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.

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 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.