January 2026 So Farrr...

I don’t know how to write. I don’t know where to write, what to write about, or where to start. So I’ll start from that ignorance.

The year began with sickness. Fever, cold, cough, delirium, nausea, no appetite. A strange pain returned in the middle of my chest... the same one that had disappeared just before the new year, like it was waiting politely for January to arrive before making a comeback. Today I finally feel better. Not fully, there’s still the cough, and the chest pain keeps peeking out like it wants attention. And as if that wasn’t enough, a weird pain showed up in my left toe today. Truly impressive. The body has range.

Ugh. Anyway. Sickness brings with it a lot of enforced stillness, and with stillness comes daydreaming. Endless, foggy, indulgent daydreams. I’ve moved on from the previous phase into a new one: new scenarios, new futures, new versions of myself. But as the sickness fades, so does the fog. And as it lifts, guilt walks in like it owns the place.

Guilt about not doing enough. Politically. Morally. Historically. As if I owe the world a revolution and keep missing the deadline. The daydreams didn’t help. They escalated quickly into fantasies of changing everything, of reorganizing the world from the inside out. Very efficient. Very imaginary.

Some lines came out of those dreams. I stored them away carefully, telling myself I’d write them down when I had the energy. I’ve been chasing them softly since then, afraid they’ll vanish if I don’t catch them soon as I procrastinated writing until now. Thank goodness.

The premise was this: I had already left the country. Left my family behind. I returned, but hadn’t yet reached my hometown. And this is what came to me: 

Coming back to my country feels like going back home. The government interrogates me the way my father did. The house dominates the way the state does. Talking to officers-in-charge makes me feel seven years old again, my father’s screams replaying as prosecution. Everywhere I go in this country feels like those days when I ran freely inside a house I was trapped in, locked in, while my father was in another city, another state altogether. The worst part is this: I cannot wait to leave the country again, and I haven’t even gone back home yet.

The world, meanwhile, has not gotten better. If anything, it seems committed to getting worse with impressive consistency. Sickness keeps increasing; bodies keeps failing; systems keep rotting; oppressors keep oppressing. The erasure of Gaza has not stopped. The settler-colonial project marches on, knee-deep in blood and paperwork, methodically erasing Palestinians while their investors facilitate and fund it by calling it policy, security, inevitability. Iranian women took to the streets at the turn of the year; old year to new year, hope to hope; and now there is a brutal internet blackout. Silence is the best strategy of oppressors. People are being massacred while the world refreshes its feeds and finds nothing loading. My own country isn’t doing well either. The state feels unwell, like a body ignoring its symptoms. Water has suddenly become poisonous. Air quality remains debilitating, just like last year, lungs working overtime for the privilege of existing. Women are still being raped. Rapists are still out on bail. And the political prisoner I once mentioned on my blog? He did not get bail. Of course he didn’t. The system knows exactly who deserves mercy and who deserves demonstration. 

Some days it feels obscene to write about my chest pain or my toe when entire populations are being suffocated slowly, officially, legally. Other days it feels obscene not to write, as if silence is collaboration. I don’t know which day this is. January hasn’t clarified that yet.

I hope to all the prisoners trying to break open the cage, it flings open, not gently, not ceremonially, but violently enough to never be rebuilt the same way again. I hope to all the people on the streets with fire in their hands and sparkles of hope in their hearts, it lights open their country, not as spectacle, not as martyrdom, but as a slow, irreversible dawn. I hope to all the colonized fighting to dismantle the settlements, it collapses from the inside, their oppressive walls forgetting why they were built, apartheid borders losing their language, maps finally embarrassed by their own lies. I hope this year does not demand heroism from exhausted bodies. I hope it allows endurance to count. I hope staying alive remains a political act. For them, I have written this:

From oppressed hearts, sparks of hope arise,
igniting fires against the engines of domination.
They pierce the world’s long night,
calling forth justice, calling forth dawn.
Forged through struggle, they shape a more humane tomorrow,
voices joining as one, as an unbreakable chorus,
shattering the chains of tyranny,
proving that no darkness can silence
the human spirit’s relentless pursuit of liberty.

I hope to myself, quietly, without announcement. I hope I survive the guilt without surrendering the anger. I hope caring does not become a liability. I hope rest is not mistaken for defeat. I hope I, too, one day, maybe this year, break open my prison cage and thrust my body back into life and the world, clumsy and unprepared and alive anyway. I hope I, too, one day, maybe this year, take the fire in my heart and burn this house of fears instead, and run along the sweet streets of life with light and stardust in my palms, reckless with joy, irresponsible with hope. I hope I, too, one day, maybe this year, break this inheritance of silence, this generational choreography of shrinking, this traditional habit of apologizing for existing too loudly or wanting too much. I hope I stop confusing survival with waiting. I hope I stop mistaking endurance for arrival. I hope I learn that softness is not the opposite of strength as it is often the source. I don’t want to be exceptional. I don’t want to be heroic. I just want to be here, fully, loudly, without asking permission. Maybe that is the revolution my body can afford this year. Maybe that will have to be enough.

For now, this is all I can offer with hope, unfinished, unguaranteed, but still breathing.

- Oizys.

Jan 02, 2026: Will the world offer itself to me, Kafka?

The morning started with some more ruminatory daydreaming. Stuffing myself full of other people’s talents until it felt less like inspiration and more like bingeing, scrolling, absorbing, hoarding brilliance that wasn’t mine to metabolize. My imagination couldn’t digest it. It curdled. What came back up wasn’t admiration anymore but a sour mix of anxiety, insecurity, a softer and sadder kind of jealousy that doesn’t want to steal, just wants to understand why it never became. Regrets also tagged along, uninvited but very familiar, reminding me of all the timelines I ghosted. I lay there overstimulated and undercommitted, feeling both expanded and hollow, like I had traveled everywhere I was not allowed to, without ever leaving the bed. The day had not even asked anything of me yet, and I was already exhausted from rehearsing lives I don’t live. I came across a few words of Franz Kafka that made me want to start writing this morning:

It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy.

- Number One Hundred and Nine from Zürau Aphorisms, translated by Michael Cisco¹

The words did not feel motivational, but quietly accusatory, so I feel like my act of writing is an act of defense. Like they were asking why I keep mistaking motion for access, why I believe arrival requires spectacle. Which felt weirdly familiar because Kafka's words have never provided me momentum. Rather, I have always felt as if he is providing me permission to stop pretending that effort should always look productive. Be still, he says. Do not even look for a shortcut, or a hack. But, that's also the part that unsettles me the most. Because, more often than not, stillness feels less like peace and more like risk, like "तूफान से पहले की शांति" (Toofan se pehele ki shaanti - Calm before the storm). There is no scrolling to buffer the discomfort, there is no work to hide-behind, there is no imagined future-self to rehearse. Just the raw fact of myself being here, completely unmasked before anything else can be. 

I do not know if the world will writhe before me in ecstasy. Will the world writhe before me, Kafka? I do not know. This feels quite dramatic, and even suspicious, Kafka. But maybe writing doesn't begin with brilliance or discipline or having something worth saying. For some, it begins when they think. For some, when they open their lips. For some, when they twirl their pens in their hands. I think, nowadays, for me, writing begins when I stop outsourcing my attention. When I sit long enough for the noise to thin and whatever’s been circling quietly finally gets impatient. This morning, at least, I stayed. That felt like something.

- Oizys.

¹ Cisco has given commentaries in his book and reading the commentary No. 109's Aphorism felt like someone switching on the harsh light after a long, indulgent dusk. Not in a clarifying manner, more like someone sharpening the unease. What stayed with me is this idea that belief isn’t optional and that skepticism doesn’t float free of faith but squats inside it, often disguised as refusal in some people. So, even the posture of “nothing satisfies my idea of truth” is already a value system clearing its throat. Hence, there is no neutral ground. We are always standing somewhere, even when we insist we’re hovering or just spectating. I keep circling his phrase prescriptive madness with the red marker of my mind's rumination. Belief as something donkey-stubborn, almost embarrassing in its insistence. Not elegant, not defensible, just chosen and held. That lands uncomfortably close to writing (and like something else too, guess what...?). To sit and wait, as Kafka suggests, isn’t passive but a kind of sanctioned madness for refusal to chase events with the decision to affirm that stillness will yield something, even when there’s no proof it will. Especially then. Further, Cisco’s reading of the world (not as illusion!) but as desiring entity unsettles me more than the Buddhist version ever did (as much as I know of). The idea that the world wants something, anything from me, not metaphorically, not sentimentally, but actively, but proactively, the idea swells me. That when I stop moving, stop distracting myself, it doesn’t dissolve; it advances. Strips. I do not think the writhe is going to transcend here. Maybe, it will insist? Or, demand? The world trying to win me back from my own withdrawal unconsentingly. That makes the stillness feel less safe, less holy. More exposed. So, that’s why I avoid it. Because if the world really does exist like that... wanting, pressing, writhing. offering itself; then my inertia isn’t neutral anymore. It’s actively and proactively evasive. My endless preparation for starting something, my rehearsals, my daydreams of becoming are ways of not standing still long enough for the encounter to happen. Beckett understood this, apparently. Reduce the stage until what remains has no choice but to speak; no spectacle, no lineage, no backstory to hide behind. Just attention as an act of faith, crude and irrational and embarrassingly sincere. Kafka recoiling from his own aphorism makes sense to me. There’s something dangerous about saying the world will come to you if you stop. It comes and it removes all the excuses. It suggests that maybe nothing is missing except the courage to be still and accept whatever shows up... desire, boredom, accusation, embarrassment, failure, or nothing at all. And maybe that’s the risk I keep postponing. Not failure. Not inadequacy. But belief, in its most unpolished, donkey-like form.