt reminds us to seize the day (and wear the dress).

Today’s resource is The Poetry Exchange podcast. Each episode not only explores a different poem, it discusses why that particular poem has been a “friend” to a particular interviewee.

Finally, here’s today’s prompt (optional, as always). In “After Turning the Clocks Back,” Jennifer Moxley links present with past, using a few well-placed details to invoke both a sense of the daily “now” and a nostalgic sense of the speaker’s long-ago life. In your poem today, similarly compare your everyday present life with your past self, using specific details to conjure aspects of your past and present in the reader’s mind.

Happy writing!

-

Note: Firstly, thank you to every single one of you who appreciated by poem yesterday. I will definitely find some time to respond to all of you. Now. Day Twenty-Nine asked us to compare our everyday present life with our past self, using specific details from both the daily now and the long-ago then. Since this is the penultimate poem of April, I suppose it is only fair that the month has started asking for evidence: who were you, who are you, and what, exactly, has been misplaced between the two? So here is my offering for Day Twenty-Nine:

After Opening the Same Window

Today, I open the window
before the room can become an argument.

Heat enters first, then the neighbour’s mixer,
then a motorbike, then one crow
with the confidence of a minor official.

My laptop is already awake,
blue-lit and accusing.
The inbox has multiplied overnight
like a rumour with funding.

On the table: one steel glass,
one half-finished cup of tea,
one notebook pretending it is not judging me,
one phone carrying the world’s fresh injuries
in a font designed for convenience and aesthetics.

This is my life now:
checking the news before brushing my hair,
answering emails with a body
that has become very good
at storing weather and warning
in the same shoulder.

But once, I was a girl
who thought morning meant only morning.

Once, I sharpened pencils
with a red plastic sharpener
over the dustbin
and believed the curled shavings
were proof that something useful
could come from being reduced.

Once, my schoolbag smelled
of tiffin, pencil box, raincoat plastic,
and the faint metallic panic
of unfinished homework.

I wore two tight plaits
that mother braided
and carried a water bottle
that leaked into my books
like a small private monsoon.

I thought the future
would arrive properly dressed.

I thought adulthood meant
a table of one’s own,
a clean cup,
a door that closed,
and nobody asking
why one’s face looked like that.

Now I have the table.
Now I have the cup.
The door closes badly.
The face has become evidence.

The girl I was
stands in the corner sometimes,
still in her uniform,
still holding a compass box
with one broken hinge.

She watches me read about another city
being turned into smoke
while the pressure cooker whistles
as if nothing has happened
because something is always happening
and lunch must still be made.

She asks, is this the future?

I tell her, yes, unfortunately,
but look, we still keep notebooks.

She asks, did we become brave?

I tell her, not exactly.
We became observant,
which is less heroic
but harder to confiscate.

She asks, did we learn to speak?

I tell her, sometimes.
Often late.
Often after the room has emptied.
Often with the window open,
so the sentence has somewhere to go.

Outside, the crow has returned
to inspect the railing.
Inside, the tea has darkened.
The laptop waits.
The country refreshes itself
without apology.

I pick up the cup.

Somewhere in me,
the girl with the leaking bottle
and homework panic
leans closer.

She wants to know
if we are happy.

I want to be honest,
but not cruel.

So I say:
we are still here.

I say:
we have become the kind of woman
who opens the window anyway.

I say:
we no longer mistake morning
for innocence,

but sometimes,
before the first notification,
before the heat fully enters,
before the day files its charges,

there is still a second
when the light touches the floor
like an old friend
who remembers our name.

~ Oizys.

After-note: The penultimate poem. Strange little word, penultimate. It sounds like something wearing spectacles and carrying bad news politely. A postman? One more day after this. One more window. One more attempt to make April give back at least some of what it has taken.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 28] - The Early Room // Before the News Refreshes

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 28]

Day Twenty-Eight

Welcome back, all, for the twenty-eighth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Today, our featured participant is the Poet Laureate of the Primitive Planets, which brings us a (gently) hysterical love poem in response to Day 27’s even-stanza-length prompt.

Today’s resource is this short meditation by the poet Barbara Guest, on the tension between a poet’s desire to control a poem, and the fact that poetry is often most moving when it surprises both the poet and the reader with wild and unpredictible moves.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt. Victoria Chang’s poem, “The Lovers,” is short and somewhat shocking, bringing us quickly from a near-hallucinatory descriptive statement to a strange sort of question, before ending on the very direct statement of a “truth.” Six lines, three sentences, and to top it off, a title that I think works for the poem but is only obliquely related to its text. Today, try writing a poem that follows the same beats: three sentences, six lines: statement, question, conclusion.

Happy writing!

-

Note: Day Twenty-Eight asked for a six-line poem in three sentences: statement, question, conclusion. Since I had already sat down to finish yesterday’s late poem before yet another long heated day could begin and become whatever it wanted to become, I thought I should also write today’s offering while the room was still somewhat available to me. So here it is, my offering (two, actually) for Day Twenty-Eight: brief, before the day grows teeth.

The Early Room

The morning sits at the edge of the bed
like a country pretending not to listen.

How many times can a kettle boil
before the house admits it is afraid?

Some truths do not arrive loudly.
They wait in the cup and darken the tea.

~ Oizys.

-

Before the News Refreshes

The window is open and the room is already full
of things no one has named yet.

What is the use of morning
if the world keeps entering before breakfast?

Some days begin as weather.
Some days begin as warning.

~ Oizys.

-

After-note: Maybe I will write more of these depending on how the day unfolds. Or I may not. The day has not yet submitted its agenda. Also, this is the third-last poem of April, which feels both relieving and suspicious.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 27] - Instructions for Sleeping With the Windows Open

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 27]

Day Twenty-Seven

Happy Monday, everyone. I hope you’re feeling energized about your writing as we head into the final days of this year’s April challenge.

Our featured participant today is What Rhymes With Stanza?, which brings us a quite feline response to Day 25’s ars poetica prompt.

Today’s resource is The Writers Annex Online, which offers a variety of short, online writing-related courses that include poetry workshops and explorations of specific poets’ work. Tuition rates vary from course to course, but these can be surprisingly affordable, particular given how distinguished the faculty is.

Last but not least, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Start by reading Robert Fillman’s poem, “There should always be two.” Now, write your own poem in which all the verses contain the same number of lines (whether couplets, triplets, quatrains, etc.) and in which you give the reader instructions of some kind.

Happy writing!

-

Note: Day Twenty-Seven asked for a poem in which all verses contain the same number of lines and give the reader instructions of some kind. I am late, again, because apparently April has decided to become a small unpaid supervisor with attendance issues.

Yesterday morning began with a slow and scary political discussion with my mother while she was hurriedly cooking for my father’s lunch. Afterward, the conversation stayed lodged in my brain, the way political speech in a family often does: not as opinion, but as evidence against you. Rebellion [read: dishonour], etc. Very efficient words. By late morning, I stretched my arms above my head and caught a crick in my left shoulder-neck, which felt like the conversation had been installed there as punishment. Or it could have been gas. The body is not always a reliable narrator, but it is usually a dramatic one.

At night, after working the whole day with the cricked shoulder, I cooked pasta, ate, and slept with the windows open for the second night in a row. Around the time my family usually goes to sleep, two policemen kept circling on a motorbike with their siren. My mother and I looked out. They made their laps and left. We turned off the lights, kept the windows wide open, and the generously violent wind cooled the dark room while the pain gathered me into sleep.

So here is my late offering for Day Twenty-Seven. Hope some of you are still around or will come back.

-

Instructions for Sleeping With the Windows Open

First, do not begin the morning
with politics near the stove.
Let your mother pack the lunchbox
before the country enters the kitchen.

If she says be careful, hear:
I have survived by lowering my voice.
If you say but how long, hear:
the daughter has mistaken fear for permission.

Do not call it rebellion yet.
Families prefer softer charges.
Say mood, say phase, say too much internet,
say the girl has become difficult again.

When the conversation ends, stand up.
Raise both arms above your head.
Let the left shoulder receive
what the room could not admit.

If the neck locks, do not panic.
Pain is also a clerk.
It stamps the body: received, received,
and misfiles the original wound.

Tell yourself it may be gas.
This is important.
History must never underestimate
the digestive system’s flair for metaphor.

Go to work with the crick.
Answer emails like a citizen.
Keep your face employable.
Move the cursor across the burning map.

Somewhere, a street is being erased
with the patience of paperwork.
Somewhere, a child’s name is shortened
to fit inside a report.

Do not say the large word.
Let it steam in the rice.
Let it enter through the news alert
and leave through the pressure cooker’s hiss.

By evening, boil water.
Salt it like a small sea.
Make pasta because the body, traitor,
still wants to be fed.

Eat without ceremony.
Wash the plate if you can.
Forgive the sink its ordinary mouth.
It has swallowed worse without testimony.

Open the windows again.
This is not courage.
This is heat management, mosquito risk,
and the ancient desire to breathe.

When the siren begins, pause.
Let your mother reach the window first.
Stand beside her in the dark
like two witnesses without a court.

Watch the policemen circle the lane.
Watch the motorbike carry authority
the way a matchstick carries fire:
smallly, loudly, looking for dry grass.

Do not ask what they want.
The point is the wanting.
The point is the lap, the return,
the neighbourhood taught to lower its pulse.

After they leave, do not celebrate.
Power also exits theatrically.
It trusts the echo to remain
and do unpaid night duty.

Turn off the lights.
Leave the windows wide open.
Let the wind enter like a relative
who has forgotten how to be gentle.

If it strikes the curtain, let it.
If it cools the room, thank it.
If it sounds like something fleeing,
do not correct the comparison.

Lie down on the painful side last.
Give the shoulder time
to stop being a border post
between speech and consequence.

Think of the body as a house
with bad civic planning.
One room stores anger.
One room floods in secret.

One room keeps every sentence
you were not allowed to finish.
One room opens at night
and counts the missing aloud.

Do not sleep immediately.
That would be too clean.
Let the mind inspect its ministries.
Let each department lose the file.

Think of your mother sleeping nearby.
Think of her hands smelling of cumin,
soap, steel, worry, and the lunch
sent out like a daily treaty.

Think of your father’s lunchbox.
Think of the state’s appetite.
Think of every home trained
to serve silence hot.

Do not become noble.
Nobility is often obedience
wearing better lighting.
Stay petty enough to notice pain.

If the shoulder throbs, listen.
If the siren returns, listen.
If the wind keeps moving, listen.
The night is giving instructions too.

It says: keep the window open.
It says: do not confuse air
with freedom, but take it anyway.
It says: breathe like contraband.

It says: the room is not innocent.
It says: neither are you.
It says: morning will come
with its stove, lunchbox, and country.

Until then, sleep badly if needed.
Sleep with the pane unlatched.
Sleep while the dark keeps watch.
Sleep as if refusal needs rest.

~ Oizys.

After-note: I do not want to name the thing too neatly today. Some violences become easier to digest when language packages them like finished news. But the poem knows what it is carrying: the home as border, the body as record, the siren as reminder, the open window as a bad and necessary form of breathing. Poems do not stop what is happening. But they can refuse the clean version. They can keep the window open long enough for the smell of smoke to enter the room.