The Loop of Lowly Bargains

June 29, 2026, 05:45 AM

The trip was cancelled. The tickets vanished into the digital void, but the manager approved the leave anyway after yet another follow-up, leaving me stranded with an empty week and the heavy, stagnant air of this shabby little room. Oh, but not before telling me the last task I completed was half-wrong because she had given me the wrong details. She did not even have the courtesy to apologise or clarify whether I had to redo it before my leave or after. She immediately replaced the ticket with an invitation [a demand, really, with zero clarity about the trip or the work] to join her for an upcoming event. I don't want to go. I cannot bring myself to go. The sheer exhaustion of performing “civilized,” enthusiastic participation for the corporate apparatus makes my limbs feel like lead. I want to resign and stop existing.

To escape this hold, I threw myself into the absolute torture of the job search loop. I applied. I followed up. I scratched at the skin of my soul to pull out professional-pretty words for a temporary position that offers disgustingly low pay. It forces me to move to a massive, hyper-capitalistic city where the starvation wages won’t even cover the rent of a closet. I sent them a list of basic, structural questions about the contract. They didn't answer. They completely ignored the text, bypassed my autonomy, and simply sent back a cold, automated job interview link with multiple calls on a weekend. The absolute frustration of being treated like a blank, faceless line of data makes my blood run hot. Is it my fault, though? Am I the problem? The endless bucket of guilt drops down on me, whispering that I am lazy, that I am a fraud of a social worker who doesn't know how to struggle in the real world. But is it truly a crime to refuse to jump from one burning cage into a slightly larger, more expensive burning cage? Why must the only option for survival be a submissively low surrender to an economy that demands total consumption for zero return?

you are a flicker on a glass screen,
a hand drawing borders for a creative crony king.
then I saw you trade the mogul’s golden lease
for the loud, anti-establishment machinery of peace.
now the track goes cold, the wires disconnect,
I do not know whose house you currently protect.
but I build a middle-station in my head:
a city where I stop before I cross the sea,
a city where I find you on my way back to me.
no romance... just a heavy, tangled weight,
deep, intensely confusing friction at the gate,
where my skin forgets the state.

Lately, the real world has become so loud, so violent, that my mind has engineered its own total blackout. To numb the chemical burn of these daily violences, I have descended completely into a deep, heavy, and extensive state of maladaptive daydreaming. I fade out. It is a violent physical pulling away, a slow-motion detachment where my eyes glaze over, the walls of this shabby room dissolve, and my consciousness is dragged backward into the dark, velvety lining of my own skull. My breathing slows until I am barely a tenant in my chest, completely slipping away from the physical gravity of my life.

I spend hours trapped inside this hyper-fixated illusion, letting the phantom of this stranger sedate my nervous system. I imagine a life mapped out around him. I imagine visiting him in that massive city, a deliberate, quiet layover on my way before leaving the country for work, and again on my way back. There is no neat, romantic paperwork in this dream. Instead, it is defined by a deep, heavy, intensely confusing kind of emotionally-charged relationship, a friction so thick and disorienting that it temporarily drowns out the historical ownership of my body, rewriting my nerve endings in a language the dictators of my past cannot read.

But I have noticed a terrifying, unyielding pattern in these daydreams. The script is always the same. It always starts with me as this alternative person, someone who completely lacks mainstream attention, but who holds a quiet, undiscovered cool. In the early stages of the dream, he is given all the credit for finding me out, for excavating me from the dust beneath the bed storage where the rest of the world left me archived.

But as the relationship unravels, my own reality begins to poison the fiction. In tandem with the daydream, I find myself frantically scouring the actual internet, furiously inspecting his life’s trajectory, his surroundings, his words, his views, analyzing his old videos, and pinning down random dots on the physical map of his world. I hunt for data, but all I find are weapons to use against myself. Those real-world details feed directly into my subconscious, culminating in an absolute, suffocating wave of insecurity. The dream-architecture cannot hold the weight of my damage. I systematically frame the relationship’s end as a tragic, inevitable undoing. A self-inflicted sabotage where I prove to myself that even in my own head, I am unlovable. And with that collapse, the narcotic high of the daydream violently breaks. The illusion shatters, and my physical body comes crashing down onto the mattress, twice as heavy and hollowed out as before.

The domestic surveillance of this familial state only heightens the crash.

A few days ago, I walked into the hallway and caught my mother with her ear clamped tightly against my sister’s bedroom door. Her face was pressed to the wood, a literal apparatus of the family regime. I asked her quietly what she was doing. She didn't even flinch. She just whispered that she was checking who my sister was talking to. In that chilling, micro-second of realization, the architecture of the house shifted. I realized she must be doing the exact same thing to me. She is listening through the plaster, patrolling my borders while I sleep.

Yet, in the thick depth of my mind, I keep forgetting. I slip so deeply into those intense, imaginary worlds that my physical armor completely drops. These moments of raw, vulnerable escape are abruptly shattered when my mother suddenly enters the room.

Lately, though, something even more unsettling has started happening. For some time now, I have noticed she knocks a bit before entering. This tiny, uncharacteristic delay goes completely against the raw, invasive fabric of our society. It feels terrifyingly deliberate. From her perspective, it makes me acutely, agonizingly aware of my own unraveling. It is as if she knows I am losing my mind under this ceiling; she is knocking out of a strange, clinical pity, giving the crazy girl a few seconds to hide her symptoms.

When she stands in the doorway, the whiplash of being dragged back from my mind into the room creates an almost physical terror. All the suppressed, heavy emotions inside me feel like metallic feelings violently springing out of my skin, pulling and tearing against my flesh under the invisible, high-voltage magnets of an MRI machine. I am raw, exposed, and magnetic, trapped in the gaze of the woman who broke me, while my mind desperately tries to crawl back into its hole.

I desperately need a new job. The daily reality of my current workplace is becoming a slow, poisonous chokehold. The entire institution is slipping rapidly into a hyper-nationalistic, capitalistic machine, a loud perpetuator of the oppressive status quo, all while wrapping itself in a deceptive, performative branding as the "Pioneer of change and equality." The sheer hypocrisy of the state apparatus wearing a mask of liberation makes me sicker and sicker with every shift. I am suffocating under their neat, non-profit corporate lies. I need an exit route that pays a decent work-from-home wage, or something that pays well enough to physically launch me far away from my hometown... or better yet, entirely out of this country.

I want change. I am screaming for it inside my head, but I know that change seldom comes to those who remain glued to the rock bottom. Or perhaps that is an optimistic lie. Sometimes, change does come at the rock bottom... but only when the structural floorboards completely collapse beneath your weight, unlocking a terrifying new level of rock bottom further down.

I just want a life. A real life, far away from this non-life, this thin life, this malnourished, degraded, and thoroughly humiliated existence. Please. I wish I believed in gods. This exact moment feels like the kind of heavy, desperate juncture where a human being should be on their knees, weeping and begging a higher power for a clean deliverance. But there is no altar here. Instead, all I see is my mother descending deeper into her own brand of religious madness. She spends her days chasing local godmen, traveling to their crowded talks in the scorching, oppressive summer heat, only to crawl back home entirely sick and dehydrated. Nobody else in this house will take care of her. So the duty falls on me. I am forced to lull her physical pain, to tend to the woman who polices my borders, simply because we share the exact same room and her sickness occupies my air. To lull my own mental pain, to survive the suffocating geometry of this shared bedroom, I turn the static back on. I close my eyes and fantasize about random men who sporadically appear in random online videos, rewriting them into my partners. I drag these digital strangers into my isolation, using their fictional warmth to block out the sound of my mother's religious broadcasts and the terrifyingly slow click of the door handle. I am a captive building empires out of ghosts, praying to a screen because the sky is completely empty.

The terrifying truth is that the further I move forward in life, the deeper I sink into the floorboards of this house. This hole of a waiting room is no longer a temporary pause, I believe. I feel it transforming into a dense, unyielding black hole of my own futile existence. The gravitational pull is total. I can never seem to locate or situate my adult self anywhere in the modern world, because whenever I reach inward to find a coordinate, I am violently dragged back to the exact same origin point. I am forever that lonely, terrified little schoolgirl, trapped between the walls of a deeply traumatic home and the hostile, suffocating desks of a bullying school, with absolutely nowhere else to go. That childgirl’s identity shapes the entire architecture of my adulthood. It dictates the oversized, protective clothes I choose to wear, acting as a soft shield against the world’s gaze. It governs the defensive way I work, the raw, bleeding ink with which I write, and the paranoid loops in which I think. It is the filter for how I feel, how I clumsily exist among others, and how I desperately fail to socialize, pulling my borders tight whenever a stranger gets too close. I am a twenty-five-year-old-plus woman walking through a neat, polite "democracy", but underneath the skin, I am still just that little girl under the desk, waiting for the blows to land, completely unable to find an exit from the day I was broken.

I wish I could want death even. But even that is no longer there; the wish to die has died along with the rest of my vitality. There is an absolute, staggering death of wantingness inside me. I cannot even summon the passion required to desire my own erasure. Desire itself has been completely hollowed out, leaving a flat, calcified plain where the hunger for an end used to burn. It is a terrifyingly quiet state of existence. To be completely devoid of appetite, to look at both life and the void with the exact same unblinking, indifferent eyes. Now, I don't want to end myself; I wish the world would end. I wish the entire hyper-nationalistic, capitalistic, misogynistic, patriarchal, classist infrastructure, the corporate cages, and the invasive domestic systems would collapse and fall directly onto me. Let the whole rotten weight of civilization crush my bones into the soil of this room. And from my softly rotting body, tucked safely beneath the rubble where no manager or mother can ever reach, a new world would quietly bloom... A single, small purple flower with tiny, bright yellow beads at its center. Let my flesh become the fertilizer for a quieter, gentler ecosystem that doesn't know the language of surveillance or trauma.

I summon all the gods humanity has ever crafted, created, believed in, or prayed to. I summon the ancient deities of stone, the modern gods of money, and the violent, policing entities used as an apparatus to control the bodies of tired daughters. I summon all of you into this small, suffocating bedroom to challenge your structural silence: Hi. If you exist, if there is a single drop of sovereignty in your mythologies, then end it. Tear down the floorboards of this waiting room and let the sky collapse.

~ Oizys.

the salary arrived. so did the sinkhole.

It is Friday, May 15th, 2026.

Five days since I wrote that all roads lead to rot, and unfortunately, the road has not developed better civic planning since then. It is still the same road, same potholes, same suspicious corner, same emotional drainage system clogged with old leaves, shame, salt, and things I should have said in 2017, 2019, 2021, yesterday, this afternoon, ten minutes ago. I would like to report progress, but progress has not submitted its attendance. Maybe it took casual leave, or maybe it resigned or maybe it saw my life and said, respectfully, madam, this department is beyond my jurisdiction. 

Monday began with a training. Technically, my manager was supposed to take it while I assisted her. Technically, I had prepared everything for her. Technically, I had even pushed her on Saturday to prepare, like a fool with hope and basic professional ethics. She did not. Then Sunday night, while I was busy being poor in the quiet and dark, she sent two texts asking me to join early on Monday to help her out. Help her out. Haha. A phrase so small, so polite, so corporate-y, it should come with its own knife. Monday arrived. Like, always. She started the session, and then, with the grace of someone dropping a dead animal at my feet, very conveniently dumped the whole thing on me. Not last minute. Worse. After the minute had already passed. After the train had left. After the public performance had begun and I was standing there with no rehearsal, no consent, and no escape hatch. And then it continued. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Three days of taking a training I had not agreed to lead. Three days of smiling into the camera, arranging knowledge into digestible portions, pretending surprise labour is the same thing as opportunity. Three days of doing everything. There is a special violence in being competent. People discover you can carry weight, and suddenly the weight becomes yours by tradition. Meanwhile, over the past weekend, my salary had not come. Sunday passed like a badly written insult. The banks, displaying their usual talent for comedy without compassion, debited whatever peanuts I had left as a penalty for low balance. Low balance. The account was hungry, so they fined it for being hungry. What a cruel joke. No, not joke. Joke implies timing. This was just cruel capitalism wearing a clown nose and holding a receipt. Then finally, Monday night, after a long day of unconsensual labour, I saw the money had been credited from my organisation. For one stupid second, I felt relief. A small animal lifting its head. Haha. Immediately, the utility bills marched in like creditors at a funeral. Paid. Paid. Paid. The salary arrived and was swallowed before I could even pretend to be a person with options. Now I do not know what to do with the remaining peanuts. Save them? Spend them? Worship them? Put them under a glass case and label them: Evidence of Almost Freedom? Money does this ugly thing where it becomes both survival and accusation. If I save, I am responsible. If I spend, I am reckless. If I buy one harmless thing, the future clears its throat. If I deny myself everything, the present sits in the corner and rots.¹ So here I am, financially adult and emotionally feral, wondering whether peanuts should become savings, food, joy, phone case, emergency fund, retirement fund, temporarily-escape-from-family fund, abandon-my-family fun or proof that I am still allowed to want. And because the universe enjoys garnish, Thursday started with a multi-team meeting. The three-day training was finally over. My face had done its professional smiling. My voice had carried three days of material it was never supposed to carry. My brain was sitting in the corner like a wet towel. Then our director thanked my manager for working so hard and taking the training. Ha. Cute. Cruel cherry on top. There she was, being publicly blessed for labour that had passed through my throat, my screen, my panic, my preparation, my improvisation, my body, my mind, my hands. I watched credit climb the hierarchy like a well-trained monkey. Nobody thanked me. Of course nobody thanked me. What was I thinking? That would have disturbed the seating arrangement of the universe. The senior must shine. The junior must become (un)human infrastructure. The work must appear from somewhere, like office electricity or women’s patience. This is the social work's corporate version of domestic labour: invisible until it fails, inherited when inconvenient, credited to someone else when successful. I wish I could say I was surprised. I was not. That is what made it worse.

Anyway. Because the mind is a strange animal and refuses to suffer in a straight line, Wednesday night I returned to The Law According to Lidia Poët. The trainings were over. The emails had documented their little theatre of stolen credit. My body was tired in that corporate-social-work way where even the bones seem to have attended calls. Finally, I had a little time to myself. So naturally, I used it to become unreasonable about a fictional prosecutor. Jacopo? No. The prosecutor. Pier. Pierluigi Fourneau. Or, as Lidia called him as her "Young Warner". Or her schnauzel. The prosecutor had me hooked. There is something very annoying about being hooked. It makes a fool of all your intellectual furniture. Suddenly I am not a woman with critical faculties. I am a Victorian fainting couch with internet access. I went researching him. Then I watched two of his other films² that night, like a person conducting scholarly work and absolutely not like a woman chasing the aftertaste of one very specific chemistry. The films had charm. They had their own mood, their own appeal, their own little atmosphere. For a while, they worked. Then the spell thinned. Whatever spark I was trying to follow was not really there. Because it was not only him, was it? That is the irritating truth. It was not only the face, the voice, the posture, the period clothing, the courtroom seriousness, the restrained longing doing its quiet damage. It was the charge between them. The particular weather created when Lidia and the prosecutor stand near each other and do not say the actual thing. That has stayed. It has stayed so stubbornly that I keep rewatching their scenes. Again and again. Night and day. Day and night. Like a devotional practice, except the temple is Netflix and the deity is unbearable romantic tension. By now, I know the scenes too well. The dialogues. The pauses. The facial expressions. The music entering at exactly the wrong-right moment. The way one look shifts the entire emotional furniture of a scene. The way a sentence becomes less important than the breath before it. The way restraint can sometimes feel more intimate than touch. The kisses. The looks and smiles. Every rewatch gives me something else. A detail I missed. A change in expression. A hesitation. A small cruelty. A softness pretending to be wit. A look that arrives half a second too late. A silence that does not know how to leave the room. And, yes, the giddy pleasure. The ridiculous private sparkle of it. I know it is fiction. I know it is choreography. I know there are writers, actors, lighting, music, editing, all the machinery of feeling doing its work behind the curtain. I know I am being handled. I can see the strings. Still, I keep offering my wrists. There is something almost embarrassing about how deeply a fictional almost-love can enter the bloodstream. Maybe because it is safe. Maybe because it asks nothing from me. Maybe because nobody in my actual life is looking at me like that... with recognition, challenge, danger, tenderness, and the terrible inconvenience of wanting. Maybe I latch onto shows because they give me scenes my life refuses to stage. In Lidia Poët, even longing has architecture. It has corridors, offices, courtrooms, gloves, lamps, carriage rides, glances. It gets music. It gets dialogue. It gets a face across the room. My longing gets browser tabs. My longing gets a broken phone case. My longing gets me, sitting here after midnight, memorising someone else’s charged silences because my own life has made desire both dangerous and impractical. And yet, I do not want to mock it too much. This tiny obsession has kept me company. It has given my tired brain somewhere beautiful to go. It has reminded me that I am still capable of being moved, charmed, struck, made foolish, made awake. That some part of me still responds to spark. Still recognises chemistry. Still wants the look, the scene, the music, the impossible almost. Maybe that is why it has not faded yet. The other films were charming, yes. But charm is not the same as haunting. Charm passes through the room. Haunting learns your name.

But the trouble with haunting is that it does not stay politely inside the show. It follows me out. At first, it feels harmless. Sweet, even. A little private theatre behind the ribs. A spark. A charged scene to revisit when the actual day has been all training, bills, stolen credit, and corporate digestion. The brain says: here, look, beauty. Look, tension. Look, someone wanting someone with their whole face while pretending not to. And then, quietly, the floor changes. The giddiness starts to rot at the edges. I know this pattern. I know it too well. The attachment begins as pleasure, then turns into comparison, then into lack, then into a pit with excellent acoustics. Suddenly I am not watching a romance. I am standing outside my own life, watching what it does not contain. No one looks at me like that. No one waits for me in a corridor of consequence. No one turns toward me with restrained disaster in their eyes. No one writes my longing into music. By MDD, I mean both things, because of course my brain could not stop at one acronym. Major Depressive Disorder, yes, the official beast with paperwork. But also Maladaptive Daydreaming, its glittering cousin, the one that does not drag me down so much as decorate the pit and invite me to live there. The daydreaming does not feel like imagination then. It feels like teleportation-relocation. One minute I am in my room, and the next I am living inside a scene that has better lighting, better dialogue, better stakes, better tenderness. I build corridors from glances. I extend conversations that never happened. I replay a look until it becomes a country. And for a while, the body loosens its grip. The real world thins. My actual life goes quiet in the background like a tab I forgot to close. That is where the DPDR slips in. Depersonalization-derealization disorder. Not as a separate disaster, but as the bill for leaving too often. The more inhabited the daydream becomes, the less inhabited I feel in my own body. My hands become props. My room becomes set design. My face becomes a character I vaguely recognise but do not fully own. The fictional world gains texture, and my real world loses temperature. And then the MDD, that old bureaucrat of the soul, opens its files. It begins gently, almost reasonably. See? This is what life can look like. This is what desire can do to a face. This is what aliveness looks like when properly lit. And now look at you. Look at your room. Look at your unread messages. Look at your body. Look at the broken phone case. Look at the salary that arrived only to vanish into bills. Look at the Saturday already being trespassed upon by work. Look at the years. Look at the stuckness. Look at the absence. Depression has never needed originality. Repetition is its main skill. Then the DPDR enters like bad fog. The world gets a pane of glass over it. My own hands become slightly theoretical. My face in the mirror looks like someone I have been assigned to maintain. The room becomes too flat and too far away at the same time. I can hear myself thinking, but from another room. I can move, answer, type, drink water, exist, but existence feels like a badly dubbed film. And the show becomes more real than me. That is the humiliating part. A fictional almost-touch has more texture than my actual evening. A glance between two actors feels more inhabited than my own body. Their silence has gravity. Mine has dust. Their longing has editing, music, consequence. Mine has tabs open and a mild headache. So I keep rewatching, partly for pleasure, partly for proof. Proof that I can still feel. Proof that somewhere inside the fog, the signal has not died. But every proof becomes evidence against me. If I can feel this much for a scene, why can I not feel properly inside my own life? If my chest can tighten because two fictional people stood too close under warm lighting, why does my actual future feel wrapped in plastic? If desire still lives in me, why does it have nowhere to go except a screen? This is how the sinkhole opens. Not dramatically. Not with a scream. Just one more rewatch. One more scene. One more detail noticed. One more minute of being pulled toward a life with movement, stakes, beauty, and someone across the room who sees you as both problem and possibility. Then I pause the show. And my own room returns. My own life returns. The same arrangement. The same stuck furniture of the self. The same body I keep trying to inhabit like rented accommodation. The same old fear standing at the foot of the bed, asking if I enjoyed my little outing. This is why I both love and fear these attachments. They rescue me. Then they show me what I needed rescuing from. They make me feel alive. Then they make my life feel unlivable. They pull me out of numbness. Then leave me with the full bill of having been numb. And I know this sounds excessive. I know sane people watch a show, enjoy the chemistry, maybe make an edit, maybe send a thirsty message to a friend, then proceed with their lives like emotionally regulated mammals. I, meanwhile, open one fictional door and fall through the architecture of my entire deprivation. Very normal. Very casual. Five stars. Would dissociate again. I do not escape reality. No. Never. I just return to it less assembled.

Anyway. The phone case is still broken. Of course it is. It has become one of those stupidly faithful objects that stays because I do not have the courage to replace it with something honest. A cracked little witness that's ugly, loyal, safer than confession. I keep thinking about the sapphic flag phone case, still. Not constantly, not dramatically, not like a heroine pressing a forbidden letter to her chest under moonlight. More like an app running quietly in the background, draining battery. A small wish. A small colour. A small yes I keep refusing myself because in this house where I reside, even colour can become evidence. A phone case is never just a phone case. It is a trial waiting for a prosecutor.³ Who bought this? Why this colour? What does it mean? Where did you see this? Who told you? Why are you becoming like this? Since when? Because families are very modern until your object begins to speak a language they did not approve. Then suddenly everyone becomes archaeologist, police, priest, and unpaid detective. So the broken cover stays. The safe thing. The ugly thing. The thing that says nothing and therefore survives. Just like me. I am ugly and I say nothing. And, unfortunately, I survive. I wish I were less good at surviving. This is a terrible thing to say because survival is supposed to be noble. Women are fed this word like jaggery wrapped around medicine. Survive. Adjust. Manage. Endure. Be strong. Be mature. Be practical. Be grateful it is not worse. Be glad you are educated. Be glad you have work. Be glad nobody has chained your ankle to the bedpost. Be glad the cage has wonky Wi-Fi that doesn't work only for you so you have to buy your data separately. And I am glad, sometimes. I am not completely foolish, you know. I know the world is brutal, and I know there are worse rooms, worse fathers, worse mothers, worse brothers, worse sisters, worse uncles, worse aunts, worse silences, worse locks, worse oppressors. And, I know comparison is the national sport of emotional invalidation. Still, knowing other people are drowning in deeper water does not make your own lungs decorative. I am tired. Not beautifully tired. Not aesthetically tired. Not poet tired. Not the cinematic kind where a woman removes one earring and looks devastating under yellow light. I am tired in the spreadsheet way. Rows and rows of small unfinished things. Cells filled with pending. Useless colours marking them pending. Body pending. Courage pending. Departure pending. Desire pending. Honesty pending. Future pending. Life pending. There is something obscene about being mid-twenty-something and feeling already archival. Like I am not living, have never lived, but only preserving evidence for a case no court will ever hear. 
Exhibit A: the broken phone case.
Exhibit B: the body that alternates between hunger and punishment of embarrassment when I do eat.⁴
Exhibit C: the tabs I keep open as if research can become rescue.
Exhibit D: the private list of things I will do when I leave.
Exhibit E: the sentence, when I leave, carrying the entire weight of a religion.⁵
But what if I do not leave? There it is. The honest rot laid bare under the decorative moss. What if I do not leave? What if the box of things I will do when I leave becomes a pathetic, loser museum of the woman I kept postponing? What if all my rebellion remains beautifully theoretical, well-written, occasionally funny, and completely unusable in this stupid head of mine and a copy of it here, in this weird little corner of the world wide web? What if I keep becoming more articulate about the cage and never actually become less caged? I hate that question because it has no manners and it shamelessly enters without knocking and sits on my bed. Today was not even dramatic enough to justify all this. That is the insult. Nothing happened. No grand fight. No cinematic breakdown. No one said the cruel line that would make a clean villain of them. The day simply passed over me with its usual dull hands. Work, phone, food thoughts, body thoughts, tabs, messages, heat, humidity, perpetual fatigue, my mother's devotional songs, the faint humiliation of still being myself in this rotting flesh. Maybe that is why I am writing. Like always. Because nothing happened, and still I feel like I survived something tremendous. Maybe the event is not always external. Maybe sometimes the event is waking up inside the same life and not immediately turning into stone. I keep thinking of Lidia Poët again. Not just the law, the fight, the forbidden rooms. Of course, that is the central point, though. I keep thinking of her forward motion. Even when she suffers, the story lets her move. Or, more aptly, she moves her story forward. She enters rooms, she argues, she demands, she fights, she risks, she desires, she loves, she fails with choreography, and she still continues. Her world resists her, yes, on this screen, it gives her scenes. My life, by comparison, feels like a loading screen. A buffering woman. A spinning circle wearing moisturizer. 

And yet, beneath all this melodrama, some tiny stubborn thing remains alive. Annoyingly alive. Cockroach alive. Government-office-file alive. It keeps making lists. It keeps saving poems. It keeps laughing at terrible jokes all alone in the small, dark room. It keeps wanting pizza, sea air, impossible softness, a room with a lock, a body that is not treated like a public institution, a love that does not require a courtroom, and one ridiculous phone case in colours nobody is allowed to interrogate. This, I suppose, is hope...? Not the clean kind. Definitely, not. Not the motivational-poster kind, either. Not the “everything happens for a reason” kind, which should be banned and replaced with free snacks. My hope is smaller and more suspicious. It looks like keeping the browser tab open. It looks like drinking water after punishing the body. It looks like writing the sentence even when the sentence is ugly. It looks like admitting I want things. It looks like not mocking myself immediately after admitting I want things. Okay, fine, it looks like mocking myself only a little. At 20:55 PM, I am still here. Still stuck. Still carrying home inside me like contraband. Still afraid that my life is not a phase but the whole arrangement. Still saving possible selves in invisible carts. Still not buying the phone case. Still wanting it. Maybe that matters. I hope, it matters. Wanting. Even wanting badly. Even wanting secretly. Even wanting in a house where desire must learn to move like a shameful thief. Rot is still here, yes. But maybe rot is not the only thing loyal to me. Maybe want is loyal too. Maybe the little sapphic flag in my head, the one I have not bought, the one I have not allowed to become plastic and visible and stupidly real, is not only fear. Maybe it is also proof that some part of me still knows colour. Still recognises itself. Still presses its face against the shop window of the future and says, very quietly, not yet, but mine. Not yet. But mine.

As I write this, she, my manager, has texted again. After work hours, of course. Respecting time would be too vulgar, too modern, too dangerously close to recognising me as a person. Some work needs to be done ASAP. As she had already promised it. Naturally. ASAP: the social work's corporate mantra of poor planning, passed down from one panicked person [usually the manager] to another [the underdog] until it lands in the lap of whoever [mostly, the underdog, again] has the least authority to refuse. The funny part is, it is not even my job. Not really. But somehow the inconvenience has found my address. Now I will have to either ask the concerned person humiliatingly late at night, as if I am the villain in their Friday, or ask tomorrow, on an off Saturday, and become the tiny unpleasant notification in someone else’s weekend. This is how bad management spreads its shame. Someone does not plan. Someone does not prepare. Someone does not communicate. Then the failure travels downward, wearing urgency as perfume the gives you a migraine the moment it hits your nostrils, until the most junior person is left holding a burning plate and apologising for the smoke. I hate this part most: the forced borrowing of another person’s time. I hate that I must become the messenger of someone else’s chaos. I hate that I must sound polite while carrying a request I do not respect. I hate that my options are either to inconvenience someone else or absorb the inconvenience into my own body, which is apparently where all unclaimed work goes to die. There should be a word for this. Not burnout. Burnout sounds too final, too respectable, like a candle in a poem. This is more like being nibbled. Tiny bites of time. Tiny bites of rest. Tiny bites of Friday evening, Saturday morning, salary, self-respect, appetite, softness, desire. Nothing large enough to make a case. Everything small enough to be dismissed. Just do this once. Just check once. Just ask once. Just join early once. Just help out once. Just manage for today. Just stretch a little. A whole life can be stolen in “just.” And I know what will happen if I say no. Maybe nothing dramatic. Maybe no punishment anyone can screenshot. Just a change in tone. A slight coolness. A note in the invisible ledger. Not a team player. Not proactive. Difficult. Uncooperative. Needs attitude adjustment. The old words wearing office clothes. So I sit here, at 23:25 PM, writing about being stuck while the proof of stuckness arrives in real time. A message on my phone. A task outside my role. An urgency I did not create. A Saturday being quietly dragged toward sacrifice. And me, still deciding whether to obey, delay, soften, apologise, resist, or perform that sophisticated modern dance called “setting boundaries” while standing on a floor made entirely of consequences. Maybe I will reply tomorrow [that being, Monday]. Maybe I will say, “I’ll check this during working hours.” Maybe I will type it bravely and then stare at it like it is a bomb and then erase it. Maybe courage, for tonight, is not sending the message immediately. Maybe survival is letting one ASAP remain slightly less ASAP. Maybe rebellion begins as a notification left unread. Actually, I read it. Or maybe I am romanticising avoidance because I am tired. Both can be true. Most things that keep me alive are morally untidy.

~ Oizys.

¹ This too echoes: “The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.” ― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
² The Mascarpone Collection.
³ Good reference.
⁴ An addendum for Exhibit B: A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka.
⁵ An addendum for Exhibit E:
When I leave, I will buy the phone case.
When I leave, I will breathe normally.
When I leave, I will decorate myself without fear.
When I leave, I will not explain every harmless thing like it is a crime scene.
When I leave, I will become the version of myself who exists without whispering.

something good happened. [haha]

april 19th. 23:37PM.

i am sitting at my table. my mother on the bed. the rain teased us an hour ago and never came, but the windows are open and the wind is generously violent. my mother says she is going to sleep after she closes her phone, which finally brings the devotional music to an end. the room is still the room. the bed is still the bed. the same objects continue their long conspiracy of being familiar. life has been the same for long, long, long.

i want to write so much, but the burden of living so much and yet not being able to live in the way i fantasise, imagine, or sometimes think i deserve, crushes me in these stupid, unheroic intervals. not even all at once. not in operatic crescendos. just steadily. like bad weather that never fully arrives and never fully leaves. i get angry. i get mad in this stale, repetitive way that feels less like fire and more like being slowly pickled in disappointment.

today i got featured on napowrimo for yesterday’s poem. the surprise startled me. it did make me blink and sit up and feel, for a second, as though the membrane between my private effort and the visible world had thinned. but i have not been able to feel happy the way i think i should feel happy. it is humiliating, this inability to perform joy on cue. as if even happiness requires a version of me that is more functional than the one currently available. i do not trust my own responses anymore. i do not know if i am underreacting or if i have already exhausted the feeling elsewhere, in some private rehearsal i cannot access now. that is what irritates me. i had imagined this before. i had rehearsed it in advance the way i rehearse everything: the future compliment, the future recognition, the future version of me receiving it well, graciously, radiantly, with the exact right degree of delight and disbelief. i have fantasised about the event of being seen often enough that when it happened, reality could only arrive already pre-chewed.

and perhaps that is one of the uglier side effects of living so much in anticipation, fantasy, daydream, simulation, imaginary elsewhere: the real thing turns up and finds you strangely unavailable to it. not because you do not care. not because you are ungrateful. but because some part of you already spent the feeling in private. 

and where is god in all this. i kept myself godless for years, almost stubbornly, because i could never locate anything in me that felt worthy of being seen by something higher. or perhaps i could not bear the idea of being seen fully. people say god is comfort, structure, witness. i have always felt like an unsupervised consciousness. i feel plath and dickinson combined here.

plath said, 'I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.' and dickinson said, “I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die”. i understand that too well. i have addressed silence often enough to recognise its texture. and yet i am not even faithful to my unbelief. there are moments i want what others seem to have, that collective surrender, that strange, shared certainty in their psychosis, that soft delusion that something is holding them together.

as a child i already felt outside it. as if everyone else had agreed to drink from something; faith, god, meaning, that opium marx talked about and everyone misunderstood, whatever form it took; and i stood there, suspicious, refusing, and therefore permanently excluded. spiritually orphaned is the closest i can get to naming it.

perhaps that orphanhood has never been only spiritual. perhaps it leaked outward into everything else: friendship, love, belonging, the confidence with which other people seem to enter a room, a city, a decade, and assume there will be something there to meet them.

which sounds spoiled. maybe it is spoiled. or maybe it is just what happens when the mind has been overperforming reality for years. a life too often rehearsed becomes difficult to inhabit live. still, i am glad. i think i am glad. i know i am glad. but the gladness arrived in a muted, underwater way. as if it had to swim to me through too much silt. as if the day itself had too many other rooms inside it for joy to occupy the whole house.

ugh. spontaneously i decided to write this although i have been fermenting things to write for days, and have not been able to press the wine, separate the liquid from the skins and seeds and bitter residue. so if this ends up a large load of dumpy gibberish, then so be it. frankly, i have written worse, and with more confidence in this unknown corner of the web's nowhere.

i have been thinking, as usual, obviously, embarrassingly, a lot. in the background: my life, my family, what i eat, what i do, my house, my job, money, class, marriage, womanhood, politics, religion, god, my country, its vulgar brutalities, iran, lebanon, gaza, palestine, people carrying on under bombardment and occupation and grief so enormous that language should be ashamed to approach it, and the victims here too, the daily humiliations and violences and stupid little acceptances by which a country teaches you what kind of suffering counts and what kind does not. and in the foreground, the constant maladaptive daydreaming, the depersonalization, the derealization, the irritating sensation of being both trapped in this life and not entirely present for it.

sometimes i think my consciousness is split into at least three badly managed departments. sometimes it does not even feel like departments. it feels like pieces. like badly handled flesh. as if i have been split into workable sections and none of them remember belonging to the same body. thought in one place, desire in another, action somewhere else entirely, and the self, if there is one, lagging behind like a witness to its own disassembly. one is trying to survive the day in practical terms: eat, work, bathe, answer, reply, produce, appear normal enough. one is continuously writing alternate lives in the background, furnishing them in absurd detail, giving them cities, clothes, books, apartments, lovers, train stations, versions of my face that look more like mine than mine does. and one is simply standing at a distance from both, watching, dissociating, making notes, becoming alien to the whole production.

this is too much consciousness for one mediocre life. that is perhaps an ungracious thing to say, but there it is.

and the house does not help. how could it. every house develops its own emotional climate and ours has been set, for years, to interruption. even when nothing actively dramatic is happening, there is a density to shared life that exhausts me. the bed where my mother lies. the phone music. the walls that have heard too much. the familiar sounds that should by now have become neutral and instead remain overfull with association. sometimes i feel i have never once had an acoustically innocent life. every room comes pre-interpreted.

and i know, i know, many people have less. this is part of what makes complaint so sticky. gratitude and suffocation can coexist so easily they become almost impossible to untangle without sounding either cruel or pathetic. yes, i have shelter. yes, i have food. yes, i have a meagre job in the social sector where i can pretend to help people. yes, today i was featured for a poem i wrote. yes, people were kind. yes, these are not nothing. and yet the architecture of my dissatisfaction remains standing. what is this life, really. what is this thing i am required to inhabit with such obedience. this banal, thin, almost polite arrangement of existence that still manages to feel grotesque from the inside. a life that looks intact from a distance but, up close, is mostly improvisation, fatigue, and the constant ricochet between imagination and a reality that refuses to deepen. i sometimes feel less like a person and more like a mass being carried forward by habit. not even tragic. just sustained. which might be worse. the walls do not collapse just because one window briefly opened.

maybe that is what disorients me most. that something objectively lovely can happen and still not reorganise the underlying misery. recognition is not relocation. praise is not freedom. being read is not the same as being released. a feature on a poetry site does not magically alter the room, the finances, the fatigue, the family structure, the body, the old griefs, the stalled appetites, the private humiliations, the long habit of feeling life happen in the wrong key. nor does it return the time already spent in becoming someone who can endure disappointment elegantly. which is not the same thing as living well, though women are often trained to confuse the two.

still, i do not want to be unfair to joy either. perhaps joy is smaller than i keep demanding it to be. perhaps it is not a flood but a pocket. perhaps it is just the startled little lift i felt when i saw my name there. perhaps it is the fact that i am writing this at all. perhaps it is the mild stupidity of grinning alone for five seconds before the rest of my brain rushed in with its clipboards and critiques.

my mind is such an overstaffed bureaucracy. no feeling gets through without ten departments stamping it.

i think, too, that part of my trouble is that i am always waiting for outer validation to produce an inner transformation it has never once promised. as if being noticed should settle something fundamental. as if praise should put bones where there has been only fog. as if one small external confirmation should finally silence the older internal voices that have spent years saying: not enough, not yet, not really, not you. but of course it does not work like that. old damage is not impressed by public recognition. it has seen too much continuity to be moved by interruption. it does not believe in moments. it believes in patterns. and my patterns have been stubborn, repetitive, embarrassingly durable. it barely looks up from its desk.

and then there is the stranger, more embarrassing layer: what if i have become so attached to longing, frustration, elsewhere, unreality, and disappointment that even good things arrive as interruptions to a familiar self-concept? what if some part of me does not know how to metabolise happiness unless it also gets to remain tragic? horrible thought. plausible thought. there is something indecent about how well i understand my own traps and how little that understanding changes anything. insight without alteration is its own kind of failure. i catalogue myself endlessly and remain the same.

and perhaps beneath all this there is also the quieter, more ordinary grief: that i have long since forgone the ideas of success i once had for myself, or at least loosened my grip on them so much that they now drift around me like old paper in dirty water. not even dramatic ambitions, necessarily. just the basic, vulgar little visions of a life that would feel recognisably mine. some steadiness. some beauty. some movement. some evidence that i had not merely been stored somewhere for safekeeping while the years got on with their work.

the ages of my twenties keep slipping and slipping, each one leaving behind its thin residue of regret, remorse, sorrow, embarrassment, loss. and what have i done with them. really. what have i done. where are my solo trips now. where are my friends. where are the photographs of youth that look like proof instead of invention. where is love, too, or whatever modest adult version of it i might have managed by now; not the operatic kind, not the kind that ruins empires, just the ordinary fact of being chosen regularly, being known in practice, being folded into someone else’s day without ceremony. where is the evidence that i have been accompanied. or perhaps the evidence exists and i am the one who exiled myself from it. which is somehow worse. not to be left, but to become the mechanism of one’s own leaving. where are the train stations, the hotel mirrors, the clothes thrown over chairs in some temporary room in another country, the badly framed self-portraits, the cheap coffee, the expensive mistakes, the accidental intimacies, the evidence that i once moved through the world as if it might answer me back.

where is the recklessness i thought would redeem me. where is the freedom i kept assuming would begin just after this one obstacle, then the next, then the next. where are the evenings that were supposed to accumulate into memory instead of disappearing into fatigue. where is the life that was meant to acquire texture. 

now i have no friends, or none that belong to the ordinary daily grammar of living. no place to go. no one to hit up on a whim. no person-shaped escape hatch in the evening. no casual proximity, no easy witness, no warm third place where my body might arrive before my thoughts do. whole weeks pass in which i speak, reply, perform, function, and yet remain fundamentally unaccompanied. there are lonelinesses inflicted by the world, and then there are the ones one manufactures with one’s own frightened hands. mine has too often been the second kind.

and this is not even a clean tragedy in which i was merely abandoned by circumstance. i participated in it. perhaps i enforced it.

i think often of the days when i did have friends, or at least the ordinary shape of friendship was still available to me. the last day i met them was the day before napowrimo 2023 began. we went to the bazaar. we shopped for the next day’s farewell. we ate, laughed, twirled, took pictures, played with dogs, drank cool drinks against the heat, gossiped, worried aloud about the future in that half-serious way young people do when they still imagine the future will arrive as an event and not just accumulate around them by stealth. then i came back home and something in me closed like a fist. i never picked up their calls again. i never went to the farewell. rather, with my closed fist, i wrote this poem: napowrimo 2023, day 1, latibulating.

please, if there is any god, do not ask me after i die why i became the enforcer of that cruel abandonment. i have no answer except that perhaps it was the only language i knew. retreat before being reached. vanish before being witnessed too closely. make distance first and call it necessity later.

a year later things had changed for them, as things do. different cities. finished courses. jobs. movement. lives beginning in visible ways. and i was still in my room, stuck in that viscous interval where time passes but nothing seems to convert into forward motion. i joined instagram after a long absence and one friend asked to meet. i declined like a thief. even now that comparison feels exact: furtive, ashamed, already acting as if i had stolen something i could not return.

since then two years have passed. so many napowrimos. i do not reach out. once in a while i like their stories; sometimes they like mine. these tiny, polite digital survivals of something i once held in my hands. what did i do. why did i do it. how does a person turn living, laughing companionship into this thin, haunted afterlife of mutual viewing and almost nothing else.

i helped do this. i withdrew. i disappeared. i made myself the instrument of the loss. i am the co-conspirator of this specific, shame-soaked, ordinary, and brutal (in exactly the right way) loneliness.

there is a particular humiliation in having once imagined adulthood as a widening and finding instead that it can narrow so quietly you barely hear the walls move. one day you realise you do not have a circle, or a scene, or even a dependable corner to disappear into. you just have your own mind, overused to the point of damage, and the stale little routes between work, home, obligation, and the internet.

sometimes i think what devastates me is not even the absence of grandeur, but the absence of density. the terrible thinness of it. the way whole years can pass and leave so little behind except a few exhausted routines, some unfinished drafts, screenshots, browser tabs, receipts, messages half-answered, clothes re-worn into anonymity, and a face in the mirror that looks as if it has been waiting for someone else’s life to start.

it is not that nothing has happened. it is that so much of what has happened feels unusable. untransformed. it has not become story, or memory, or wisdom, or even proper damage. it just lies there in me like badly stored material. the unlived and the half-lived rotting side by side.

i had once imagined my twenties as something feverish, excessive, full of departure. not glamorous, necessarily, but alive. intellectually alive, sexually alive, erotically alive, geographically alive, aesthetically alive, morally alive, politically alive, some kind of alive that would leave marks and make stories. instead there has been so much suspension. so much delay. so much ricochet between endurance and fantasy. so much waiting in one room while the mind drags the body across continents it cannot afford.

and this too is difficult to confess without sounding ridiculous, because many lives are narrower than mine, harsher than mine, poorer than mine, more violently constrained than mine. i know that. i know it with shame. but comparison does not erase the private knowledge of waste. it does not soothe the vulgar panic of realising that youth is not an abstract resource. it is being spent whether i am using it well or not. it is horrifying how possible it is to waste a life without ever doing anything visibly dramatic enough to call waste.

sometimes i want to gather up all the vanished versions of myself... the one who would travel more, love more, read more, risk more, earn more, become more, leave more, refuse more; and line them against the wall like unclaimed luggage. look at them properly. apologise, perhaps. or accuse them. or accuse myself. i do not know which would be more accurate. maybe execute them forever.

what a thin thing a life can become while still remaining unbearably heavy.

and then there is politics, which would be easier to survive if it remained outside the house. but it does not. there is the politics of the world, of the country, of the city, of the street, and then the quieter politics of the home: what is repeated, what is excused, what begins to sound normal, what kind of hardness enters the language and stays. i can feel the moral weather changing around me. i move in one direction by instinct, by study, by injury, by refusal, and they move in another by fear, fatigue, resentment, habit, ambition, television, history. no one announces the split. it just keeps widening in the room.

it is strange to watch the people you belong to become less and less inhabitable to your mind. strange to hear familiar voices begin to carry values that make your skin recoil in private while your face stays neutral. strange to understand that love does not prevent estrangement; it only makes it slower, and more humiliating. even at home there is this creeping sense that the map is being redrawn while i am still inside it.

and what unsettles me most is not merely that they are changing, or revealing themselves more fully, or settling more comfortably into positions i cannot inhabit. it is that i am not outside this. i am not some clean witness standing at a moral distance, taking notes. i am made in part by the same house, the same air, the same repetitions, the same evasions, the same selective tendernesses and sanctioned cruelties. whatever i reject in them, i have had to locate first in myself: in reflexes, in fears, in silences, in the speed with which i excuse what should not be excused, in the cowardices that wear the mask of practicality. i come from them. i live among them. i am materially entangled with them. their language has passed through me. their permissions made me possible. their limitations deformed me. i am trying to refuse what formed me while still eating in the same house.

that is what makes it so exhausting. proximity is not innocence. dependence is not innocence. love is not innocence. i can feel my own complicities peeling away slowly, and not cleanly, and certainly not nobly. there is no dramatic purification in it. only the long, embarrassing work of noticing where i still benefit, where i still keep quiet, where i still choose peace in the room over truth, where i still let comfort be purchased by someone else’s greater vulnerability.

sometimes i think the family is the first state one belongs to, the smallest nation with its own border controls, censored histories, authorised griefs, acceptable enemies, myths of itself, and penalties for dissent. and like any state, it asks for loyalty long after loyalty has become morally expensive. it asks to be understood gently, in context, with compassion for its wounds, while it goes on reproducing wounds of its own. to step even slightly out of line feels at once necessary and treacherous.

i do not know what to do with the guilt of this. guilt that i have not done enough. guilt that i cannot seem to do enough. guilt that my refusals are so often interior, private, unspectacular. guilt that i am still here. guilt that i still need what i critique. guilt that i am trying to unlearn entire moral arrangements while remaining materially sheltered by them. there is something unbearable about needing refuge in the same structure whose values you are trying to survive.

and beyond the house, the scale of the world makes a mockery of individual conscience. what am i supposed to do with all this helplessness. what does one person do with a mind full of cities burning, people starved, children bombed, neighbours brutalised, hatreds normalised, and one’s own body still trapped in the petty logistics of earning, eating, commuting, replying, enduring. there are days when politics feels less like conviction and more like a permanent injury to perception. once you have seen certain things clearly, how do you return to the small, obedient choreography of ordinary life without feeling obscene.

and yet i do return to it. i brush my teeth. i answer emails. i eat dinner. i sit in rooms where opinions pass like contaminated air and say less than i mean because i am tired, because i am outnumbered, because i am dependent, because i do not know how to turn private correctness into public force. this, too, becomes part of the guilt: not only that the world is wrong, but that i remain so administratively continuous within it.

perhaps one of the hardest humiliations of adulthood is learning that moral seriousness does not automatically produce effective power. you can see clearly, feel deeply, refuse inwardly, and still remain terribly limited in what you can alter by nightfall. i cannot save the world from this room. i cannot save anyone at scale. the radius of my action remains humiliatingly small.

so the task, if there is one, may be smaller and less flattering than i once imagined: to reduce the amount of falsehood, consent, and deadness passing through my own life. to speak more accurately. to refuse certain languages. not to laugh at what should not be normalised. to help specific people in specific ways when i can. to send money when i can. to read seriously. to write seriously. to keep some moral clarity intact when the room would prefer mush. not to surrender my mind entirely just because fatigue makes surrender feel reasonable.

it sounds paltry. perhaps it is paltry. but limitation is not innocence, and helplessness is not permission.

what if i cannot leave the house. what if i cannot save anyone. what if the radius of my action remains humiliatingly small. i do not know how to live with that without either becoming self-forgiving too soon or self-punishing to the point of uselessness. perhaps this is another thing no one prepares you for: that moral life, for many of us, is not heroism but attrition. not grand action but repeated refusals, small accuracies, withheld consent, redistributed money, defended language, maintained clarity, the keeping intact of some inward line even when the outer life remains compromised.

which sounds paltry against the scale of suffering. maybe it is paltry. but perhaps the task was never to save the world from one room. perhaps it is only to reduce the amount of falsehood, consent, and deadness passing through one’s own life. to keep some inward line intact. to refuse certain languages. to resist the convenience of numbness. to help where one can without turning that smallness into an alibi. 

but i do not know what else to do except refuse the seductions available to me: numbness, cynicism, self-exoneration, the convenience of saying i am powerless and therefore unaccountable. powerlessness is real. so is the moral laziness that sometimes disguises itself as despair. i am trying to tell the difference.

still, i hate how little it feels like. i hate how the conscience can be so alive while the body remains so constrained. i hate how clearly one can think and how inadequately one can act. i hate that history keeps arriving in the room and finding me underqualified for it.

i do not mean that i want misery. i mean that the psyche grows strange little loyalties. it becomes used to its own weather. one can become so accustomed to being the woman who is almost, nearly, on the verge, not yet, later, someday, elsewhere, that any actual arrival feels suspiciously out of character.

and yet i am tired of being elsewhere in advance. tired of pre-living, pre-grieving, pre-mourning, pre-irritated, pre-annoyed, pre-sad, pre-interpreting, pre-exhausting experience before it has the decency to happen. tired of having so much life take place in fantasy that reality feels like an administrative follow-up. tired of being split between the person at the table, the person in the imagined future, and the person hovering above both with a notebook and a headache.

outside, the rain still has not come. only the wind. all gesture, no event. perhaps that is why it feels fitting tonight.

my mother will sleep soon. the room will darken into its usual arrangement. tomorrow, monday, will arrive with its familiar demands, vulgar and undignified as ever. i will still have to wake up inside the same life. but tonight i wanted to place on record at least this much: that something good happened, and i am trying, in my clumsy, delayed, overthought way, to let it belong to me. even if only partially. even if my mind keeps trying to convert it into theory, guilt, irony, suspicion, or prose.

if i am honest, i am not even waiting for a different life anymore. i am waiting for a different way of being inside this one. because the years are not pausing while i think. they are going. they are going with or without my permission, and i am increasingly frightened by how little of them feels inhabited from the inside. which feels both more possible and more impossible at the same time.

something good happened. i was here for some of it. let that count.

april 20. 01:07AM.

anyway, my mother had fallen asleep. the wind stopped, the heat returned, and that was enough to wake her. she asked me if i planned to sleep now and switch off the lights or if i had to “work more.” the concern, as always, is the light. not my sleep. as long as i switch it off and lie down under the covers, silent and still, she can sleep.

it is strange how easily a life can be reduced to such negotiations. not even conflict. just adjustment. dim the light. lower the sound. occupy less space. become less noticeable. continue.

so i will close this, switch off the light, and lie down like a reasonable person inside a life that continues tomorrow whether i feel ready for it or not.

i had planned, earlier in the day, to write a blog on my other, more politically articulate alter-alter ego account about the recent happenings, something sharp, something properly argued, something that would at least pretend to meet the scale of what is unfolding outside. i had also planned to wash my hair, take a proper bath, reset the body in some minimal, dignified way, which, if i am being honest, i have not done in two days now. i think two. maybe more. time has a way of blurring when the days repeat themselves this closely.

instead i am here, still sitting at the table, thinking in long, unusable sentences.

perhaps i will simply go into my covers and rot quietly with my unwashed hair and unwritten thoughts. that seems, in a strange way, the most socially efficient option. it will invite no comments, require no explanations, cause no disturbance. i can fit myself back into the expected shape of the night without insisting on being noticed, without the small chaos of sitting here, writing, keeping the light on, existing too visibly.

or perhaps i will get up, walk to the bathroom, stand under water, do the small necessary labour of tending to a body that i keep postponing. both options feel disproportionately heavy. the journey from this table to my bed is, tonight, longer than it should be. not physically. just in the way a mind can stretch a few steps into something like resistance.

let’s see which version of me gets up.

~ Oizys.

April Fourteenth: NaPoWriMo: Suspended In

Today’s (optional) prompt asks you to write a poem of at least ten lines in which each line begins with the same word (e.g., “Because,” “Forget,” “Not,” “If”). This technique of beginning multiple lines with the same word or phrase is called anaphora, and has long been used to give poems a driving rhythm and/or a sense of puzzlebox mystery. To give you more context, here’s an essay by Rebecca Hazelton on her students’ “adventures in anaphora,” and a contemporary poem that uses anaphora to great effect: Layli Long Soldier’s “Whereas.”

Suspended in time, a moment escaped,
Suspended in space, a dream folded,
Suspended in thoughts, a journey concluded,
Suspended in whispers, secrets concealed,
Suspended in laughter, echoes hushed,
Suspended in tears, emotions retained,
Suspended in silence, truths recoiled,
Suspended in hope, a future ignored,
Suspended in love, hearts disentangled,
Suspended in grace, a universe forgotten.

- Oizys.

April Sixth: NaPoWriMo: Wisdom in the Weird?

And now for our (optional) prompt. Today’s we’d like to challenge you to write a poem rooted in “weird wisdom,” by which we mean something objectively odd that someone told you once, and that has stuck with you ever since. Need an example? Check out Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Making a Fist.”

Moments of failure feel
Like reality stumbling onto me,
While the world moves forward
And I shuffle into my past.
They creep into my hands slowly,
And burst inside my mouth suddenly.
My fingers shiver and cramp,
My mouth foaming with desperation.
My knuckles cringe,
My throat shuts.
Ungrappled opportunities slip from my shaking hand,
Self-doubt and the weight of will melt bitterly on my tongue.
Weak fingers stroke a weak throat.
I try to remember the prayer, but it is too foggy.
I try to recall the words of wisdom, but they are too woolly.
What was it..?
Ignorance is bliss?

- Oizys.

New Haircut, Same Rot; New Year, Same Plot

On December 31st, I started writing this at 11 p.m. I have procrastinated writing things for so long that there have been feelings covered with tarps of dust, time, and rust. What's happening? Well, a war. For days, weeks, and months, I have been yearning for the tips of my fingers to rebel and push out these emotions for the world to see (or just this creepy little corner of the worldwideweb). And all it took was a calendar change. A partition of lines between two numbers to make me sit and crap a few words. Let me give you some highlights of this so-called war machinery:

- The Battle of Self-Doubt: The soldiers of my inner child and adult critic march on the streets, declaring war. The trenches of self-doubt ran deep, and the fear of continuing to live became a formidable opponent.

- The Skirmishes with Time: Time, my relentless adversary, seemed to slip away unnoticed. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and my aspirations to write became casualties of an ever-advancing clock. Procrastination, it seemed, was winning the temporal battles.

- The Confrontation with Limitations: The demand for perfection in every sentence and every paragraph paralyzed my creative spirit. The war cry of "You are not good enough" echoed louder than the call to simply be and create. The battlefield was littered with unfinished drafts and stangant blood of dead dreams, casualties of an unyielding pursuit of flawlessness.

- The Negotiations with Inspiration: The teasing muse, the inspiration, a fickle ally, played hard to get. There were moments when ideas tried to flow effortlessly, and then there were barren stretches where the well of creativity seemed to run dry. Negotiating with this unpredictable force became a constant struggle.

- The Siege of the External World: The onslaught of modern temptations from the external world, with its sirens of social media, the clamor of daily responsibilities, and the allure of mindless entertainment, besieged my creative fortress. Distractions were like invaders breaching the walls, diverting my focus from the writing battleground.

But here I am, at the eleventh hour, facing the final skirmish of the year. The pen is indeed mightier than the procrastination that held me captive. As the clock ticks away, I'm daydreaming of emerging victorious in this personal war. The arsenal of words is my weapon, and the battlefield is the blank page. Perhaps, in this late-night scrawl, there's a ceasefire. A truce between the excuses and the act of creation. The war is not over, but at this moment, I've claimed a small piece of peace. So, here's to the war of words, fought in the quiet hours of the night, and to the hope that the coming year brings more bits and pieces.

In this very moment, we sit and ponder. Try to go as far back as possible, wondering where it all went wrong. Trying to pinpoint the exact moment we could have stopped, the exact action that could have been omitted. The battlefield of retrospection is strewn with the debris of missed opportunities and the echoes of decisions that led us to this late-night confrontation.

The ink on the pages of the past is smeared with the stains of hesitation and indecision. Each missed deadline, every postponed commitment, is a marker on the timeline of this ongoing struggle. The war drums of regret beat in rhythm with the ticking clock, amplifying the urgency of the present moment.

As the night wears on, the shadows of doubt lengthen. The pen, poised and resolute, faces the impending dawn with determination. It knows that tomorrow morning, the war will resume. The battlefield will once again witness the clash between creation and procrastination. We sit in contemplation, we feel time slipping, and we hear the clock ticking. As the night gives way to the approaching light, I gather my thoughts and prepare for the final chapter in this ongoing saga. The war between pen and procrastination will continue tomorrow morning, but for now, in the quietude of the night, I find solace(?) in the knowledge that the battle is not lost (over..?). The ink flows, and with it, the promise of (sigh...) living:

- This is never, ever a do-or-die situation. Always do or sit and wonder why, and be forced to do so by the consequences. I was in the same position when I wrote my last chapter. Nothing changed. Well, from an outsider's perspective, the insides have been rotting. Soft mass, all liquified in a bottled body. I don't talk anymore. I have stopped saying things to people. I wake up, I work, and I go to sleep. I daydream in the background to stop outside stimulation. I have erased all previous memories. Deleted all photographs. I have successfully butchered all the relationships (not that I had many to begin with...). I have not replied to a single person in months, not even the ones who live with me. I have made my life as thin as possible. She is an old, anorexic, malnourished crone. Who exudes fragility. Holding the knife pointed towards her stomach, waiting for someone to accidentally give a push, and she can part reluctantly, the way she was born. Full of wretchedness. Like a disgusting fruit with a rotting smell and dark spots on her skin. Head full of white fungus. Mouth full of blisters. Reduced into nothing but an embodiment of decay and despair. Her seeds cry, carrying the burden of a life that withered away, a lament for the potential that never had the ability to bloom.

- There is a child who lives in a house behind mine. He cries. Alot. I have never seen him. I have only heard him. His cries. Oh, the painful cries. The ones where each wail comes from the depths of the stomach and pierces into the world but hits no one. Today, it felt as if his tears were silent echoes, seeking refuge in my vast silence. But I have no place and no refuge to offer. I wonder about the burdens he carries. His voice, raw and unfiltered, makes me sick. It is almost like the wail is trying to reach my own dormant pain, stirring the echoes of my past. Invading the house of memories. Angry that it finds nothing, enraged that everything is erased. Searching further, all there is is an inner child. They exchanged looks. A look when a failed prodigal daughter sees a forefather from her ancestry. Like a disgusting tale of fractured heritage and unresolved pain that fuels a rage at the erasure of histories, at the silent screams echoing through generations. I stand near my window searching to catch a glimpse of that poor boy at the intersection of two realms, where the child behind me seeks refuge in his cries, and the child within me responds with a silent acknowledgment—a subtle nod to the vulnerability of unresolved pain. The prodigal daughter fails (falls...?) at the feet of history standing infront of her, and the forefather smites her with a suppressing gaze, a poignant narrative unfolds—an intricate tapestry of sadness and anger woven through the threads of forgotten histories.

- There is some talk about building a house. My parents talk. There is another person, I hear. Their creative discussion turns into an argument. I hear my father begin to raise his voice while the other person backs my mother's argument with reason. Soon, the voices stop talking once the father puts an end to the discussion, and there's silence. I wonder. What do we do with more rooms? I have been effectively decreasing myself to take up less and less space. The clash of opinions in the adjacent room mirrors the internal conflict, a tug-of-war between the desire for expansion and the impulse to retreat further into the shadows. What would it mean to occupy more space in the physical realm when the instinct is to shrink into the margins? The dilemma is softly interrupted with a muffled cry. I think it is my mother. I recognize the cry. It is the same cry she cries after every discussion ends. As the cry permeates the silence, it's as if the walls themselves absorb the emotional residue of the unresolved debate. The dilemma deepens, intertwining the practical consideration of additional rooms with the emotional complexity of familial dynamics. The cry becomes a melancholic punctuation mark, underscoring the emotional toll of the ongoing struggle for space, both physical and emotional.

Oh, look, we have crossed the blurry lines of 11:59 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. We have (dis?)successfully stepped into January 1st, 2024. Did something change in the physical world at the stroke of midnight? Nothing. We wrap up our day and go to sleep. Knowing fully well, tomorrow we will wake up the same way, brush the same teeth in the same mouth full of age-old blisters, pick up the same weapons of lowly daydreaming and incapability to unlevel the will to live, and fight the same war. The clock may reset, but the essence of our existence remains tethered to the unyielding grip of the status quo and the cruel leader who always wins.

- Oizys.

That English Family

Tea, Dreams, and Bittersweet Realities: An Envy-Fueled Odyssey Of That English Family

While doing my research on the postgraduate college I wanted to attend, I stumbled upon a piece written by one person with a sketch drawn by his brother. When I read a bit more about them, I came across a blog by their mother. Her blog, her words, and her pictures of her sons, grandchildren, and relatives became a soothing balm for wounds I didn't know I had. Her little stories of faith, her memories of her mother, her entries about her elder son getting into university, her videos of playing with her younger son's kids She had lived a difficult life yet managed to make the most of it. She and her family look very, very happy. Not the Instagram happy where they morph their differences into lies to get coins and likes. Genuinely happy. Smiles. Guitar. No lies. Their eyes sparkle. Their moments attest to genuineness. The comment section is a giant,  soft quilt of compliments showered by her friends and extended family. I do not know how they are related to each other or what kind of relationship they maintain. But she seems like a genuinely good person. Just humans and goodness mixed like sugar and butter. She reads and writes beautifully, and her words have turned me into some sort of "fan".

I recently saw her update about visiting her elder son, who is studying in a different country, in a beautiful city in Europe. He glowed. He exhibited luminosity. His face just sparkles. He makes music in his free time. He had multiple bands. He uploads them on YouTube and sells them as well. He is studying hard to build a career as well. I watched some of his music. There's freedom. There's passion. There's love. There's acceptance. I imagine them to be a family of love, freedom, and acceptance. Living in a home filled with warmth and good tea I imagine them meeting on holidays and celebrating with their friends and family, exchanging gifts. I imagine them saying goodbye before the elder son leaves for university and sharing tears. I imagine them having video calls where they try to match their timezones. I imagine her elder son taking her mother around the city, showing her the museums, parks, and famous eateries. She is writing another book, and I have yet to buy her first one. I am saving money for that. I imagine her meeting her son's friends as they show her around. I imagine her going back home and reminiscing about her time with her son, which is reflected in her blog.

After glancing a bit more at the photographs she had uploaded with tiny notes about each of them tucked underneath, a train of reality hit me. It is the same university that rejected me. I looked at her son, standing outside the university. Reality—my grusomely bland reality—pulls me back to my cold room, to my cold cot. And I think about my interview with the professor from that university, which was flailing and embarrassing. I think about the non-existent photographs of me with my family. I think about the screams and angry silences around my house. I think about the last time I spoke to my sister, who is from a completely different country. I think about the last time I spoke to my father, who had just moved in downstairs. I think about my friends who have left to pursue their dreams in different cities. I think about my mother, who is sleeping next to me. I think about last evening, when we all made our teas separately and drank them separately.

I check flights for cities in Europe. One leaves tonight. Should I go? Should I pack my bags and just leave? Should I visit the university, talk to the students and professors there, and talk to her elder son about his experience there and his music? Should I visit her as well? Tell her I am saving money to buy her book. That would be ridiculous. I don't even have the money to buy her book, and yet I am visiting her from a shabby little town in a shabby little country. She doesn't even know who I am. I decide against it and go to sleep. Try to sleep. With fantasy and reality fighting over my head. I lie there while they both rip me into pieces. I think about tomorrow morning and how I have to pick up these pieces and face life in this room. I imagine what she must be telling her son about how much she enjoyed her trip to visit him. And I imagine her son reading her mother's happiness while walking to the university while passing a park where she shared a cup of tea with her while telling her all about his studies. I think about the last time I took a trip and shared it with anyone and glance over my empty gallery. I close her blog and try to forget her URL so as to match my fantasy with my empty reality. So, it can be a fair fight.

- Oizys.

Peeling Rusty Layers: Trying To Unveiling the Uncharted Realities Within

I would like to begin by mentioning my credentials as a fellow dissosiate. I have been dissociating for as long as I can remember. I would play with toys to show my parents, but underneath, I would be pretending to live some other life. At first, I felt enigmatic. I felt like I had the magical power to take myself on a journey wherever I could. I was building this labyrinth-like maze around me. I found a refuge deep within the walls of this intricate labyrinth and lost myself in the complicated maze from the chaos and confusion around me. It became my sanctuary, a place where I could retreat and find solace in the midst of overwhelming emotions or external pressures. The more I dissociated, the more elaborate and intricate my labyrinth grew. Each twist and turn represented a coping mechanism, a defence mechanism that shielded me from the harsh realities I struggled to comprehend.

But as I grow older, I realise that my labyrinth, while once a source of comfort, has become a barrier that isolates me from genuine connections and authentic experiences. It was as if I had built an impenetrable fortress around myself, preventing others from truly seeing me and, in turn, impeding my ability to fully engage with the world around me. I touch my knee, and I feel a jolt within myself. Whose is it? I cannot recognise my face in the pictures. Who is she? Every time I wake up for sleep, I feel like I have been teleported into a completely different world. I feel as if I have forgotten my mother tongue. In the labyrinth of my mind, fragments of melodies linger, wisps of forgotten conversations that evoke a longing for a language I can no longer grasp. It is as if a veil has been cast, obscuring the words that once flowed effortlessly from my lips. The food feels foreign in my mouth. The taste of my mother's comforting meals, once a symphony of love and nourishment, now feels like a distant memory slipping through my fingers. The once-beloved dishes now seem distant, their flavours veiled in a thin shroud of unfamiliarity. I chew chilli peppers after chilli peppers and cry my eyes out, yet I feel no spice.

Now, I try to navigate my way out. It is not easy, as every wall and corridor has memories, emotions, and fears carved deep into them that I have tucked away. But, I think, the real hindrance is confronting the underlying causes of my dissociation—the wounds that led me to seek refuge in the labyrinth. It is hurtful. The core reason is hidden somewhere deep. And it is wrapped with layers and layers of woolgathering. It is painful as I try to navigate and unwrap. It feels like I am scraping off the rusty layers of derealized lives to give birth to my reality. Ever pulled out a dry tampon? Yeah, that's what this feels like. So uncomfortable. So difficult. Skin-wrenching. A completely unused life. But the conundrum is that even if I successfully pull it out, I can never reuse it, right? Think about it. I will spend months and years peeling off all these fake identities to embark upon a realisation pilgrimage—a quest to reconnect with the actualities that formed the foundation of my identity—only to find out I have no countable experiences in my real life as a contrast to my fantasies, where I have lived a wide range of characters, lives, and universes in my own metaverse. With each layer shed, I am forced to reckon with the profound absence of tangible experiences, genuine relationships, and a solid sense of self. The time spent lost in my dissociative metaverse has left me with a fragmented timeline, where the milestones of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood slip through my grasp like sand through clenched fists. While I find out this new fact, I will have lost time as well. With my childhood, teenhood, and half of the twentyhood already eschewed by psycheclipse, I will be left with an infant in an adult body who has lost a chunk of sentience.

I fall back into bed. Tired and wounded. I scrape off the rust and chip away at this oxidised facade, leaving reality in my palms. It looks like a weak, crying baby—red-faced, marked with spots of uncertainty and fragility. And I am a tired mother who is suddenly thrust into this duty to nurture and care for this fragile and broken soul, offering solace and comfort as she navigates the path of self-discovery and healing.