[dVerse] November 05 - Wildly Constant

Wildly Constant

The wind has been moving things around again.

A dry leaf under the door.
A receipt from last Tuesday.
A newspaper folded open
to a face I have no reason to remember.

I collect them.
The leaf goes into the bin.
The receipt, into a drawer.
The face follows me to the kitchen.

Some thoughts have no use for doors.
They enter through the smallest available gap,
take a seat,
begin again where they left off.

I can be measuring rice
when an old conversation resumes.
I can be washing a cup
when a possible disaster requests consideration
from every available angle.

There is a particular kind of fear
that makes a person stay indoors
even when the room has become unbearable.

I have called it cowardice.
I have called it hibernation.
I have tried other names.
I have watched the days gather outside
like people waiting for a house to open.

Sometimes I try to leave one condition of mind
and return to the body.

There is the floor.
The weight of the feet.
The cup in my hand.
The ordinary business of being located somewhere.

But even this return acquires an audience.

The characters are watching
the other me leave the scene.
They watch her become the one
who is supposed to be here,
the one with a body, a family,
a room that apparently belongs to her,
and several people who know
what she ought to do with it.

Their watching brings me back
to the scene I was trying to leave.

I have to begin again.

Outside, a branch keeps knocking
against the window.
I cannot tell whether it is asking to enter
or trying to get out.

I look up the phrase: sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Hosea, eighth century BCE. Prophet of doom.
A warning about what a people cultivate
and what eventually grows from it.

I read about the destruction in the book,
then the promises of restoration,
then the tradition of Hosea's prayer,
the doom it was said to avert.

I have been reading about wind
for longer than I intended.

The phrase assumes a field,
a hand scattering seed,
some relationship between action and consequence.

What does the wind assume?

It moves the neighbour's washing,
pollen, ash, the fine remains of a roof.
It carries things that never agreed
to become part of its journey.

I return to the room.

There is the family,
the familiar arrangements,
the instructions disguised as concern,
the small permitted dimensions of a life.

Reality has its own weather.
It presses against the skin
with the dull persistence of furniture
that cannot be moved.

The first job was a bad room
with bad people in it.
The salary barely qualified as money.
I left with the peculiar exhaustion
of someone who has been underpaid
in more ways than one.

The second job felt like a discovery.
I liked the work.
I remember the relief of finding it,
the small astonishment
of being somewhere I wanted to work.

The work is still good.
The people have found other ways
to make it difficult.
The new contract arrived
with the old number in it.

No increase.
Same amount. Three contracts.

I read the figure again.
Numbers are very good at staying still
while everything around them deteriorates.

My father sends me job openings.
He knows the kind of work I would dislike.
He knows the kind of work I am absolutely unqualified for.
I think he knows I know this.
Still, the links arrive,
one after another,
as though the misery of this job
might eventually make his choices
resemble mine.

My sister and I do not speak.
Sometimes I think of how much
she has inherited from him.
She got almost everything.
I got the scream.

My mother and I are like
two people drowning in the same well.
We keep reaching for each other
because there is no one else
within reach.

Sometimes a hand is a hand.
Sometimes it is the thing
that pushes the other under.

Even that, perhaps,
in a reduced quantity.
A quarter-strength inheritance,
diluted somewhere between
his throat and mine.

His voice could occupy a house.
Mine has to calculate
whether it is safe to leave the room.

I have been calling this fear.
Cowardice, sometimes.
The family has other names for it,
I imagine.
There are so many names
for a daughter who does not move
when someone points towards a door.

I had thought returning would mean
the end of the investigation.
Instead, I am here,
trying to determine which part of the day
I am allowed to inhabit.
The branch knocks again.
I listen.
The wind has not answered.
It has never needed to.

~ Oizys.

Wrote this for dVerse OpenLinkNight # 419 on 05 Nov 2026. I am super late, as usual, but I took my sweet time and somehow turned a pseudo-rant + stream of consciousness into something resembling a poem.

Some notes, echoes and listening.

• Hosea 8:7 — “Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind” - The verse belongs to a prophetic warning about Israel's conduct and its consequences. The wind in the poem begins with this image of sowing and reaping, then moves beyond the logic of cause and consequence.
• Hosea 14 — A promise of restoration - A countercurrent to the destruction and judgement elsewhere in the book.
• “The Wind” — Yusuf / Cat Stevens (1971) - A song about listening to the wind and the soul, and the uncertainty of where one will end up.
• “Listening Wind” — Talking Heads, Remain in Light (1980) - A darker political song about alienation, intrusion, and resistance. Its wind carries a very different history from the one in this poem.
• Listen! The Wind — Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1938) - An account of the Lindberghs' 1933 transatlantic survey flight, in which wind and weather become practical forces that determine what can and cannot happen.

Even Their Misery Has a Life to Happen In & I Am Just Counting My Avocados

29th October, 2026. 11:37 PM. I had dinner, combed my hair over the dustbin, went to shit, cried over the commode, took a bath, and came to bed. I looked here and there on the internet while I was thinking of writing the next blog post. I read the last one. I am impressed. Wow. But not too much, because I am feeling like writing again. Which means the pangs of hideousness, anxiety, paranoia, sadness, loneliness, meltdowns, resentment, hatred, distrust, defeatism, misery, hopelessness, etc, etc, etc are back. So back. Should I pick up where I left from? Try and trace till this point of being cramped up underneath the blanket again? Breaking down again? I can't even remember most things. I think it started on 17th October, Saturday. I had to work that Saturday even though it was my off day. But, I had come to terms with that. The day before I had ordered groceries and with it, my second avocado. So, Saturday morning, before starting work, I made the same guacamole toast. This time, the fruit was ripe and soft, so I made the spread, and it creamed nicely. It was a soft morning. I woke up early, did household chores, dishes, put up curtains, made the avocado toast breakfast, and as I was finishing making my guac, my father suddenly asked me a question. He asked if the results or information about the next steps for the job he had asked me to apply for are out and I should check it. It was a job my mother kept pushing me to apply for despite me telling her that I don't want that kind of job. So, I didn't really apply for it. What do I say to him, if not, okay, I will check it. I said exactly that, took my guacamole and bread and went to my desk. I just couldn't stop thinking. Did he just ask that randomly? Did he just ask that to strike up a conversation? Did he ask that with some ulterior intention? Did my mother tell him to ask that? Did he ask my mother first and he didn't get an answer via her from me so he asked me directly? Why? Why is he talking to me? Why? Why are they doing this? What should I do? How can I get a job by myself? I know for a fact that the jobs they suggest are not a fit for me and I wouldn't even get them. And, I don't even want them. But. No. Not but. And. And, at the same time, I am flailing around trying to find a new one. I continued working. I have started properly loathing this workplace finally. Not the type of work. The clients, for sure, because they are mostly government bodies or shady organisations trying to get close to government bodies. And, the workplace colleagues except one or two are insidiously annoying. I imagine the entire organisation collapsing on them when I leave. It's my wistful thinking. And, it led to this rotting spiral of dissociation and daydreaming. Ever since, I have just been dissolving into MDDs and DPDRs. Just constantly engulfing time and days and nights with my daydreaming about different situations. Days and nights passed by. I kept daydreaming. About this and that. About people I came across on the internet. I kept reading about them and I kept imagining things. I made up worlds in my mind. A poem came out of it. Art direction. It's because the person I was diving deep into and the world he belonged to fed fodder to my daydreams. I kept digging and digging while my brain and my body kept flailing and flailing. My real existence, on the other hand, was paralysed because this addiction to my daydreams distracted me from my ongoing existence. Which is a comfortable stoppage point. But it's temporary. In these daydreams, I am just flowing in life. Flowing with life in me. Talking to people. Loving people. Going out. Creating things. I daydreamt about writing plays. Directing plays. The poem for dVerse’s Oct. 22 prompt, Art Direction, was bred out of such a daydream where I kept imagining myself sitting amongst people, some of those I kept diving deep into and some of my coworkers from my current workplace (but, they are all nice to me in these scenarios...) and we were talking about an event with many plays which had one of mine. The one I kept thinking about on the commode which I also mentioned in my last weblog post. I kept talking to them. Telling them about how I came to be there and I daydreamt a back story. I ran away at 18 or 19 (deliberately blurred the age) and I ran with a boy a little bit older than me. We lived together for a month. And then he left me. I went back. Six years or so passed. We bumped into each other again and we wanted to ask each other if we wanted to run away again but we were meeting after six or so years, so we maintained the superficial formality. And we arranged a second meeting where we started off with the same superficial formality but then we abruptly told each other at the same time that we would like to run away again. And the third meeting happened at the airport with our bags packed. I daydreamt about writing plays after he left me when we ran away for the first time. And, during this event with plays, I am bringing one or two of them back. A play about a sub whose partner dies after 20 or 22 years of their dom-sub marital relationship and she doesn't know where to put her devotion anymore. She processes her grief while undoing the labors of submission she carried and performed for him. Their dom-sub dynamic had a core aspect of her consuming leaves for him. It was set during the Sumerian period. The name I gave was “The Leaf”. Another play was based on the oldest known prison diary in the Western tradition and one of the earliest surviving first-person accounts written by a woman: The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity. Perpetua was arrested alongside her enslaved companion Felicity and others for refusing to perform sacrifices to the Roman gods. In my play, I attempted to show Felicity’s narration. I named it: “The Most Ancient Slave Diary”.  Anyway, such were the days and their dreams spiralling in my brain. All while, my real and actual life was passing by. And, I was also meagerly passing through it. The two courses were coming to an end. I had taken up another voluntary project while another voluntary project was lined up. All while overworking. I had to prepare two projects for my courses. I was doing fine until deadlines came too close and I just collapsed and started procrastination. Over the weekend (24-25th), I kept delaying and delaying. I crossed deadlines and then I begrudgingly picked them up. I did them over long periods of nights. Stayed up late and completed them. Although I missed a meeting on Monday that was set up by one of the course coordinators with an external advisor. I kept thinking of an excuse while haphazardly finishing the presentations and submissions. I completed it anyway and both of the presentations happened on the same day, yesterday, one in the morning and one in the evening. After that, I ate some leftover store-bought almost-stale snacks and cozied into my blanket and slipped into the daydreams while watching the videos of those people. I had moved to the next generation of those people actually and was deep into the lives of their kids who are, by the way, as old as me. And, they have had a thousand trips to Europe, they are married, have done and abandoned various projects, etc, etc, etc.  Today passed by as well with work. It was a bit frustrating. But in the back of my mind. I was still soaking my brains and body and my existence in these daydreams. It all came down when my mother came to my room in the late evening. And kept poking me to get up and start preparing for dinner. We did a little bit of “you go first” and “no, you go first”. She got up after a while and I went up as well. She was reheating the food while I took out some plates and chopped some cucumbers and raw mangoes for salad to have with dinner. I had my dinner while diving deep into their life videos and after I was done, my mother was ready to have hers. I did some nightly chores of locking doors, checking windows, etc. before going to the bathroom. My mother told me the cyclone has had a major impact on our village. She smiled while she told me. You’d think it was a sad smile. But, I have always felt very uncomfortable with that smile. Because, I know the intention behind that smile. It's that peculiar, almost smug satisfaction of knowing something that I apparently don't. Or, at least, getting to make me feel like I don't. Like she's informing me of something and simultaneously reprimanding me for not already knowing it. And, somehow, I am supposed to feel guilty… guilty for not knowing, guilty for not asking, guilty for not being sufficiently concerned, guilty for sitting in my room, going about my life, while things are happening elsewhere that I am apparently expected to know everything about. It's not just her. My father does it. My sister does it. This strange, condescending way of talking to me as though I am perpetually unattached, uninformed, unaware, incapable of understanding things unless they explain them to me. And, even their explanations come with this underlying insinuation that I should have known better. If I ask questions, I don't know anything. If I don't ask, I don't care about anything. And, if I already know, there is always something else I apparently don't know. I don't know how much of this is deliberate. But, I feel it. That constant, almost imperceptible effort to make me feel smaller than I already do. 31st October, 01:33 AM. I paused writing last night and let my mdd chloroform me to sleep. I woke up in the morning. Got to work after making tea. Simultaneously, the rooms were getting cleaned. Everything was back to normal between me and my mother. By the way, my sister & I do not speak. I worked and worked and worked today. My mother and I chatted in between  throughout the day. She was telling me bits and pieces of what was going on. Whether father is going to visit the village. How much crops are lost. The water engulfed the whole district or two. And, there is possibly another cyclone coming. I feel like I have forgotten how to apply for jobs. I had a meeting with a co-worker I work with. We ranted about the vapidity and vainness of the project we are working on and how the client is an abuser-whitewasher and the government is piggybacking on it to beautify their name and even our organisation didn’t oppose it until they got snubbed. I finished work and did a major and desperately needed grocery haul with my mother after eating lunch at around 6:30 PM. Yes. I think I heard my mother tell someone, “She doesn’t know how harmful it is. Or, maybe. Actually, she knows.” I had been ruminating about making a paneer tikka wrap with these tortilla wraps I saw and this recipe I stumbled upon. So, I bought some items for that. Since I bought those, I didn't get an avocado... Fingers crossed if and when I make them. I probably have to make them over this weekend. Late evening, my mother and I put on a bedsheet. It’s always fresh to put clean bedsheets after rooms are cleaned. And, I asked her if she would oil my hair. I oiled my hair after a long, long period of time. I window-shopped some clothes [pants, particularly] and some basic skincare. I do not and cannot use skincare products the way people are using them these days. I cannot even buy that much. Because the ones I selected today are still in the cart. I don’t know if and when I will buy them. It has also been a long time since I have used moisturiser and face wash. I was a diligent body moisturiser-er as well. It stopped a good amount of time ago. Anyway, I didn’t have dinner. My mother had her dinner and went to sleep. And, I was scrolling through some more recipes of the wraps as midnight approached. Then, I had the urge to eat some puffed rice. So, I made that as my dinner. While chowing down, I watched those people again. After finishing that, keeping the actual dinner in the fridge, shutting off all the lights and closing all the doors, and spiralling quietly into MDD for a little while, I came to write. I wrote the three pending dVerse poems. Read, read, read if you want to. I have a working Saturday tomorrow. I am going to have a major withdrawal symptom as I have no classes, no quizzes, no tinkering around to build projects from next week.  By the way, the daydreaming still continues. It always snowballs. I have been rummaging deeper and deeper into the lives of those people. So “perfect”. Such “perfect” families. Such “perfect” education. Such “perfect” autonomous jobs. Such “perfect” creativity. Such “perfect” videos. Such “perfect” failures. Such “perfect” successes. Such “perfect” breakfasts. Such “perfect” proposals. Such “perfect”  partners. Such “perfect” friendships. Such “perfect” girlhoods. Such “perfect” trauma stories. Such “perfect”  fuck-ups. Such “perfect” uni lives. Such “perfect” gap years. Such “perfect” heartbreaks. Such “perfect” recoveries. Such “perfect” relocations. Such “perfect” apartments. Such “perfect” inconveniences. Such “perfect” existential crises. Such “perfect” rebellions. Such “perfect” mistakes. Such “perfect” second chances. Such “perfect” freedom to squander time, money, opportunities, relationships, and still have something to fall back on. Such “perfect” boredom. Such “perfect” uncertainty. Such “perfect” lives where even the wrong turns seem to lead somewhere. Even their failures have a narrative. Even their aimlessness has an aesthetic. Even their misery seems to have a life to happen in. Here I am. Counting my avocados. I have one, and then two avocados. A small, almost tender continuity. I have a soft Saturday morning. I make breakfast. My father asks one question. And suddenly, what was supposed to be an ordinary morning becomes a series of interrogations, suspicions, worries about employment, autonomy, agency, life, freedom, abandonment, and escape. Then the daydreaming takes over. Meanwhile, my actual life continues demanding labour, presentations, deadlines, domestic participation, and decisions. Constantly ricocheting between the life in which I am making things happen and the life in which things keep happening to me. After my mother and I put on the bedsheet, I saw a packet of gummies. I asked her, "Where did this come from?" She told me my sister's friend got it from Thailand, and gave it to my sister. My sister gave it to my mother. I asked her if I could try them. So, probably I am gonna go to bed, try some gummies, and drown myself in those videos, while my daydreams ruminate on the rock bottom of my mind [...] ~ Oizys.

[dVerse] October 29 - The Spellchecker Has No Objections

At nine, the inbox Mondayed my pulse
on a perfectly innocent Thursday.

First came a gentle reminder.
Then another.
Then one marked urgent
with the friendliness
of a knife wrapped in tissue paper.

None of them
felt particularly gentle.

By noon, I had semicoloned my answer
to the employee satisfaction survey:

Yes, insofar as the rent;
no, insofar as the body.

Human Resources wanted
a single selection.

Strongly Agree.
Agree.
Neither Agree nor Disagree.
Disagree.
Strongly Disagree.

There was no box
for my body has been attending meetings
my mind was never invited to.

I selected Neither.

Apparently, that was neutral.
Apparently, I was doing well.

At five, the crows asterisked the sky
above the bus stop...
small black footnotes to the city's claim
that nothing unusual had happened.

I carried the unfinished form home
beside an electricity bill,
a crumpled receipt,
a list of un-bought groceries,
and the remains of a lunch
I had eaten without tasting.

That night, I opened a blank document.

I wrote:
I would like to resign from—

The sentence stopped.

I read it twice.

The spellchecker objected
to every verb I had invented.

It had no objections
to the job description.

~ Oizys.

Written for dVerse Meeting the Bar: Verbing Your Verse, hosted by Björn Rudberg on October 29, 2026. The prompt encouraged turning nouns and adjectives into verbs, particularly transitive ones, to make metaphors act rather than merely describe. I used Mondayed, semicoloned, and asterisked. The spellchecker is entitled to its opinion. And, I am entitled to mine.

The Tiles Break, Then the Ball Falls.

9 October, 01:38 AM

I am writing here from underneath my blanket while my mother sleeps next to me. I am writing after having a full and a half breakdown under this same blanket in silent-scream mode. But just because it was silent doesn't mean it was just mental. It was all ... mental, psychological, physical, too too physical, emotional, too many tears and sobs. What happened? Well I could start from the inception of my league and lineage but that would be a long story and I really don't know or remember a lot of details. I could start from my time when the streak of bad luck started in my life but you can read the thousand versions of that closet theatre play here in any post on this weblog. I will start with where I last left. Things were becoming cool between me and my mother. We were talking, working, cooking, etc… discussing what went wrong with my sister towards me because I didn't even say anything during that conversation. Anyway…

Last night I saw an email that was sent to me in the late evening post-work hours. HR had sent me my new contract with no salary upgrade, so I frantically started job search, thinking of ways to respond and/or send questions. I spent a really long time applying for a lot of jobs, late into the night. I had the dinner that my mother and I prepared pretty half-heartedly and my mind was occupied with too much anxiety. I slept really late. I wrote a draft email that I thought I would send HR with some questions.

This morning, Oct 8th, I was chatting with my mother. She was supposed to go to the doctor. And conversations went by. I brought my tea to my room, to my table and started working. Then I heard some noises. I saw my sister was ranting to my mother and crying. I couldn't make much of what she was saying but I figured it out. She was talking about the last time my mother had gone on a vacation. Was it last year? Or the year before? And our father's behaviour during that time. She might have said something about me but I didn't hear directly. Since the environment was tight and breathless. And her attitude towards me. And how she was increasing her voice to make me listen. And then..

My brain just slipped like a ball into the mud and rolled away. I started having a breakdown. Which kept breaking and breaking. You know like those tile breaking games. You keep breaking them. And they keep falling. You think there is an end. But there is no end. It's a pitless rock bottom. What an oxymoron? That’s the right literary device, right? I don’t know and I'm too tired and cramped up to check… In the abyss-like breakdown, I ended up sending that mail to HR that I had drafted. As the day passed by, I had locked myself in the room to break down into pieces perpetually while working. Not eating. Not responding to anyone. And I didn't want my mother to enter and see me and ask me any questions. Although, she doesn’t really ask much when she sees me cry. We don’t have that culture in our family. We turn our face and leave. The only time we understand concepts like privacy and space. Anyway… I was still in the breakdown mode when the HR replied. It was a bit late in the afternoon. It was after a meeting with my teammates for a presentation where I kept suggesting a solution but they didn't hear. Sometimes, I wonder why I even try? Anyway, the HR response was okay. More of a saving-their-own-ass-in-a-shady-contract kinda response than actually answering-our-queries-while-we-non-consentingly-and-obliviously-meander-in-their-murky-waters-of-shady-contract response. But, I responded by thanking them for their response “clarifying” everything and said that based on this understanding, I will be sending the signed contract. Great, now I have to go out, take a printout of this, sign it, scan it, and send it to them. I was breaking down again and again. The familial violence and the stagnant, shitty, shady workplace with toxic and abusive coworkers who have become “department heads” / “managers” and managers who have suddenly become “associate directors”. Pair them with a vapid job market and a vile society out there. It all constrained me and closed in on me at once. I felt as if someone was holding me down in a small, small room. Technically, physically I was safe. But, my whole body has been feeling unsafe and insecure. Shivering and panicking. For what? Nothing. I don't know. There is no reason. Or maybe there are too many reasons. Just waiting for something to happen. Just that crawling feeling. Like something is going to happen. Like something bad is going to happen. Like how you violently tap the screen of your phone anticipating something will happen in that tile breaking game but it just keeps breaking perpetually. You kind of wish you literally ‘burst’ into tears and flow away forever. Like if you break down as hard as possible, something will happen and it will all come to a sudden end. Just collapse forever. But it doesn't. Rather, the day, the evil, devil day just passes by. 

I didn't eat much. In the middle of the day, I bathed and ate some puffed rice and took medicine for the empty gaseous stomach and riling headache after the HR responded. I thought the bath and some meagre food and medicines will help me keep a sane mind while I continue to break down and apply for jobs and work. I didn't drink evening tea. Just some peach fizz and water. Water was important. 

Finally, at night, my mother came and told me to check her phone and her bank statement to verify if the money she was trying to send to someone did go or not as the app said the payment failed. During that time, thank god(?), my face was okay and I wasn't actively breaking down. I fixed it and she asked if I was going to have dinner. I think my body couldn't say no. I had dinner and while eating dinner, I found this show on YouTube that occupied my mind throughout the dinner and after that I could eat at the dinner table and was able to just… be without falling down crying. It only kept me occupied till my mother came to bed and fell asleep. After I finished it, and tried watching some suggested shows of the same person, I couldn't. I kept my phone away as it was at 2%. Then, my body vomited out the rest of my anxiety, worries, sadness, depression, and other psychological waste by way of making me break down again and again. So, that's why… a full and a half violent breakdown under the blanket in silent mode. Then I went to the bathroom, cleaned up. Changed and had some water. Then I went to bed and wrote this.

I feel so… alone. And, I feel so… responsible for this loneliness. I know I made this, I mothered this, I raised this. It's mine. My burden to carry. Never did I think it would cause me this pain when I was sculpting it. Never did my thoughts about this loneliness crystallise into a proper understanding of what shape it would take in my life and how it would mould my life. But, I feel so urgently unsafe and insecure. All the taunts, jibes, mockeries, shames, humiliation, degradation, hurtful behaviours, their unapologetic and intentional hypocrisies, their mean voices, their abusive actions just seep into my intrusive thoughts and keep amalgamizing into something vitriolic and monstrous inside my head and force me into that small, small room where someone was holding me down.

10 October, 21:23 PM

What happened yesterday, Oct 9th? My memory is a bit fuzzy but let me jog my memory? I woke up. Um, how did I wake up? I don’t remember. I cannot remember. I remember breaking down in bits and pieces here and there. I think my mother came to wake me up but I was a bit awake. But, I didn’t respond to her. Then, I woke up. I remember making my own breakfast too late while keeping an eye on work if something came up. I think I didn’t have much work. I did complete my timesheets which took some time. But, I was deliberating whether to go out and finish that contract thing. I didn’t. I still haven’t. All I remember is a memory of an old web series that hit me from the show I was watching last night. So, I looked it up. It was taken into some app. Previously, it was available for free on YouTube. I started watching. I didn’t mention this yesterday but the evening before yesterday, while I was helping my mother in cooking dinner, I noticed my laptop’s hinge is broken because of which the keyboard deck keeps moving up when I lift the lid. So, this particular bit became a device in my recurring MDD-driven intrusive thoughts that have been fueling my breakdowns since yesterday. I fell asleep, I think, by completing that show. The first season was a bomb of nostalgia. The last season was a bore. In the beginning of last season, my free tier came to an end, so I paid for the first level of the subscription tier for a month which came with ads but allowed you to watch for unlimited minutes. Cheap with lots of ads. Late capitalism with enshittification. I felt like a baby. You know, how a baby cries and then you distract it with some toy or a trick.

Anyway, today, I did not do much work. There is an event tomorrow towards which many people are working. So, the whole day was quite lazy. I am working on completing my project for one of the two courses I am doing. My mother and I got some choice groceries. The day went by. My breakdowns were a bit wobbly. The tears leaked here and there. Eventually, I came to my desk to continue writing this entry. 

I have been researching buying a laptop. I don't know what I am going to do about it. I don’t know what will happen. How is it that there is always something that needs fixing? Something that needs money? Something that needs doing? I rewatched the YouTube show a couple of times. It was a book reviewer I love. So…

11th October, 14:35 PM

I couldn’t continue writing. I had to stop at 22:00 PM. I woke my mother up to inquire whether she and my father will eat or not. She told me if I can go and give my father the food as everything was ready. I asked him and he said he was going to come upstairs so I started arranging plates and bowls for him. And, I asked my sleepy mother whether my sister is going to come home and when because when I called out my father to ask about dinner, he was locking the gates for the night. I told my father that my sister was on her way back home. Meanwhile, my mother, who was refusing to wake up, sat up and came out of the bedroom. She started reheating the food and putting it out on the plate for my father. She asked me to take it downstairs for him. I did and he asked me again when my sister was going to arrive. I said, she is on her way. I had zero idea. She had called my mother to say that she was on her way. Anyway, I convinced my mother to eat and just go to sleep rather than continuing her nap for a little more and delaying dinner. We started bringing out our dinner. I had informed my mother when I woke her up that I would not be having dinner. I did some other chores like putting the dishes in the washer. While that was happening, my sister came home. Nobody really asked her anything. She came back from her first ever swimming class. I did end up having some assortment of side dishes as dinner next to my mother. We both shared the complaints that the vegetables were absolutely raw. My mother finished her dinner and went to sleep. I finished my half-assed raw-y dinner and completed some other chores like putting the remaining food in the fridge, hanging up the washed clothes here and there, locking doors, etc. Then, at 23:35 PM, I came back to bed and was scrolling the phone and I came across a poem by Emily Dickinson: It struck me—every Day

It struck me—every Day—

The Lightning was as new

As if the Cloud that instant slit

And let the Fire through—

It burned Me—in the Night—

It Blistered to My Dream—

It sickened fresh upon my sight—

With every Morn that came—

I thought that Storm—was brief—

The Maddest—quickest by—

But Nature lost the Date of This—

And left it in the Sky—

It made me feel like writing, but my tired body prevailed. I was too tired to do anything with that feeling. So, I didn't write. I switched between surfing the internet, trying to sleep by throwing the phone away, reaching out for it again, having mild breakdowns, MDD-driven nightmarish intrusive daydreams just creeping around, watching gibberish here and there. And, in no time, it was almost 3:00 AM. I felt like shitting so I went to the bathroom. I had a weird idea. The story that had mesmerised and disarmed me some days or weeks ago came back to me while I was in bed. Because a phrase used there was also the name of the book that was mentioned in the YouTube podcast. I looked into that phrase a little bit and it was a phrase with a historical origin, series of adaptations here and there. This made my pull towards the story even stronger. So, I started visualising it. And then, bam! On the commode, I went on yet another MDD-trip imagining myself writing the screen script for that story and co-directing it with the author… Anyway. That helped me relax, the shitting. and also the fact that my period was finally over so I didn’t have to wear a pad anymore. 

11th October, 15:35 PM

Sorry. I had to take an hour of break. [I think I will explain it further as I narrate. Haha. Unless I go away again.] Continuing where I left off. So, I came back to bed, all light and more tired at around 15:30 PM. Drowsy and on the verge of sleep, I was holding my phone all cramped up underneath my blanket, when my mother hit my head and asked me to sleep. After which I put my phone away and slept off. This morning, I woke up around 11:30 AM and went to my mother and she told me she tried waking me up so many times but alas, of course I slept at 4 AM. The day went by. I had some tea and some sugar-sprinkled coffee flavoured biscuits I had brought yesterday. My mother had her late or second breakfast. Then, we went to our bedroom. We were sitting and eating some Longans that I also got the other day. And, I was researching laptops to buy. My mother instructed me to go and check on the grandmother of the upstairs family. To check what she was up to as the family had gone out for a lunch feast function. I went and she was sleeping. A small, old lady. Her shrivelled up and wrinkled hands on her belly. I looked at her for a bit. Small white strands of hair flailing around over her small, sleeping face under the speedy ceiling fan. I went upstairs further to the terrace and looked around at the plants and the house where another couple lived, which was locked. I don’t know if they still do. Next to the locked door, a bamboo ladder to go up further to the cistern terrace. I didn’t even dare to. Anyway, I came back, and while going downstairs, I took another peek at the grandmother and she was taking a turn so I quickly ran away. I came back to my room and my mother was sleeping. So, I sat at my desk and opened my un-hinged laptop and started writing again at 14:35 PM.

I had to break away because I was having yet another quiet MDD-driven episode while writing and my mother asked me what I would be having for lunch. She informed me she would not be having any and that our father must not have even finished the breakfast-lunch she had given him. She kept pushing me for the fruits I had gotten yesterday. There was only an avocado left! By the way, my first avocado. So, to get her off my back I had to tell her I would be having that avocado and I had to get up and get going to show her I was going to make it. So, I did! After so many years of fantasising about how I would eat an avocado or guac or guac toast. It was a bit messy. It wasn’t ripe. But, my mother had given me the vegetables and put the pan to toast the bread, so there was no going back. I chopped a quick onion, half a tomato, and two chillies. After generously sprinkling two kinds of salt, I checked on the internet and some had posted that lime juice might help break it down. So, I squeezed half a lemon. I do not know if it helped or not. I kept mashing it with the back of the fork, sometimes stabbing it while toasting the bread. Then, I came back to my table and saw my mother, who was half-asleep, woke up a little bit. I informed her about the avocado situation and told her that’s why I wasn’t eating it. Anyway, it wasn’t bad! If we had let it ripen, the guac would have come out creamy. But, I put it on and between toasts and ate it. I think the onions, tomatoes, chillies with salt and lemon did the trick, which is also my favourite mix. So, I continued writing. Meanwhile, I also had a discussion with my mother about how sick she was feeling. A small quick flash of that old grandmother came to my mind and I turned back to see my mother’s face and it went away.

And, here we are. As I completed writing, I finished the toast, there was some guac left and I had kept two pieces of bread aside thinking whether I would like it or not. I brought it from the fridge while my mother got up to eat some puffed rice and milk, so I asked her if she wanted me to join her at the dining table. She said yes. And, we had a quick discussion about dinner and about my father going to leave at around 18:00 PM. Ending this narration at 16:05 PM and going to join my mother at the dining table to finish my half-assed, messy guac toast while she eats as well.

11th October, 18:10 PM

I am back to writing some more. I ate the rest of the guac with two pieces of bread while my mother nibbled on some biscuits with water waiting for her milk to get warm. Then, I got up to make some tea for myself. The water evaporated as my mother asked me to sit with her and wait for the leaves to boil a bit more. So, I showed it to her. I added some more water and got it done. My mother also got her hot milk to eat with puffed rice. We talked about things here and there. She randomly mentioned an actor who died two-three days ago. A well-known actor. And, he had an NGO. Etc, etc, etc. From some corner of my mind, a question popped up, didn’t he murder someone? By pushing her off the balcony? She said, no! She said, you must be thinking of some plot of a movie he must’ve been in. We looked him up. Then, I realised, after reading his wiki page, he had sexually harassed someone. Oh. Yes. But, then who was that who died by falling off the balcony. My mother started rummaging through her memory coming up with film names that the dead actress was in. I started searching. And, bam! There it was, that actress from the film that my mother came across. We started reading and discussing what had happened to her. She was sitting by the balcony and when she turned to get up, she fell off and died. She was 19. By the age of 19, she was a very successful and well-known actress. There was a huge controversy around her death being a murder. I saw another actress and remembered I had read about her as well who committed suicide after her partner had sexually assaulted her. I shared that story with my mother as well. That actress too had become a bit famous because of the last movie she did before she passed away. So, my conversation with my mother meandered towards that region: death, suicide, mental health etc… Oof! Sometimes we do talk about those things and more often than not, we are almost always on different sides but I don’t think we have ever been disgusting to each other. I think partly because we self-censor a lot. But we try to discuss. Like in this current topic at hand, my mother was constantly saying how people should just talk to each other or just try to find a solution or just find someone to talk to rather than giving in to utter despair and committing suicide. I tried explaining to her my stance that we can never, ever speak from the outside of someone’s life and judge or nitpick or question them. We don’t know what kind of people they might be surrounded with. There’s shame, stigma, denial, silence, misunderstanding, fear, threats, sadness, etc… that shapes everyone’s situations and circumstances. I also explained to her: those questions of why didn’t they tell anyone or how is it that they couldn't find one single person who listened to them or etc… don’t work anymore. People have asked those questions since time immemorial and they haven’t and do not help at all! We meandered into students committing suicide (given the current situation in our country!), people not getting jobs or people dying because of stress or toxic workplace. I tried telling her it is a deeply systemic issue to which she agreed. But, there were some things that I said she didn’t agree to. We both softly held our stances. It eventually came to a natural impasse where we both agreed to leave it unresolved. Then, we moved on to other work. She, to figure out what my father will eat and me, to put yet another shift of dishes in the washer. Then, I came to my room and surfed the internet a little bit. I reflected (but did not ruminate) about my conversation with my mother. Did that talk have any colours of our own interconnected and separate experiences with sadness, depression, suicide attempts? Were we trying to communicate our own issues with each other and/or commenting on each other’s issues by low-key referring to others’ examples? The thought fizzled out. 

And, as I came here and sat to write at 18:10 PM. I first checked the word count before resuming. It was 3260-something. I wow-ed at myself. Haha. Of course, it was written in the span of a couple of days. But, such a consistent stream of consciousness with writing and chronicling? Who am I? Should I stop? Should I continue? Should I push myself further? Write more and more. Like, as I sat and wrote this, my mother gave me a call from downstairs. She went downstairs with some food for my father to have before leaving. She called and informed me that my sister would be having her dinner outside. She went out for a work team weekend outing in the morning before I woke up. And, so the plans my mother and I had made for dinner in the late afternoon changed. We revised our dinner plan and ended the call. And then, I resumed writing this. It’s physically strenuous sometimes. It’s a privileged form of physical labour. Writing. At your desk. And your back hurts. Your neck and your shoulder hurt. Your epigastrium against the desk, slouching over the laptop. Constantly leaning the upper stomach tightly against the rigid desk edge which folds the skin of the upper abdomen. I recently got a blister/boil right on that spot because I sat like that for a couple of days, non-stop, working, writing, and researching. I need to make sure I don't repeat this. What more do I write? I just want to type, type, type. Ahaaa. I have a major task of completing my project and I need to submit it tomorrow! And, I have that contract to get printed and signed and scanned and sent! Uh. 

Something that’s been in my head for many months that I thought of after watching a video about Dostoevsky and Chekhov’s writing about sadness. How the sadness in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work is grandiose, existential, and explosive with massive spiritual crises, moral guilt, madness, and extreme psychological torment. Dostoevskian abyss, like the symphony of the scream, is where sadness is an active, violent, and theatrical force and his characters wrestle with it like a physical demon. His characters scream, confess, suffer grand downfalls, and wrestle with God, sin, and the dark absurdity of human free will. It is cosmic and vertical in nature where characters are either reaching for the divine or plunging headfirst into damnation. Sadness is tied to monumental suffering that carries a redemptive or terrifying weight. Like, you are stuck in the moment where you are perpetually giving in to utter, utter despair and scratching the rock bottom with your bare nails. When Raskolnikov or Ivan Karamazov suffer, their internal guilt fractures their reality. Sadness becomes madness, fever dreams, and public confessions. It is a heavy, bruising weight, but it carries a grand purpose: through total spiritual annihilation, there is at least the possibility of resurrection. It is a scream into the void, demanding that God answer.

And, the sadness in Anton Chekhov’s work is quiet, everyday, and understated because it focuses on ordinary people experiencing quiet disappointments, unfulfilled potential, and chronic loneliness. Chekhovian sadness seeps in through small, mundane moments… Like Iona Potapov, a grieving father, trying to tell strangers about his dead son in the story Misery (The Lament) and ending up talking to his horse. Oh, the deep grief, loneliness, and human indifference. Or, Uncle Vanya where each and every character under one household’s roof carried a distinct form of sadness and life still went on which was also a materialised form of yet another kind of sadness. Or, The Three Sisters, the tragedy is that the clock keeps ticking. Chekhovian twilight which is like the ache of the unsaid and inside that ache, sadness is a passive, atmospheric fog which evaporates into the room and settles on the furniture. It is a horizontal and devastatingly ordinary streak in life and there are no grand downfalls, only the slow, crushing realization that tomorrow will look exactly like today.

I have been realising this contrast and have been trying to capture the exact frequency of both writers. It took me a bit to get to this point to be able to describe the difference between existential terror and existential weariness. I feel like I do experience both of them. I feel like my life operates on both the frequencies. You know the constant and perpetual breakdowns where you get the feeling of a shattering panic attack in the middle of a thunderstorm, where you feel the weight of every moral choice you’ve ever made. That’s the Dostoevsky frequency. Once that moment has inevitably passed, you have the Chekhov frequency. You know the feeling of staring at a beige wall on a rainy Sunday afternoon, realising you missed an opportunity five years ago, and quietly going back to doing the dishes. It is the representation of the two halves of human sorrow: the explosive crises that define us, and the quiet loneliness that wears us away. And, after this realisation has crystallised in my mind, I feel I only exist in these two halves. The tiles break sometimes vigorously and then the ball freefalls for a while until the next phase of tile breaking starts. I feel like this is a good ending to this long-winded entry. Don’t you think? We are at 4880-something words.

~ Oizys.

The Weight of Logistics and Labyrinths

June 20, 2026, 11:55 PM - June 21, 2026, 03:50 AM

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.