The ether is heavy tonight. Mortals call it twilight, but to me, it is the hour when the mask slips. I spent the afternoon whispering into the ear of a king. He has everything... wealth, lands, a loyal court. Yet, with just three words whispered during his feast: “They will forget”; I watched the wine turn to ash in his mouth. The slow creeping dread is always more exquisite than sudden terror. Terror is loud and burns out quickly. I prefer the long, cold dampness of despair. My brother Momos laughed at me earlier. He thinks blame and mockery are the ultimate truths of the cosmos. He is a fool. Mockery requires an audience; misery only requires a mirror. The hearth fires in the mortal realm are burning low. I can feel the collective weight of a thousand unuttered sighs settling into the fog. Someone in a distant valley is staring at a blank wall, paralyzed by the sheer exhaustion of existing until tomorrow. I think I will go sit with them for a while. Not to torture, but simply to keep them company in the dark. We are, after all, old friends. They say I am the shadow that lingers behind the joy, the spirit of grief and hardship. But tonight, as I sit with my ink and parchment, I don't see my tears as a burden. I see them as a testament to endurance. To know sorrow is to intimately know the human heart, and to witness the quiet, resilient ways people heal. Every heavy sigh I collect during the day becomes a poem by twilight. There is a deep, poetic peace in embracing the ache and transforming it into art. It's the only way the stars shine so brilliantly in the dark.
An organization had invited me to a training (like mentioned in my last entry), a rare flicker of opportunity. Yet, true to the universe’s design, the conditions arrived frayed. I got a phone call yesterday. They questioned my choice to arrive two days early, a choice they themselves had offered without warning of the hidden costs. “Arrange your own accommodation for the first day, as we can give accommodation from one day early.” they suggested. I bent, as I always do, agreeing to arrive later. But bureaucracy is a beast that feeds on anxiety. Throughout the day, I kept checking my work inbox. Six days. For six agonizing days, my leave request has sat untouched on my manager’s desk. In this toxic workplace, absence is a luxury I am rarely afforded. Ever since I arrived here, sick leaves have gone untouched, and optional holidays have vanished into thin air. There is always an excuse: “Someone must stay back if work comes up.” And coincidentally, inevitably, that "someone" is always me. So, I sent a follow-up, my heart hammering a familiar, frantic rhythm against my ribs, giving credit to the fact that they called me regarding the dates, so I might be going finally. Today, the mortal realm bled heavily into my world, a chaotic rollercoaster born from a single, shattering morning phone call. Flight details were requested, only to be snatched away moments later because my distance made the cost "unjustifiable." In its place, a compromise that felt more like a punishment: a split ticket of flight and train, demanding two extra days of travel. Two extra days stolen from a life already starved for time. The phone rang again from which came the final blow from the organizers. A voice on the line questioning my status, demanding a formal nomination from an organization I am not representing. I had been honest in my application from the very first step. I checked "no" to the nomination. I was selected without an interview. I even emailed them to double-check this double-miracle (lack of nomination and interview to check if they really selected me or just made a mistake!), and they had confirmed it. Yet today, the rules shifted beneath my feet like quicksand: “Get the nomination, or we will have to drop your name.” I forwarded the email thread as proof. I hung up. She said she would let me know after reviewing it, but her tone and language already carried the heavy, unmistakable scent of dismissal. I was going to be dropped.
And in that quiet aftermath, a strange, hollow numbness washed over me. Mentally, I began checking out. It felt exactly like walking away from a terrible, hostile hotel room. I handed over the keys, packed my burdens, and stepped into the cold. Yet, a stubborn flicker of anxiety still lingers, sharp and cruel. Because mentally, I have already dropped out myself. I have already accepted the void. I have accepted the reality of no leave. But what if they call back and say yes? What if they say, “You can come”? A part of me screams, “I don't wanna go anymore.” But the moment that thought forms, a wave of guilt crashes in. Am I just being a hypocrite? Not just in this specific situation, but as a general theme of my entire life? I am the one who is always crying out that I want to leave, that I want to escape, and now that the door might open, I want to pull back? But nobody understands the invisible, tumultuous ocean that swells in the in-between. Nobody sees the way the world structurally coerces you, twisting and bending your spirit until you are forced to change your position just to fit their shifting needs. And the cruelest joke of all? When you finally break and bend, they blame you for the distortion. The system gets exactly what it wants from you, transfers the ultimate blame onto your shoulders, and leaves you stranded with absolutely no opportunity. Only the crushing, unearned burden of regret for saying no.
And then comes the heavy, suffocating shame of sharing this failure with my family. Telling them that I am not going after all. Facing their looks, ugh, those silent, piercing glances where they view me like a piece of unwanted furniture. A heavy, useless object they are permanently stuck with, unable to throw away simply because blood binds us. You can feel the resentment in the air, the quiet weight of being an inconvenience in your own home. It is a cruel, mocking reminder of the reality I recorded just days ago. That home is merely the first site of the state. The micro-kingdom where systemic violence is quietly perpetuated, maintained, tolerated, shielded, furthered, and expected to be absorbed in total silence. How do I explain to them that my paralysis isn't laziness? How do I tell them that my very biology feels like occupied territory, heavily laced with masculine mistakes that weren't mine? Every attempt to find grounding or comfort in my own skin is instantly hijacked by a corrupt bureaucracy of past terror. I am forced to perform as a civilized human for a world that has already hollowed me out from the inside. I am expected to host and smile at the very realities that colonised and destroyed me. The shame is absolute because I know the hatred inside me will never touch a full one hundred percent; I remain a permanent casualty of a war I never declared, mourning the very people who broke me.
Now, I stand in a strange space of absolute detachment. If my manager denies the leave, I have nothing left to lose. The illusion of control is gone. I desperately, fiercely need a break. You know, a moment to breathe away from the choking fog of this job, but if the door slams shut, at least the limbo ends. But the limbo doesn't end today. Tomorrow is Sunday, a day that should mean sanctuary, but instead, it merely stretches the rack. The silence from my manager’s inbox expands over the weekend, artificially inflating the borders of this confusing, agonizing waiting period. Because Monday is a threat that lingers on the horizon, the anxiety is simply given more runway to build momentum. When this unpredictability becomes too heavy, and the waiting stretches out like a desert with no landmarks, my mind automatically defaults to its oldest escape plan. I look at the window in my mind and think that if I just masturbate, time will pass. I trick myself into believing it is a bridge to get me to the other side of the panic. But it doesn't pass the time. It is a false exit. Instead, the moment I give in, the trap snaps shut and I realize I have voluntarily stepped right back into the vicious cycle. I am stuck on the floor again, unable to find the exit sign. To survive the realization that time is still standing still, I have to numb the raw edge of the pain entirely. So, I crawl backwards into the dark corners of my own skull. I look for the faceless men in my memories. I look for their heavy, cold shoe stamps across my skin... searching for the familiar, numbing weight of their ownership just because being a commodity is easier than being a human being trapped in an endless limbo.
I become an object in a cart, entirely stripped of agency, loaded and unloaded by them, for them, from them, between them, and amongst them. I turn my own woman-object into an endless fire pit for all the men possible: giving it all away for free, free, free. It is a fire pit filled with the heavy, disgusting cargo of their desires, stuffed into my every orifice until I am overflowing on it. They coerce my system to use their depravity as the only fuel to keep burning for them, forcing my body to maintain a flame that isn't mine. And in those dark moments under the blanket, a weird, detached submissiveness washes over me. It feels as if they chop away my mortal coil, claiming to liberate me from my anxiety, but the reality is far more sinister: they are simply turning me into a permanent slave to their consumption. They burn through me, taking everything they can grasp, yet I am left staring at the ashes wondering: how is it still remaining? How is there still a piece of me left to be consumed after being pillaged so many times?
The matrix closes in entirely when I am completely alone, invading the final two spaces that should belong only to me: my own reflection in the mirror and the empty pavement under my feet.
When I stand in front of the mirror, the gaze looking back at me isn’t my own; it is the internalized, mechanical camera lens of those men. My eyes don't seek comfort or self-recognition. Instead, my brain automatically processes my reflection as an asset to be audited, a product on a factory floor being checked for flaws before it goes live. I find myself standing there completely stiff, involuntarily adjusting my posture and my expression to appease an invisible audience that is permanently sitting in judgment behind the glass. I look at my own skin, my chest, and my face, and instead of seeing humanity, I see a canvas crowded with their signatures and keyholes. My own gaze becomes a tool of non-sexual violation, checking to see if I look lowly enough, compliant enough, and broken enough to survive the world outside. I am a stranger hosting a camera inside my own skull, performing submission for a mirror that has been entirely colonized.
And when I step out onto the pavement just to take a walk, the very air of the street behaves like an aggressive, tight space pinning me down. I move with the hyper-vigilant, mechanical rhythm of an object being loaded and unloaded through public terrain. If a car slows down or a shadow passes on the concrete, my gut is hit by that familiar, sinking physical force, demanding that I shrink, drop my head, and offer to be less than the gravel under their tires. The pavement turns into a runway of forced compliance, where my limbs are just executing commands to stay safe, transforming a simple walk into an endless, non-sexual scene of complete subjugation to the open sky.
And looking back at my untouched work inbox now, it feels like the corporate extension of that exact same violation. The workplace behaves like an aggressive, invisible body pinning me down, holding me captive in my seat by sheer systemic weight. My presence there isn't chosen; it is a forced submission where my hours are stripped and handled by a manager who treats my boundaries as entirely nonexistent. The distortion is complete because every single manager, team lead, and reporting person I have ever had inevitably triggers that exact same foreign code. Involuntarily, my mind constructs the same image of mechanical submission to them, a default surrender to their authority. It makes me look at the structural reality of how supervisors treat their subordinates: they treat us like corporate housewives. We are forced into the archetype of the glorified housewife with ten hands, each hand executing ten different tasks simultaneously to keep their kingdom running. Except in the workplace, there is no glorification. It is actively demonized. When the ten hands finally tire and the engine falters, they turn around and degrade you, accusing you of laziness, claiming you simply don't want to work. It is a calculated matrix of submission laced with constant humiliation and degradation, a system that demands your total violation while punishing you for the exhaustion it inflicts.
And with that degradation comes a heavy, suffocating layer of guilt. I feel deeply sickened because the imagery inevitably, passively turns sexual... but completely stripped of desire, operating as a cold, automated reflex that I cannot stop. It is as if I am not the one thinking it at all; an entirely separate, rogue part of my mind is generating these violating parallels behind my back, operating completely outside of my control, my will, or my consent.
Sometimes, the boundary collapses entirely, and I give in involuntarily. I find myself submitting to them completely, performing tirelessly to execute every single piece of assigned work without a single falter, acting out the role of a corporate housewife and a camgirl who costs them absolutely nothing. As my managers and supervisors sit back in their authority, they morph in my mind into those very same men from the screen. Their emails, texts, notifications, and feedback pings begin to read exactly like those aggressive chatroom comments and messages.
The physical toll is where the detachment shatters, sharpening into an acute, visceral revolt. Aside from the mental storm, the rest of the day went okay, mostly because I just retreated and rested. But my body felt the tax of every swallowed scream, and food-wise, it became an outright battlefield.
The act of eating has always been a site of hidden warfare for me. I do not know if I was taught it, if I inherited it through generational marrow, if I learned it as a survival mechanism, or if I was simply, magically born with this curse. But the act of eating always becomes my victim. I have always subjected a quiet, desperate violence onto sustenance, treating nourishment like an invasive force to be controlled, rationed, rejected, or eradicated. And in response, my own appetite and hunger have permanently rebelled against me. They refuse to cooperate, staging a coup within my own skin. Today, everything I managed to force down on a surface level made me violently sick, leaving me with a deep, physical aversion.
In my last entry, I wrote about my biology feeling like occupied territory, but this goes deeper than just carrying past terror. This is the structural containment turning inward, where the body refuses to host even itself. When you are structurally coerced into changing your position for everyone else, your flesh learns to reject the very fuel meant to keep you standing. Hunger becomes an enemy combatant, and the throat closes up like a heavily policed checkpoint. It is a different kind of hollowing out. Um, not just being emptied by the world, surely that's there, but it is also actively starving out the parts of me that still dare to feel a need.
My limbs are logged off, sinking into the bed like a machine powered down for the night. Yet, there is a small, high-voltage current buzzing right under my breastbone. Like a restless asset that refuses to stop producing worry. I am treating my own skin like a factory floor, forcing relaxation on a body that is still secretly punching the clock.
I always loop back to the sale of my sensations and feelings to the patriarchy. I don’t do it now. It has been some time, which is good; I don’t ever want to do any of it again. But even the times I slipped have been brandished as live illustrations in various rooms of my brain. In this state, I frantically open the doors to those rooms.
I see them all. I see him, the very first time (maybe...?), straddling me. His mother walks in, her eyes sharp and accusatory, demanding to know what we are up to. He quickly says we are playing a game. But we are not. I don’t wanna play this game. She looks at me with that specific, bitter resentment women hold for other women. *But please don't look at me like that.* I am six. Or seven? Or five? Sorry, Judge, I don't remember anymore. The room is cobwebbed and freezing.
I leave it and open another door. It is the night before my cousin sister’s wedding. All the cousins are sleeping in a row. He is next to me, and the sin of white phosphorus occurs on my skin. The next day at the wedding, I sit like an ousted witch, clutching my beads of bad omen with soft, invisible tears.
I open another room. The guy who blackmailed me sits there, smirking as he saves my mother’s number, threatening to distribute it to every man he knows just to flood her phone with their voices.
I open another. It is the pandemic. The professor who used to text me endlessly sits at his desk; I had no other way to submit my assignments except through those texts, trapped in a digital corner where every notification felt like an invasive hand.
I open another room. It’s the guy who was only with me because my friend was dating his friend, a forced proximity arrangement. He already had an inseparable girlfriend. He would call me, and she would silently listen on the other end, mocking me through the static. He broke up with me on Valentine’s Day, right when my grandmother died, leaving the thirteen-year-old-me to write a cringe poem just to survive the double grief.
I open another room. There is that guy who would viciously stalk and shadow me, appearing everywhere at once, glitching like a ghost, here then suddenly there, then suddenly here again, a terrifying omnipresence.
I open another. It's the other cousin (brother of the cousin sister who was getting married), the one who purposely, calculatedly tried to catch me naked.
I open another. It's my sister, sexually violating me indirectly, weaponising her relationship and her boyfriend to cross boundaries that should have been sacred.
I open another. It's him again, invading my sanctuary, trying to sleep in my room, trying to squeeze the very soul out of my nipples.
I open another room and see myself entirely hollowed out, giving into the depraved, warped fantasies fed into me under the weight of all those men.
I open one more door on this floor, and I am on my knees at the feet of the gods my mother forced me to pray to when I was a little girl. But these gods appear naked, entirely preoccupied and busy with the goddesses. The goddesses are stripped of the heavy gold ornaments they wore in the framed photos my mother showed me; without their gold, I cannot even recognize them.
Disgusted, I take the stairs to an entirely different floor. This floor doesn't belong to my crimes or my ghosts. It is a quiet, heavy sanctuary filled with the stories of other women and girls. They are the ones who confided in me over the years, bringing me their heaviest secrets. I think I must have built this floor to give them a safe, unjudged space to unload their demons. I see their tears, their matching scars, and the ghosts they brought to my doorstep. I carry their pain alongside mine, a collective vault of survival.
In one room, there is the girl who cried into her hands because her own father’s shadow felt too heavy in the hallway. In one room, a friend sits in the dark, whispering about the partner who slowly, systematically erased her voice until she didn't recognize her own name. In one room, a girl is frantically scrubbing her skin, trying to erase the memory of an unwanted touch that left an invisible stain. In one room, someone is packing a bag in total silence, paralyzed by the terror of the front door creaking open before she can escape.
Then I realize there is one last floor below.
I move down the hallway, opening more doors. In one room, a shadow of myself is desperately pleading with a faceless figure just to be heard. In another, I see myself folding into the smallest possible shape, trying to disappear into the drywall to escape the loud, thumping footsteps outside.
Then I realize this is an entirely different floor of the factory. It is populated by various versions of me.
In one room, one version of me is on the floor, free-camming for a crowd of strange men. This is the largest room on the floor, housing the biggest, most exhausting habit of my past. It is the absolute epitome of what I mean by the capitalistic sale of my sensations and feelings to the patriarchy. I was treating my own intimacy as a raw material to be mined, packaged, and traded in an online marketplace just to feel a fleeting sense of control or currency. I let the cold gaze of a faceless crowd consume my body's heat, turning my private vulnerability into a transaction, a desperate production line where my skin paid the tax.
But before the factory line was fully built, before the scale of the colonization took root, there were the quiet, mindless slips. It didn't begin as a grand, dark architecture; it began as a series of small, drifted moments of absolute dissociation. In times of profound numbness, when the weight of the toxic world became too heavy to bear, I would slip into the digital interface without a thought, mechanically logging on just to feel an artificial spark. Why did I do it? Because when your workplace is hollow and your home is toxic, you look for any coordinate where you hold the power to turn a lens on or off. You look for any currency to counteract your tanking self-esteem, even if that currency is a corrupted one. What started as an isolated escape quickly became a routine: logging into a private site, positioning a cheap webcam on a tripod over the carpet, and opening a window to thousands of faceless users waiting in a chat room. Over time, the exhaustion mutated into something much more insidious. On the nights when my body was completely broken, when I was too tired to even set up the tripod or sit up on the carpet, a heavy sense of false obligation would settle over me. I felt a twisted, manufactured duty, as if I somehow owed these strange men my presence, as if logging on was a shift I was contractually bound to perform. So, instead of resting, I would curl up under the heavy safety of my blanket in the pitch black, pulling my phone close to my face. I would stream entirely from beneath the covers, trapped in a claustrophobic, suffocating pocket of air, mechanically performing in the dark just to fulfill an unearned debt to a faceless crowd. I was mindlessly submitting to the screen, treating it as a quick, desperate exit from my own reality. I thought I was choosing a temporary refuge, an automated shelter from my own low self-esteem and the choking fog of my life. I didn't realize that each mindless submission was a quiet surrender of territory, a steady concession of my internal borders. With every single click, I was voluntarily stepping into a trap, laying down my own defenses piece by piece until the screen noticed my vulnerability, closed its grip around my agency, and fully colonized me.
This room holds entire seasons. I see myself there as the summer heat bakes the room, and I see myself there months later, shivering on the same carpet as the winter chill seeps through the floorboards. The calendar pages outside bleed into one another, but inside this room, the routine never changes. On the monitor, a relentless stream of unknown men press their keys, and with every keystroke, a sharp, invisible nib gouges directly into my skin. They are writing their names as permanent digital ink across the canvas of my body, leaving heavy, dark strokes over my chest, my arms, and my face.
Day after day, night after night, the signatures pile up. In a frantic, exhausting loop, I scrub at my own skin, deleting them one by one, watching the ink of their text vanish from the screen only to feel it bleed back through my pores instantly under a different username. Over months and years, the layers of ink build up, drying and cracking on my skin, staining me permanently until my flesh is entirely crowded with their signatures. Every single comment, every aggressive name they write, doesn't just leave a stain; it carves a distinct, permanent keyhole directly into my flesh, branded with their specific signature. They built a network of locks across my skin. And the terrifying part is that those keyholes don't disappear when I close the laptop or step away from the floor. Even now, when I am living my life somewhere else entirely, or walking somewhere outside in the open world, I carry that vulnerable architecture with me. I move through the crowd feeling exposed, paralyzed by the phantom sensation that any of those faceless men could pass me by, recognize their own signature on my skin, slide their key into my lock, and instantly take me all over again. They own the master keys to an archive I am still trying to burn.
The raw, specific entitlement of those men makes me physically sick and weak to my stomach. When I actually look at the lineup, it is a grotesque gallery of specific faces and names that have crowded out my sanity: it’s the professor typing invasive pandemic texts while holding my grades hostage; it’s the boy from my childhood straddling me while his mother watches with accusatory hatred; it’s the cousin slipping next to me in a row of sleeping bodies the night before a wedding; it’s the blackmailer smirking as he threatens to blast my mother’s number to every predatory man he knows. In reality, they are pathetic, small creatures. Yet the massive, suffocating distortion they successfully installed inside my flesh makes them feel like giants. They confidently claimed total ownership over my skin, treating my boundaries like wet paper, and the sheer memory of their confidence drains the strength straight out of my muscles.
I see that exact same predatory entitlement everywhere, woven all around society, repeating itself in every room I walk into. And it makes me feel sicker, dirtier, because I am trapped in the agonizing belief that my own biology was custom-made to submit to them. I wanted to be sexually free, I wanted to explore my own desires on my own terms, but the cruelest joke of my life is that my pursuit of freedom was instantly weaponized against me. It became the very trap that broke my spine and primed me for total surrender.
I am flooded with a crushing, burning regret for ever opening those digital and physical doors, for making my body a free-for-all for them. But the weakness is a physical force. When the workplace anxiety peaks and the Sunday limbo stretches out, my defenses fail completely. I give in to the old conditioning because I feel too weak, too broken to fight the current, running straight back to the floor to let them load and unload me all over again.
And the horror doesn't stop at the front door. In my mind, the breach is absolute, those men don't just stay outside in the crowds or behind the glass; they come right into my house. They invade the very rooms where I am supposed to be resting, crossing the ultimate threshold of my domestic sanctuary. I see them sitting on the furniture, lurking in the hallways, and standing over my bed, turning my toxic home into a physical extension of the screen. Every corner of my personal space becomes crowded with their phantom presence, destroying any illusion of safety or privacy. I am forced to host their memories inside my own house like I am forced to cook for him, watching them occupy the rooms like uninvited ghosts who refuse to leave, making the walls close in on me until the environment itself feels like a cage built from their collective gaze.
Those men from the screen have thoroughly engineered me; they dismantled my autonomy and re-wired my internal circuitry to default to a state of total, unquestioning submission to lowliness, rock-bottom-ness.
The regret turns into a relentless, circular interrogation inside my own skull, a series of frantic retrospective thoughts that I cannot silence. I stare into the dark and find myself questioning the exact, agonizing mechanics of my past compliance, demanding answers from a body that felt completely hijacked.
The questions arrive like police batons, each one looking for a confession from a body that was never given a lawyer.
Why did I have to jiggle my breasts for them? Why did I have to lactate on command behind that screen? Why did it have to clamp my nipples just to satisfy their digital metrics? Why did I have to slap myself so enthusiastically for them? Why did I moan so loudly, so freely? Freely? Why did I scream their names, jiggle my ass, and dance on command? Why did I put on lipstick when I don't even wear make-up, forcing myself to look painted for their screens? Why was I on all fours, dressed skimpily in clothes I would never dare to wear outside or anywhere, when all I actually own in my real life are shabby, traditional clothes? Why did I have to bite my lips? Why did I ask if they want more? Why did I keep doing it when I was completely tired, exhausted, on my period, sad, annoyed, hungry, or sore? Why did I force myself to continue when my body was already completely drained from lactating so much? Why did I let them make me penetrate myself with all the objects in the world, allowing them to turn my orifices into canals of a kaleidoscope of their filth and desires? Why did I have to pull so hard when they demanded? Couldn't I have stopped? Why did I keep everything clamped when they demanded it, even after switching off the cam? Couldn't I have just stopped right there? Why did I sleep like that? Why did I have to write their name in permanent marker? Couldn't I have written it in any other way, or not at all? Why did I show my actual face? Why did I give up seeing my friends, cutting off the real world just to do this? Why did I mistake being watched for being held? Why did every command feel easier than one honest choice? Why did I confuse the power to switch the camera on with the power to leave? Why did my loneliness translate itself into obedience so quickly? Why did I keep calling it freedom when my body was only learning a new prison? Why did I enjoy it, or why did I pretend to enjoy it so much that the difference disappeared? Why did I have to rub that lotion and think it was theirs, leaving it unwashed for the entire night as they demanded? Could I not have just cleaned myself? Why did I not remove those objects after turning off the cam like they asked me to? Couldn't I have just removed them? Why did I keep my orifices packed and heavy, treating my own body as a continuous container for their filth long after the screen was dead? Why couldn't I have just stopped? Why did I keep obeying their demands even after switching off the cam, letting their instructions dictate my body long after the stream ended? Why did I sleep under the weight of their rules, leaving their signatures on my skin instead of scrubbing them away immediately? Why did I show my face to that faceless void, giving away my identity to strangers while giving up seeing my real friends just to stay trapped in this room? Why didn't I remove their presence the moment the screen went black?
There is no answer, of course. Only the cruel aftertaste of having survived something and still being cross-examined for the method of survival. And beneath every “why” sits the smaller, more frightened question: was I there, or was I only watching myself become useful to them?
Every single memory of those physical performances feels like a betrayal executed by my own flesh. I am tortured by the question of why my anatomy co-operated so tirelessly with their scripts, why it produced the exact reactions they demanded, and why I let my own biological responses be mined as a raw commodity. I am flooded with a crushing, burning regret for ever opening those digital and physical doors, for making my body a free-for-all for them.
It manifests as a desperate, physical compulsion to perform my unworthiness just to stay in the room. I find myself sitting on the cold tile floor, pressing their tired feet with careful, rhythmic strokes. Every gentle squeeze is water poured directly onto the roots of their ego flowers, watching those invisible blossoms bloom larger and prouder with every passing second as they grow at my expense. I offer myself up to be less, to be lowly, intentionally shrinking into the background of their lives to prove I take up no space.It is an endless archive of compliance, a factory that ran for so long that the smell of the glowing monitor and the hum of the overworked fan became my entire ecosystem.
But as I delete the last anonymous comment, the chaotic roar of the crowd narrows down to a single, piercing frequency. The screen goes black, and that takes me straight to the desk of the next room.
Here, she sits at the table, working, sending audio notes of self-humiliation to the one guy she was blindly seeing... the one who turned out to be absolutely, systematically abusive. He virtually tortured her until the day she finally realized she could just hit block and sever the connection. Yet the faint details of her real life that she carelessly surrendered during those vulnerable hours still haunt her like an unexploded bomb... the mention of her city, the layout of her street, the specific, fragile habits she only shared in the dark. They are breadcrumbs left in the hands of a monster. What if he finds her?
The horror goes deeper than a simple physical search; it is the terrifying reality of his installed settings inside my own biology. It feels as though he rewires your internal mechanics, planting invisible codes in your muscles, your pulse, and your breathing. I am paralyzed by the fear that he might execute those commands from afar, overriding my system like a virus, capturing my defenses, and forcing me to submit to him all over again without my actual will. The ghost of his control lingers in my marrow, waiting to wake up.
And when those internal settings override my mind entirely, the door to the next room violently forces itself open.
In this room, the exhaustion turns completely frantic. I see a version of me caught in a psychotic episode that has no rhyme or reason, driven purely by a desperate, misplaced need to release the crushing pressure inside my skin. I am frantically rubbing my bare breasts against the hard bedroom floor, pushing until my anatomy rebels and I puke straight onto the ground out of sheer, hollow exhaustion. I collapse, thinking the nightmare has broken. But time glitches in this space. Suddenly, the next day appears out of nowhere, and without my consent, the loop resets. I am doing it again.
I am rubbing my bare breasts against the wall, my skin scraping raw. I am back down on the floor again, but now the floor is covered in a thick, wet, gooey white material that feels heavy and suffocating, actively trying to trap me and glue my limbs down. The environment flashes and morphs around me in a chaotic blur. I am doing it again, scraping my breasts against the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. Suddenly I am on the concrete of the balcony floor, then the exposed terrace floor under an unmoving sky. With another glitch, I am suddenly pushed right up against the camera screen, performing and pressing these rubbed breasts against the glass for a wall of screaming, faceless men. Then the scene cuts to a sterile hospital bed where the motion of rubbing continues, desperate and inescapable. Finally, the frenzied energy bottoms out. The scenery snaps back to the bedroom floor, but the panic is gone. I am at his feet, not entirely still, while his other foot rests heavily on my head. This last movement is not frantic at all. The rhythm has changed. I look completely mechanical, rubbing up and down, like a hollowed-out automaton operating on a loop I no longer control.
The numbness of that mechanical rhythm carries me across the threshold into the next room, smoothing out into a quiet, frozen state by the window.
Here, a version of me sits trapped at the glass, masturbating endlessly in a relentless, compulsive loop while the world outside moves in a brutal, accelerated timelapse. It feels like a life-lapse. Through the window pane, I watch years compress into seconds. I see my friends getting married and smiling in beautiful jewelry, dresses, makeup, families, friends, and their beautiful men. I see them securing good, stable corporate jobs, moving forward with purpose. I watch my sister traveling across different countries, expanding her horizon while mine shrinks to a single point. I even see him out there, moving on easily, holding down a job, standing next to a girlfriend.
And inside, behind the glass, I am just stuck in that endless, repetitive motion, masturbating like I am mining something. It feels exactly like mining, scraping away at a depleted quarry, digging deeper into a hollowed-out cavern of my own flesh, trying to extract a single ounce of feeling or relief while the whole world moves beautifully on without me.
Behind the next door, a version of me is counting the cracks in the ceiling, matching her pulse to the ticking of a clock that never moves. Beside her, another me is scrubbing her hands until the skin turns raw, trying to wash away an invisible layer of oil that won't leave.
But as I reach the end of the corridor, the rooms begin to fade into something innocent, quiet, and soft. I open the last door. There is a version of me just lying flat on the floor on a quiet evening. It follows a brutal day where a power cut left the city to BBQ under a merciless sun. She is just lying there, watching, feeling a tad bit human as the power finally returns and the ceiling fan slowly, beautifully starts to turn.
Aside from the mental storm, the rest of the day went okay, mostly because I just retreated and rested. But my body felt the toll. Food-wise, it was a disaster. Everything I managed to eat on a surface level just made me feel sick, leaving me with a deep, physical aversion to nourishment. When the mind is nauseated by reality, the body follows suit.
But oh, the exhausting familiarity of this loop.
It is a vicious, spinning wheel of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, a toxic workplace, a toxic home, and this constant thinness of life. These feelings aren't new; they are the exact same ghosts I wrote about in my last entry, just wearing a different mask today. The same crushing claustrophobia of wanting to expand while being forcibly shrunk by every environment I inhabit. It feels as though every single door that begins to creak open is violently slammed in my face before I can even glimpse the light. I am left trapped in the hallway, wondering why opportunity only visits to mock me.
It leaves a scar that goes deeper than mere burnout. It makes me feel unwanted. Broken in the most fundamental, irreparable ways. It is as if every human being is born with a solid, glowing core, but mine arrived incomplete. Mine feels half-bitten, as though someone took a piece of my soul from the very beginning, leaving me entirely unfit for everyone, everything, everywhere.
I look around at the world, at the people moving with purpose and belonging, and I feel like an absolute stranger in a world of family. But perhaps, this is where my ink must find its purpose tonight. If I am a stranger to their joy, I am a lifeline to the broken. I will sit here with my half-bitten core, and I will keep writing through the dark.
~ Oizys.