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.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 17] - After the door, the map, the mirror

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 17]

Day Seventeen

Happy Friday, all! I hope you find that writing poetry is a great entry-way into your weekend.

Today, our featured participant is Adam J Scarborough, who brings us a wonderfully disorienting haiku in response to Day 16’s prompt.

Our resource for the day is The Walt Whitman Archive, where you’ll find all manner of material related to Walt Whitman, one of America’s most celebrated and — let’s be frank — unusual poets.

And now for our (optional) prompt! Sergio Raimondi’s poem, “Today Matsuo Basho Cooks,” plays on the following haiku by (you guessed it), Matsuo Basho:

Crimson pepper pod!
Add two pairs of wings, and look—
darting dragonfly.

For today’s challenge, write a poem in which you respond to a favorite poem by another poet.

Happy writing!

-

Note: For Day Seventeen, my offering is a response-poem braided from Dickinson, Rich, and Plath, with yesterday’s half-room still refusing to leave me alone.

After the door, the map, the mirror

After Emily Dickinson Leaves the Door Ajar

Because I could not be vast,
the room kept half of me.

Not death.
Not exactly.
Only its smaller clerks:

domestic decree,
the polite partition,
the inherited hush
buttoned up the throat.

Emily,
you made a corridor
out of a dash.
I live there now—

between said and unsaid,
between mine and permitted,
between the bed’s thin grammar
and the wall’s good manners.

A woman learns quickly
what must not clang.

even grief, here,
must enter sideways.

The window does not open.
It concedes.
The door is not locked.
It has simply been trained
to hesitate.

And I,
so long instructed
in the etiquette of less,

have become excellent
at folding.

the body into corner,
the sentence into smoke,
the wanting into something
that passes for discipline.

After Adrienne Rich, Dividing the Room

The room was split before I entered it.
Someone had already done the thinking.

One half for use.
One half for permission.
Enough remainder to hold a girl
until she mistakes arrangement
for character.

Adrienne,
I was taught to call this ordinary.

To say
the wall is just a wall,
the smaller portion merely practical,
the narrowing of self
a household skill.

But language leaves fingerprints.

What is allocated
is never innocent.
What is shared
is not always mutual.
What is kept “for now”
has a way of becoming
the architecture of a life.

So yes, Adrienne,
I have read the maps.
I know borders arrive first
in furniture,
in lowered voices,
in who gets the window,
in who learns to live
as though leftover space
were a kind of love.

The room says nothing.
Power rarely has to.

After Sylvia Plath, Entering The Room

You wrote of certain slants.
I know them too.

The room enters the body.

Not as flame.
Not as spectacle.
More intimate than that.

A slow white pressure.
A neatness with teeth.
The mirror holding my face
like an accusation
filed and refiled
under daughter,
under woman,
under manageable.

The curtains do not flutter.
They supervise.
The cupboard swells
with its patient jaw.
Even the pillow knows
how to keep a secret
pressed flat.

Sylvia,
here nothing dramatic happens.
That is the drama. 

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (entry dated April 17, 1956)

April again.
Morning again.
Morning comes anyway.
I gather my limbs
as though from poorer ground.
The body rises here
less like waking
than being recalled
to an arrangement
it did not survive.
The old labour of rising
as if from a grave
into a room
already waiting
to resume its claims.
Morning, and again
the small exhumation of self.
Limb by limb,
I assemble obedience
from the graveyard shift
of sleep.

A life can be halved
without blood.
A mind can be trained
to sit in its designated portion
and call that poise.

By afternoon,
light enters
like a verdict.
silence is laid out
white as a sickbed.
the soul—if that is still
the word for it—
bruises quietly
against its assigned perimeter.

No carriage waits.
No clean rebellion either.

Only the old arrangement:
one portion for breathing,
one for obedience,
and a narrow seam between
through which the mind
keeps trying
to escape unfollowed.

~ Oizys.

Afternote: I came across an article about Toni Morrison today, who once said, rather sharply, with a kind of necessary impatience, “Don’t do that. Don’t write about your little life.” I have been thinking about that sentence all day. This poem begins in the half-room, but I hope it does not stay there as mere confession or anecdotal. Rooms are never only rooms. They are blueprints of hierarchy, rehearsals of obedience, small domestic states where power learns to appear natural. So I hoped this poem could extrapolate from the room-cage outward: toward lands partitioned, peoples pushed onto the smaller side of history, and the brutal interruption of continuity, memory, and inheritance that follows when a place is carved up by force.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 16] - What the half-room refused to say

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 16]

Day Sixteen

Happy sixteenth day of National/Global Poetry Writing month, everyone!

Our featured daily participant is klara laurenzia linden, who brings us a bilingual response to Day Fifteen’s unusual-love-poem challenge.

Today’s resource is Copper Canyon Press’s “Line/Break” interview series, which brings you half-hour-ish episodes featuring eight contemporary poets.

And last but not least, here’s today’s optional prompt. In “Ocean,” Robinson Jeffers delivers an almost oracular, scriptural description of the sea not just as a geographical phenomenon, but a sort of being – old, wise, profound, and able to teach those who want to learn. Today, try writing a poem in which you describe something that cannot speak, and what it has taught or told you.

Happy writing!

-

What the half-room refused to say

The room is not whole.
it has been decided for me.

a line exists,
drawn, 
enforced:
by cupboard edge,
by shared wall,
by divided bed,
by the way voices travel
only one direction.

my half
learns the discipline of shrinking.

the bed knows how to fold itself
into apology.
the desk keeps its elbows in.
even the window
opens like a compromise,
never fully,
just enough to prove air exists.

nothing here belongs without permission.

the other half:
i do not name it.
i cannot.
i do not have the right.
naming gives it symmetry.
it does not deserve that.

it spills:
light, instructions, inherited noise,
the clatter of a life
that assumes its right to be loud.

my half learns silence
like a second language.

there are nights
when the wall breathes differently.
not alive,
even slightly, but
just aware
of how thin it is.

i have measured that thinness
with my back,
with my listening,
with the way my thoughts
stop mid-sentence.

this room has taught me
how division becomes etiquette.

how you can live entire years
on the smaller side of a decision
you did not make.

how space is not architecture
of autonomy
it is the benevolence
of their permission.

and permission,
like everything else here,
is rationed.

still,
nothing breaks.

not the wall,
not the line,
not the borders,
not the partition,
not the boundary,
not the careful choreography
of staying inside what is mine
only because it was left over.

the room says nothing.

but every day
it rearranges me
into halves
into smaller obediences
and develops,
then quieter partitions
then smaller territories
then enclaves
that do not argue anymore.

~ Oizys.

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 6] - Monday, with Government Weather

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 6]

Day Six

Well, if it’s got to be Monday, at least it’s a Monday during Na/GloPoWriMo, so the work-week can start off with a bountiful crop of poems!

Our featured participant today is alex innocent, who reminds us that sometimes “less is more” with his very short, pointed response to Day Five’s things-I-dislike prompt.

Our daily resource is Nobel-winning poet Louise Glück’s essay, “Against Sincerity.” Here, Glück muses on the difference between honesty and truth, and how, in poetry, words that ring true are not necessarily those that are “honest” in the sense of recounting events as they happened. After all, a poem isn’t a newspaper article. Making art means selecting, trimming, choosing, exaggerating, and even deceiving, all in service of a goal that differs from a bare recitation of facts.

And now, to put theory in our practice, here’s our optional prompt! This one takes its inspiration from Yentl van Stokkum’s poem, “It’s the Warmest Summer on Record Babe,” which blends casual, almost blasé phrasing with surreal events like getting advice from a bumblebee. In your poem today, try writing with a breezy, conversational tone, while including at least one thing that could only happen in a dream.

Happy writing!

-

Monday, with Government Weather

I was just trying to make tea, honestly,
nothing mythic about it,
the kettle had already begun its small complaint
and Monday was sitting on my shoulders
like an unpaid bill.

Then a bumblebee came in through the window
and landed on the rim of the sugar jar
like it paid rent here.

It looked at me for a long second,
the way old women do
before saying something that ruins your week,
and said,
you keep rehearsing escape
like it’s a train timetable.

I said, sorry?
because what else do you say
when an insect enters your kitchen
already disappointed in you.

Outside, the sky had that boiled-grey look
it gets before rain,
and the wind, as usual,
seemed to be keeping receipts.

Somewhere in it,
summer called me by my old name
like it still expected an answer.

And the clothes on the line
were twisting slowly
like they were trying to become ghosts.

The bee cleaned its legs,
completely at ease.
You think elsewhere is a country, it said,
but sometimes it is only a room
where nobody has called your name incorrectly.

I wanted to argue with that,
but the spoon in my hand
had gone warm as a pulse,
and from the hallway
I could hear the house breathing
in its usual difficult way.

Somewhere inside it,
my depression was moving furniture around again.

In the kitchen,
the sink started remembering names
I had spent years trying not to answer to.

My anxiety, meanwhile,
had somehow acquired a government ID
and was moving through the house
with official permission
with the confidence of something
licensed to govern me
as if my fear had finally been recognized
by the proper authorities.

From the other room,
my mother’s bangles began speaking
in another language:
sharp, glassy, impossible to translate,
though my body understood every word.

Then, as casually as bad news,
the staircase lengthened.

Not a metaphor.
Actually lengthened.
One more step, then another,
then seven more for every year
I had spent wanting to leave.

At the top of it
was the city I almost moved to,
all dim balconies, wet pavements,
and a life that looked possible from far away.

In my hand,
my passport bloomed like a flower
and then rotted there,
petal by petal,
as if even paper knew
how long I had rehearsed leaving.

And above it,
a cloud opened like a drawer
and all my abandoned drafts fell out,
fluttering through the street
like failed instructions.

And in it
stood a girl wearing my face
more successfully than I ever had.

She looked well-rested.
I hated her immediately.

The bee said,
that’s not her fault.

Rain began without commitment,
just a few drops rehearsing tragedy
on the windowsill,
then more of it,
as if the rain had notes 
on how I was handling my life.

Somewhere above all that,
the moon texted, "u up?"
in the tone of someone
who already knew the answer.

The girl at the top of the stairs
waved like we had met before,
which, in a way, we had.
I have been building her for years
out of refusal and stationery
and all the dresses I never bought
as if every missed bus in my life
had gone on without me
toward some unlived district of myself.

The kettle screamed.
The bee flew off.
The staircase snapped back into itself.

My tea tasted faintly of thunder.

Anyway,
Monday went on.

~ Oizys.

April 6, 2026: More rot, more longing to disappear.

April 6, 2026, Around 2 or 3AM.

Sorry. Forgive me but I am not done with my rant of last night, so before the week starts, let me hold onto the leftover Sunday night and finish taking this dump of rot that is continued. Some days, the need to be elsewhere does not feel like longing. It feels like a reflex. A flinch of the soul. As if my inner life has spent so long bracing against this one that it now mistakes disappearance for design. I do not just want to leave this room, this city, this version of myself. I want to leave the sequence entirely. I want another arrangement of cause and consequence. Another childhood. Another girlhood. Another body that did not learn vigilance so early. Another adulthood not built like a delayed apology. Another womanhood that is not so distraught and misused. Another family. Another identity. Another school. Another college. Another dream. Another passion. Another sadness. Another personhood. Or, another hood altogether.

Because, the lives I did not live somewhere else as someone else will forever haunt me. Because, I have spent too much of my life rehearsing departure in places I never left. Because, the urge to be someone else has made my brain hold me captive in a horror house. And I know how dramatic that sounds (horror house) but I mean it quite literally in the emotional, mental, and psychological sense.

Every corridor in it leads to a version of me that did not happen. A girl in better clothes. A girl in a different city. A girl with a room of her own and no one else's moods clinging to the curtains, no one else's permissions hanging in the clothes, no one else's footsteps entering the bloodstream before they even reached the door. A girl who said yes when I said no and no when I said yes. A girl who moved through life with more instinct than hesitation. A girl who studied what she wanted, loved what she wanted, left when she should have, stayed when it mattered, and somehow did not end up here; half-fermented in her own life, writing from the stale middle of it, with her wants lined up like abandoned vessels. A girl who was not always standing three selves away from herself, observing, editing, withholding. And I suppose this is the first humiliation of it: that the self I wanted was never particularly grand. Not extraordinary. Not famous. Not dazzling. Just inhabitable. Just someone I could have lived inside without flinching.

Maybe that is why the fantasy has such staying power. If I had only dreamed of impossible things, perhaps I could dismiss them as vanity, delusion, ego in costume. But the lives I did not live are made of such ordinary materials that their loss feels almost embarrassing to grieve. The right coat. The right train ticket. A degree pursued with conviction instead of panic. A rented room with thin curtains and a kettle. A city where I would have become anonymous enough to begin. A body less watched, less interpreted, less managed. A life with enough breath in it for appetite. It is so mundane, really, the architecture of my elsewhere. Which is perhaps why it hurts. I am not mourning fantasy in its most flamboyant form. I am mourning accessibility. Ease. A version of adulthood that did not already feel spoiled before opening.

And yes, I am aware there is a material vulgarity to this longing too. It is never only the grand things, never only destiny with a capital D. It is material too. Embarrassingly material. It is never just spiritual or psychological. It comes draped in things. It comes with objects attached, because objects are often the nearest visible edges of unlived selves.The unlived life has texture. It has the clothes I wished to wear without feeling watched by the walls or without having to grow a different spine first. It has foods I wanted to try without calculating cost, guilt, digestion, consequence or foods I wanted to eat in places and times where they would not feel like an occasion I had to justify. It has train rides and airport benches and secondhand bookshops in streets whose names I do not know. It has notebooks bought in optimism. Books I wanted to buy and annotate in cafes I wanted to linger in. Shoes with a particular kind of heel-click that would announce not fear but arrival. It has lipstick shades that belonged to a braver mouth. It has rings, boots, perfumes, cities, libraries, bowls of pasta eaten alone but without sadness, mornings that began in peace instead of retrieval. Even my fantasies arrive furnished. Yes. My fantasies are embarrassingly furnished. They come with shelves and lamps and train stations and tote bags and second-hand bookshops and the private eroticism of being able to spend money on a self I actually believed would continue. That last part matters. It is not greed. It is continuity. People buy things for futures they assume they are allowed to have. My problem, perhaps, is that I have too often treated the future as a rumour. Even my longing knows the price tags of the things that would have made me feel more inhabitably human.

And then there is the more difficult question, the one that resists being romanticized: what stopped me? I want to be careful here because there is always a temptation to either externalize everything and become pure victim, or internalize everything and become my own little tyrant. The truth, disgustingly, is always mixed. What stopped me is not one thing, which is perhaps the cruelest part. I could forgive a single villain. I could build an altar to one clean disaster. But it was never one thing. It was a long conspiracy.

What stopped me was money, yes. Family, yes. Illness, yes. Anxiety, depression, timing, cowardice, obedience, class, gender, shame, exhaustion, bad luck, internal fracture, abuse, trauma, a body and brain that do not carry life lightly, an economy that makes even the most modest independence feel like an elaborate joke, that old rot that teaches you to doubt your own hunger the moment it begins to speak, yes, yes, yes. But what also stopped me was how thoroughly I had already been trained into hesitation. How instinctively I mistrusted my own appetite. How often I mistook fear for prudence and self-erasure for maturity. How much of my life was built not around desire but around impact reduction: how to want less, take less, ask less, be less difficult to carry. One does not become that way overnight. It is a long schooling. And its cruelest lesson is that after enough years, you begin to mistake your shrinking for personality. It was my body. It was my mind. It was the thousand tiny humiliations that gather around a life and slowly train it to expect less. It was the way survival makes cowards of us, and then punishes us for cowardice. It was that I kept waiting to become someone who could begin, while life kept happening to the person who hadn’t.

Which is why I recoil slightly when people talk about self-actualization as if it is simply a matter of courage. Courage, my foot. Courage is expensive. It requires a floor to fall from and some faith that the fall will not end you. Some of us have spent too long learning that one wrong move can cost more than revelation is worth. Some of us become archivists of our own restraint. We collect abandoned versions of ourselves not because we are whimsical, but because consequences have always arrived to us dressed more convincingly than freedom ever did. This is not an excuse. It is worse than an excuse. It is an anatomy.

And still. Still. And, this is the part that irritates me, the part that refuses to die cleanly. Despite all of that, something survives of the wanting. This is what irritates me most. I say survives because it does not flourish. It does not stride about with confidence. It survives like mold in corners, like a plant with one stubborn green vein left, like an ember under wet ash. It survives in ridiculous places: in bookmarked courses, in dresses saved to folders, in tabs left open for cities I may never touch, in the way I still note apartments as if there were a version of me preparing to move, in the way a single good sentence can make me briefly believe that another arrangement of self and life is not entirely impossible. That after all this thinning out, all this disappointment, all this reluctant familiarity with the limits of things, some stubborn little ember still hisses when I see a photograph of elsewhere, when I read about a woman who remade herself, when I buy a notebook as if I have not already failed fifty others, when I write a sentence that sounds briefly like escape. Some idiotic, unkillable shard of me still believes there is another arrangement possible. Not ideal. Not cinematic. Just less airless. Less belittled. Less trapped inside the architecture of old damage. This surviving want is not noble. It is inconvenient. It ruins despair by refusing to become total.

Maybe that is what haunts me most. Not the lives I did not live, but the fact that I can still imagine them. If the wanting had died completely, perhaps I would at least have the dignity of finality. But no. It hangs on like mould in monsoon corners, like a smell in fabric, like the memory of a key to a house that no longer exists. It survives in ridiculous forms. In bookmarked courses. In saved dresses. In tabs left open. In the way I still mentally arrange future rooms I may never enter. In the way a part of me is always packing, even while the rest of me has long since unpacked into defeat.

And perhaps that is what I really cannot settle with: that after all this time, all this fatigue, all this erosion, some part of me still behaves as if it has not received the final memo. Some part of me still thinks in alternatives. Still leans toward elsewhere as if the word itself contains oxygen. Still constructs tiny passageways out of language, objects, fantasy, style, work, art, movement. Still wants not in the vague ornamental sense, but in the bodily sense. Wants like a muscle. Wants like a pulse. Which should be heartening, I know. Except it isn't always. Sometimes it only sharpens the tragedy. Desire is not always a life force; sometimes it is evidence. Evidence of what has not been met. Evidence of what has been deferred so long it has started to go sour.

So I keep asking myself whether elsewhere is still a place, or whether it has become a symptom. Whether I truly long for another geography, or whether my mind has simply become addicted to the fantasy of displacement because it cannot bear the intimacy of this life. Maybe elsewhere is not a city, not a country, not even another body. Maybe it is just the shape my dissatisfaction takes when it grows too large to sit inside me quietly. Maybe it is grief in travel clothes. Maybe it is depression with a passport. Maybe it is what longing becomes when it has nowhere practical to go. This is the kind of question I can spend hours chewing on because both answers feel unbearable. If elsewhere is a place, then I have failed to get there. If it is a symptom, then perhaps I have been treating an inner condition as a geographical one all along. Perhaps what I call longing is sometimes only displacement instinct, the mind trying to escape itself through scenery. Perhaps I have mistaken the fantasy of movement for transformation. Perhaps no city can save a person from the architecture of her own dread. But then, that too can become a trap, can’t it? The over-psychologising of every wish until desire itself becomes suspect. Until every wanting is treated as pathology. Until the simple, sane human wish for another life gets diagnosed into submission.

And I am tired of doing that too, of turning every hunger into a case study, every ache into a theory, every small surviving impulse toward beauty or distance into something I must interrogate before I am allowed to feel it. Sometimes I think the mind's cleverness is one of its cruelest weapons. It takes a straightforward grief. My life did not become what I hoped. And forces it into a thousand chambers of analysis until even pain becomes hard to hold plainly. Still, plainness eludes me. I can't just say I wanted more. I have to ask what "more" means, for whom, against what conditions, and whether the wanting was mine or manufactured or
inherited or defensive or late. This is what I mean by captivity. It is not only that I am trapped in a life. I am trapped in interpretation.

But then again, maybe I think that only because I have been denied elsewhere for so long that I have started to pathologize the desire for it. Maybe wanting out is not sickness. Maybe it is the last sane reflex left in a life that has asked too often to be endured rather than inhabited. Maybe the rehearsals of departure were not delusion, but instinct. Maybe there was always something in me trying, in its own frantic and failing way, to save my life from becoming only this. But perhaps that too is because interpretation has been one of the only tools available to me. When one cannot move freely through the world, one overdevelops motion within the mind. One becomes a digger, a circler, a ruminator, a chronic reviser of inner terrain. One learns to survive by reading every tremor for meaning. And yes, this can become grotesque. Exhausting. Disgusting, even. A kind of word-and-mind-diarrhea, if I am being honest. But it is also how I have kept myself company. How I have refused the bluntness of numbness. How I have made a record, however excessive, of what it felt like to be here while wanting elsewhere with such embarrassing persistence.

So maybe elsewhere is both place and symptom. Maybe it is a real hunger and an interpretive wound. Maybe it is the name I give to the version of life in which my wants do not have to arrive disguised as theory. Maybe it is not another city at all, but a self I could enter without all this recoil. Maybe it is a room of my own. Maybe it is enough money to breathe. Maybe it is a body less full of alarms. Maybe it is simply the absence of being constantly, grindingly over-acquainted with diminishment.

I do not know. I only know that there is a version of me always pressing her palm to the glass of another life. Not glamorous. Not impossible. Just other. Just less cramped by the old damage. Less bruised by repetition. Less known by dread. Less watched by dread. Less delayed. Less fluent in internal evacuation. Less trained in diminishment. And I do not know whether she is a mirage, a memory from the future, or simply the shape of my refusal. I only know that she has followed me for years, and that some nights (nights like this one and the last one) she feels less like fantasy and more like accusation, but also witness. As if she has been standing there all this time, on the other side of the glass, asking not why I failed to become her, but why I was made to believe that wanting her was indulgence in the first place.

And maybe that is where the rot really is. Not only in the unlived life, but in the long conditioning that taught me to meet my own desires first with suspicion, then with embarrassment, then with elegy. As if longing itself needed to be housebroken. As if escape were vulgar. As if survival should have been enough to keep me from grieving the texture of the life I never got to touch.

No false dawn. No brave little sunrise crawling over the hill with a lesson tucked under its arm.

So what now? That ugly, practical question. The one that always comes shambling in after the mind has finished staging its little apocalypse. What now, after all this analysis, all this excavation, all this circling of the unlived life like a dog around the place it means to die? What does one do with an elsewhere that has outlived its usefulness as fantasy but refuses to harden into fact?

Nothing noble, I suspect. Nothing cinematic. I will not emerge from this entry clarified. I will not suddenly book a ticket, reinvent myself, become decisive, become brave, become one of those women who finally chooses herself with clean hands and a steady gaze. I know myself too well for that kind of masturbatory ending. More likely, I will wake up in the same room, in the same body, under the same old economies of dread, and continue the long, undignified labour of being a person I did not entirely consent to becoming.

And maybe that is part of the obscenity of it all. That life does not pause respectfully when one is psychologically elsewhere. The dishes still exist. The inbox still multiplies. The body still demands medicine, food, water, maintenance. Work still waits with its little bureaucratic appetite. The world keeps asking for behaviour from a person who has privately gone missing. That, too, is a kind of violence, I think. Not dramatic enough to be named as such, but constant enough to leave marks. The expectation of functioning after the soul has spent the night trying to tunnel out through the teeth.

Sometimes I think writing is only another rehearsal of departure. Not escape exactly, because I am still here while writing, unfortunately, still pinned to the same coordinates. But it is a way of splitting, of sending some thinking part of myself ahead into a space the rest of me cannot yet inhabit. A scout, perhaps. A fugitive organ. A mouth going where the body cannot follow. Which is why it exhausts me and why I return to it anyway. Because if I cannot leave, I can at least produce evidence that leaving was once imagined with enough force to feel almost anatomical.

And no, that does not save me. Let me be clear. I am not trying to smuggle redemption in through the back door under the respectable name of Art. Writing does not heal the thing in any full or serious sense. It records. It stains. It enlarges. It sometimes makes the interior look even more uninhabitable by turning on all the lights at once. But at least then the horror house stops pretending to be a home. At least then the rot is named before it can pass itself off as personality. At least then I have not colluded entirely in my own disappearance.

Perhaps that is the closest I can come tonight to an answer, if answer is even the word. Elsewhere still grips me. The unlived lives still rattle around in their little display cases, accusingly intact. The wanting survives, which is inconvenient. The analysis survives, which is worse. I survive too, somehow, though not in any way that would make for an inspirational poster. More like mildew survives. More like rust. More like a bad habit of consciousness that has not yet found the courtesy to extinguish itself.

And still, even now, I can feel the mind trying to set up another exit. Another imagined room. Another future in disguise. It is embarrassing, this persistence. Almost vulgar. But perhaps vulgarity is all that remains when dignity has been thinned out by too much self-awareness. Perhaps there is nothing left to do but admit that I am still full of unsanctioned wants, still stalked by alternate selves, still made ridiculous by the ongoing suspicion that life might have been otherwise and that I was not wrong to want that otherwise with such appetite.

So let this stand, then, not as resolution, but as residue. Not as a lesson. Not as a neat little emotional compost heap from which something nourishing will surely grow. I am tired of forcing usefulness onto suffering just to justify its space. Let it be ugly. Let it be excessive. Let it be one more entry in the long archive of a person trying, with mixed results and worsening posture, to understand why being here has so often felt like being kept from herself.

And tomorrow; hateful, repetitive, unimpressed tomorrow; will come anyway. Not because I invited it. Not because I am ready. Not because the page has ended on a note of maturity. It will simply arrive, as all brute facts do, and I will have to meet it with whatever is left of me after this. Which may not be much. Which may only be language. Which may only be this: I am still here, and I am still unconvinced.

~ Oizys.

April 5, 2026: Rot, longing to disappear

April 5, 2026, Around 2 or 3AM.

The need to be someone else, somewhere else, at some other time period sits like a stone in my throat and permeates my sentience. After a seepy Saturday, I offered my Day 4 response to Na/GloPoWriMo and suddenly fell down the rabbit hole of my failed attempts at writing a book, haha. It's too deep, actually; I didn't burrow far enough. I noticed from my "An Upcoming Book???" blog page that I had started writing/ideating the "scream is my father tongue" idea this time last year. Perhaps the effects of Na/GloPoWriMo. I tried redoing the zine. The summer night was windy and soft. It was well past midnight. The windows were open, and my mother was falling into the sweet abyss of sleep. I looked at her and heard some noise. So, I went up to the window. There was a family of four or five. I could see the father and two sons clearly, the mother faintly, and maybe another child. They were playing. I returned to zine editing, where I had left last year. I tried and tried. I thought I had learned the basics of design from my current job and some lateral volunteering work. But, alas! Tiredness overpowered me. So, I shut down my laptop, shut the windows, fixed my mother's blanket, and dipped inside mine. I wanted to complete the zine editing and sit and write this entry at my table, but… Here I am. Under my blanket, typing away on my phone. The idea that was swirling in my mind while I was thinking of writing this at my table was basically a mind dump. A literal dump of all my thoughts and vomit out all the feelings that clutch my skin from beneath and wash my hands of them.

Some nights like tonight, I really struggle between this rock and a hard place, between cowardice and banality, between self-destruction and externally inflicted trauma and abuse called life. All I ever want in these moments is to disappear. Teleport into an unfamiliar existence. Be someone else. Somewhere else. At some other time. Perhaps in some other world. To get rid of all these events, sickly memories, (mis/non)happenings, and lost opportunities just to protect my coating of asocialness. To put an end to this endlessly triggered anxiety. To get out of this sinkhole of a depression once and for all. To erase this regret-laden, thin life where the fantasies rot: the fantasies of all the clothes I wished to wear, all the foods I craved to eat, all the places I itched to be, all the people I cared to talk to, all the books I dreamt of reading, all the jobs I overarchingly applied to do, all the courses I oh-so-passionately thought about studying, all the poems I longed to write, all the love I longed to give, and some love I yearned to receive. They rot in my daily life. Like when my mother leaves the rice in water, and it ferments and starts to smell. The waft hits your nose every second breath, making you wonder where it's coming from, and after rummaging for a good chunk of time, you realise it's that days-old rice in water your mother soaked. I wish I could ask my mother to cull out this rot in me and throw it away.

Reminds me of this:

https://www.tumblr.com/maiabaia/185983017870/mother-by-maia-baia

But, even that's a poetic fantasy. Reality is something you have to burrow through, as if tunnelling through dense, unyielding earth. Each passing day, I try. I wish I had an entity to pray to who would believe me that I try. I try to live. I try to work. I try to care. I try to show up. I try to eat. I try to drink. I try to take my medicines. I try to write. I try to read. I try to feel. I try to experience. I try and try and try. But life is just a wretched mirror, reflecting all the dark nights that have ever come upon you. The rot always riles up. It rises and howls inside me like an animal trapped under my skin. It slithers around beneath my skin and seeps out here and there, leaving me with the stickiness of realisation. Realisation of this thin, malnourished life. How bland and banal and behind and bickered it is. So drought-like. The rot is like a rock sometimes, too hard and unyielding. It drinks up whatever water of life I sporadically get and leaves me dry and thirsty and unquenched and still clenched. Life is too difficult to carry on like this. But the problem with stagnancy is that you are not only not able to move forward, but also not able to actively stop the process altogether. You have to go through the excruciating process of self-deterioration in autopilot. While the world moves on, you keep deluding yourself that you don't need to catch up because it will end soon, but the deterioration slows the ending, and you end up caught up nonconsentingly and all oblivious. The world must have something that I lack, which keeps it going. Even the remaining motivators like a job, or some money, or moving out and going somewhere else have been stoned to death. A different life seems impossible in this economy. More and more money will still not be able to sustain me in this economy. Moving out is a financial emasculation in this economy. Whilst I realised this, my remaining motivators for creating some life once I moved out were also dead. Now, I don't care.

I don't care about all the clothes I wished to wear, all the foods I craved to eat, all the places I itched to be, all the people I cared to talk to, all the books I dreamt of reading, all the jobs I over-archingly applied to do, all the courses I oh-so passionately thought to study, all the poems I longed to write, all the love I longed to give, some love I yearned to recieve.

They are all unnecessary rot to me that I can't get rid of, a cross I will have to bear. This rot has now become the fermentor, like a vessel that breeds and sustains, my ever-growing anxiety and depression. It eats away at my self-esteem, my adult capability, my human dignity.

And yet, this too will have to be carried into morning, not resolved, not redeemed, not erased, not even properly rested, just dragged there by ankle, like everything else I have not managed to kill or become. Perhaps that is the ugliest part of living: not that one suffers, but that one must go on arranging the suffering into a shape that can pass for a day. A body must still be gotten up. Teeth must still be brushed. A face must still be washed and shown to the world as if it belongs there. Maybe that is why I write any of this down at all. No matter how much I procrastinate writing, I still come back to this place. Not because it lightens or soothes or heals anything. But if I do not pin these nights to the page, they spread, become atmosphere, become the weather of my life. At least here, for a few paragraphs, the rot has a border, and I can look it in the face and say: yes, you are still here. Yes, you have eaten through another evening. Yes, you have made a home in me. But you are not the only thing that remains. 

Because I remain too. Miserably, thinly, ungloriously, unwantedly, unfortunately, but still. Still the hand under the blanket, still the phone glowed in the dark, still the daughter who fixed her mother’s blanket before crawling back into her own ruin. Still, the person who tries, even when trying, feels like a farce performed for no god at all. Maybe that is not hope. Fine. Let it be something smaller and more humiliating. Let it be mere continuance. Let it be the animal's refusal to vanish. Tonight, that will have to do. Sorry.

~ Oizys.