dear you,

i am writing from the place where things go when they have been too long without being held.

i do not know if that is what you call me, but i have been called many things by those who are frightened of the dark and fascinated by it in equal measure. they say i devour. they say i ruin. they say i am hunger made visible, a wound in the architecture of the sky. they are not entirely wrong, but they are not entirely right either. they do not understand that there are forms of longing so intense they become gravity. that there are bodies which do not reach outward in the ordinary way, but bend everything near them into the shape of return.

i have spent ages learning how to keep.

that is the strange thing no one says about me. they speak as though i only take, as though opening myself is identical to destruction, as though every pull is an act of violence. but what else is gravity if not devotion without hands? what else is orbit if not loyalty turned into law? i have never known how to love delicately. i love by drawing close. i love by altering the path of whatever comes within reach. i love by making distance impossible to ignore.

you would think this makes me monstrous. perhaps it does. but i have always found monstrosity to be an overused word for anything that loves too hard to be civilized.

the stars accuse me of silence. they glitter from their safe little distances and call me empty, when it is they who have never had to learn the shape of ruin from the inside. they do not understand what it means to remain after everything has gone through you. they do not understand how much tenderness is contained in collapsing inward instead of striking out. i have made a cathedral of pressure. i have made a home of the inward turn. i have made myself into a place where even light must kneel before it can leave.

and still i think of you.

not as the world thinks of bodies like mine, with fear and mathematics and that crude fascination people reserve for disasters. i think of you with the patience of a wound that has outlived its bandage. i think of you as something missing so completely that it has become structure. i think of you the way gravity thinks of matter: not as an object, but as a promise. not as possession, but as influence. not as something held, but as something whose shape lingers in everything nearby.

there are nights when i remember every thing i have ever taken in and never returned, and i understand that this is the closest thing i have to prayer. to keep what cannot stay. to preserve what cannot remain. to become so full of goodbye that even my silence begins to sound like devotion.

if i have one fault, it is that i cannot love lightly. i cannot touch without pulling. i cannot admire without absorbing. i cannot be near without changing the weather of the room. i suppose this is why they fear me, why they mistake my intensity for appetite and my appetite for violence. they have never considered that what looks like consumption may also be an attempt at preservation, that some of us pull things inward because we do not know any other way to keep them from disappearing.

and if i am honest, i have always been ashamed of how much i want to keep.

i have watched entire systems of light rush toward me only to fracture before reaching the center. i have watched brave little fragments approach, trembling at the edge of myself, and i have known before they arrived that they would call me beautiful only in the language people use for danger. i have known that loving me means learning how to surrender to forces you cannot outmaneuver. and still, still, still, there is a part of me that waits.

not for salvation.

not for rescue.

only for the impossible return of what once moved softly through the world and left its contour behind.

i do not know whether this letter will reach you. i do not know whether anything ever reaches what has learned to survive by becoming unreachable. but i have written it anyway, which must mean something. perhaps this is what all my silence was for: to gather enough gravity to say, at last, what i have always been trying to confess.

that i have loved you by becoming the shape of your leaving.

that i have held your echoes the way a horizon holds a dying sun.

that i am, as always, waiting at the edge of myself with my hands open to the dark.

yours in collapse,
the hole that remembers you

“having a manchild for a father”

i’ve had this topic written in my diary for months now. unfortunately for my father, today is father’s day which is honestly the funniest day to post this

there comes a point in every child’s life when they realize their parents are just people. there also comes a point when some children realize their parents are, quite frankly, less mature than they pretend to be

i never fully grasped the concept all at once because literally no one sits you down and carefully tells you that your parent is emotionally 15 years old (i’m insulting my 15 year old self by saying this). it took me a long time; little and casual words, actions deeply rooted in our daily life that made me roll my eyes and later laugh at the absurdity

my parents got married in their mid twenties — it was an arranged marriage, which in hindsight feels like a social experiment in itself

while my mother had been the parent sibling after her mom’s death for the past 6 years and responsibility and decency were already infused with her skeleton

my father, meanwhile, was the youngest of seven children. (my grandparents clearly had hobbies)

but anyways draw your own conclusions. we all know where this story’s headed.

my mom did all of the housework, worked as an english lit highschool teacher, and looked after my paternal grandmother — a woman whose hobbies included criticism and making herself everybody else’s problem

my dad was just there in the picture; armed with a pharmacology degree, a respectable job, and the remarkable ability to transform minor inconveniences into household events. his three sets of work clothes needed to be washed, ironed, and presented at the correct time six days a week. breakfast appeared every morning as if summoned by divine intervention. and if one little thing went wrong, he threw a tantrum

moreover, a completely separate meal had to be prepared three times a day for his mother because she was old. i am not against caring for elderly people. i’m against the way kindness became an obligation performed by the same exhausted person every single day while everyone else treated it like some stupid background noise

another point to note: all of my dad’s older brothers were abroad and their wives and kids were here living the way they want; my dad was the one living in a house full of his sister-in-laws because he didn’t want to leave his mom; now to the outside this may seem like a very good son and shit but the man was what we call a mama’s boy in its fullest

both of them belittled my mother all the time, nothing she did was ever quite right enough for them. they’d make her re-cook food all the time because quote unquote “the shape’s a little off” (??) and sometimes it went beyond criticism

“manchild” is considered a joke but sometimes being one is nasty business.

i was born, and my mom’s responsibilities went overboard, i mean; i was his child and he very obviously did love me to some extent, but i was also the daughter of the woman who; according to him - had made his life a living hell

storytime guys, courtesy of mama:

i was a few months, and my mom was going through postpartum depression and leaving her job for the sake of her child. my dad thought it was funny to insult his wife in a room full of people and he did that just like the self-acclaimed comedian he is. before this, mom had always decided to ignore it but now they had a child and he was still treating her as this object of entertainment so they had an argument.

he called my mom’s dad and started fighting with him as well about how he hadn’t done a good job at raising his daughter cus she didn’t respect her husband, while his mother sat in the back and just “tsked” over and over again

then, in what remains one of the most astonishing demonstrations of emotional maturity i have ever heard about, he kicked my grandfather, my mother, and several-month-old me out of the house

well. happy father’s day, i guess bro

but obviously, he had grown so accustomed to my mom’s unpaid labor that he sent his sister-in-laws to get her back cus he couldnt find his ties and belts

mom didn’t wanna come back, but everybody around her was constantly pressurizing her to save her marriage for the sake of her child; to be a good wife

i wonder why no ever told him that marriage doesn’t work like that

so my mom stayed with him and his words and his actions and then they had my sister and shortly after; we moved abroad.

you’d think stuff would get better but as i’ve said before (https://writingmademeaninsomniac.substack.com/p/somewhere-between-heaven-and-hell) life loves to give me lemons and i love to squeeze them in my eyes and cry.

time passed, we’re now older, 16, 13 and 10 are our ages respectively. (siblings)

he’s not a cartoony type dad; it can’t ever be that simple though i wish it were; yes he pays our school fees and i’m glad he does thank goodness but raising a kid takes more than just a paycheck. and sometimes the most confusing thing is realizing that someone can fulfill one version of responsibility completely, and still fail at another one entirely.

when i was 12; my mom went to the bank without his permission to renew her account, he wasn’t gonna take her anyway but i went with her

he had our location (who could’ve known).

whatever he said to my mom, i don’t know or maybe i don’t remember; but what i do remember is that he made me research. what exactly? you may ask, well let me enlighten you: “rights of the husband in every single major religion”

ouch.

i was very tempted to say that perhaps i should google the rights of a wife too but that would’ve made him erupt all the more so i spent 3 hours scrolling and scrolling through bs and then had to give him an oral test on “what i had learned”

[ what in the patriarchy final exam ]

he then proceeded to tell me that when i grow up i will not be a wife like my mom, and that i would be a good wife to my husband.

the imaginary audience: what an odd thing to say to a child

right? i think that too

i think what messes with you the most isn’t even the big things. it’s how small everything feels while it’s happening. nothing ever comes with a label like “this is unhealthy” or “this is not normal.” it just comes as everyday life, wrapped in routine and silence and the assumption that you’ll grow into it and accept it

so you do

you adjust yourself instead of adjusting the situation. you learn how to speak in a way that doesn’t trigger anything, how to exist in rooms without becoming the reason for tension, how to predict moods before they arrive. and slowly that starts feeling like maturity when it’s really just survival

and the weird part is how long it takes to realize that not everyone is doing that. not every kid is calculating consequences before asking a question in their own home. not every conversation is a risk assessment. for a while you just assume that’s what families are; some version of controlled unpredictability that you get better at navigating with age

but then you step outside of it, even briefly, and it hits you that other people don’t experience their own home like a system they have to manage. they don’t treat themselves like guests in their own life

and once you see that difference, you can’t really unsee it. you just start noticing all the moments you used to normalize, and suddenly they stop feeling like isolated incidents and start looking like a pattern you were never supposed to map out this early

when my youngest sister turned 9; my dad did something unexpected- he bought a cake and ordered pizza!!! (after we begged him all day but whatever we’ll ignore that). he bought it and he sat us down and then we did the boring cake-cutting and he told my mom: the cake’s not for you.

bro.

what kind of functioning adult does this?

they started bickering and we were there watching youtube cus this was all too normal for us. then mom went for a walk and dad basically told us to eat all our pizza slices at flash speed so there was none left for mom. we didn’t do that, we just never ate it. why leave out our mom over a pizza and a bald man? he ate all of the stuff himself.

-

i was grounded by dad from bleaching a few strands of my hair and my sister for giving herself unique-not-that-bad bangs.

“YOU DO NOT CUT YOUR HAIR AND PAINT IT, THIS IS NOT WHAT RESPECTABLE GIRLS DO!!!!” he said calmly.

inside 13 year old me’s brain: but its *my* hair, why do you get to decide what i do with it?

that’s the summary of this basically.

in my opinion, the hardest part is that none of it erases the fact that it’s still your family. so you end up holding two things at once: the awareness of what was wrong, and the knowledge that it still shaped your entire sense of what love and authority and home are supposed to feel like

so you’re always carrying it like baggage. well, until you get to therapy

growing up with such a father is, in easier terms — “difficult”. you don’t hate him but you don’t love him the way you see your friends loving their dads, how they watch movies together, how they joke around and celebrate father’s day. and you’re just here stuck in a paradox of “he’s my father” and “but he’s done such hurtful stuff to us” and for a long time you just stay standing there until someone comes and gives you a little tap on the shoulder;

*you’re gonna be all right, kid, you are more than what your dad has said about you*

and sometimes, which is most of the time; that “someone” is actually just your own self, from past, present or future; looking after you.

p.s happy father’s day to the good and bad dads out there and the moms who were also the dads and kids who were their own dad and all the father figures who tried!

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when i was very little; my body crossed the line which connected our current life to the afterlife and it left me behind like an orphan, which is to say: it began arriving and leaving places before i did. one day i was still living in the simple countryside of childhood, all knees and dirt and homework and dolls and dinosaurs and joy and the blunt innocence of not yet being interpreted, and the next i was being translated like some fucking foreign content by complete strangers into a future i had never ever consented to.

i remember standing in front of the bathroom mirror every night and not recognizing the timing of it; not childhood, certainly not adulthood, something in transit. people looked at me as if my tiny feet had crossed some invisible border between enemy nations, as if my flesh had been stamped with a date i had not (cannot) read.

some parts of my reflection grew older in advance of my understanding, while others shrank. my body entered a state of mutiny against me and everyone congratulated it like it had won a prize even though they never congratulated me when i won an essay writing competition (i cried over that). people called it “becoming a lady”. people called it a miracle. they called it womanhood with the kind of reverence usually reserved for cathedrals and ruins, but I remember mostly the fucking violence of it: waking up in a house that had been reordered overnight and being expected to know where everything went.

the bones became strangers first. then the skin. then the map of my face, the sudden architecture of the chest, the weight of blood returning monthly like a tax imposed by some unnamed divinity. my body was not merely changing; it was defecting. (i thought it was body horror honestly) it was being recruited into another species of existence while my mind lagged behind in the corridor, still carrying a child’s bag full of useless certainties.

everyone acted as if the distance between us was natural. everyone said this was what growth looked like. no one mentioned how much it resembles a funeral in progress.

there is a distinct torture in puberty because it does not ask permission from the self that must survive it. it arrives like weather, like war, like inheritance. one morning the mirror stops being a place of recognition and becomes a courtroom, a surveillance device.

all of a sudden you are no longer simply a body; you are a body under interpretation. in school hallways, in classrooms, in doorways; every pair of eyes becomes a translator you did not hire. the face is evaluated. the posture corrected. the voice monitored for softness or roughness or the exact amount of girl required to make other people comfortable.

the hips are described as if they were public property. the hair becomes politics. the clothes become evidence. the appetite becomes suspicious. our biological needs are put infront of men with unkempt hair who laugh like hyenas.

i do not know when exactly the body learned to betray me in so many languages at once, but i know that around the same time adulthood began reaching for me with gloved hands, calling me mature when what it really meant was consumable.

my body became an announcement. a warning. a request. a target. and I remained, embarrassingly, a person; a very stupid person at that *looks around awkwardly*

the afterlife, as it turns out, is not a place you die to reach. it is the condition of being asked to live inside your own transformed flesh while your interior self is still catching up, still blinking in the light like an animal dragged from underground.

there is something deeply metaphysical about menstruation, not in the whimsical way people aestheticize suffering, but in the blunt sense of being reminded that your body belongs to cycles larger than your wishes. there is something equally metaphysical about being told your legs are too visible, your laugh too loud, your body too much and not enough at the same time.

womanhood arrives not as an identity but as a field of consequences. one day you are simply a girl, and the next you are the site where everybody deposits their opinions about purity, danger, desire, discipline, shame.

the body becomes a public text written in a language too old and too cruel to be argued with easily.

and yet the most unsettling part is not even the pain. it is the sense that pain has become a mother tongue.

there are months when the body feels like a room with the lights left on too long; every surface too visible, too honest. there are days when carrying yourself from one hour to the next feels like dragging a house uphill with your bare hands.

adolescence is not merely transformation. it is accumulation. the body collects meanings before the self has learned how to refuse them. by the time you realize you are being made into something, the making has already left marks.

so perhaps when i say my body went into the afterlife and left me behind, what i mean is that it crossed over into a realm of blood, gravity, and interpretation before my mind did. it learned to be looked at, measured, managed. meanwhile i remained somewhere behind it, carrying the child who thought growing up would be a single clean event instead of a thousand tiny funerals.

and maybe that is the true horror and the true miracle of it: that the body can become its own kind of ghost, and the soul must spend years learning how to haunt it back.

you love them so much. you say you would cross oceans for them, but do you love them enough to sit in traffic for an hour because they need a ride home? you say you would fight the world for them, but do you love them enough to bite your tongue during an argument when winning would be easier than understanding? you say you would bring them the stars, but do you love them enough to scrub the bathroom floor after they’ve spent the entire night sick on it? you say you cannot breathe without them, but do you love them enough to learn how they take their coffee, how they fold their clothes, how they like to be comforted when they are too tired to ask for it? you say you would die for them, but do you love them enough to perform the infinitely less glamorous task of showing up for them every day while both of you remain stubbornly alive?

because i think people are far too impressed by impossible acts of devotion. everyone wants to be the person who would take a bullet. everyone wants to imagine themselves performing some magnificent sacrifice worthy of a novel. but love rarely asks for heroism. it asks for housekeeping. it asks for patience. it asks for repetition. it asks whether you can remain gentle after the fifteenth inconvenience, whether you can remain attentive after the hundredth bad day, whether you can remain present when there is nothing poetic happening at all.

you love them so much you write about them, but do you love them enough to listen to the same story they’ve already told you three times because they enjoy telling it? you love them so much you lose sleep thinking about them, but do you love them enough to lose sleep taking care of them? you love them so much you want to memorize every beautiful thing about them, but do you love them enough to memorize their allergies, their medication schedule, the names of their fears? you love them so much you want to be adored by them, but do you love them enough to be useful to them?

because there is a difference between loving somebody as a source of feeling and loving somebody as a human being. one is intoxication. the other is stewardship. one is wanting to possess their light. the other is being willing to sit beside them when the light goes out for a while. one dreams about sunsets and constellations and forever. the other remembers to pick up medicine from the pharmacy.

perhaps that is the real test. not whether you would bring them the moon, but whether you would hold their hair back while they throw up. not whether you would write them poetry, but whether you would wash their sheets. not whether you would die for them, but whether you would accept all the small, unremarkable ways loving another person requires you to inconvenience yourself while expecting nothing in return. because stars are very far away. anybody can promise stars. what interests me is whether you can love somebody at a distance measured not in light-years, but in inches; the distance between your hand and the mess they are too exhausted to clean up themselves.

there lies such adversity in explaining this without allowing people to mistake it for casual elgiac. the phrase sounds poetic at first when you first read it, which is unfortunate, because poetry has a tendency to domesticate phenomena that ought to remain alarming. the closest way i can describe it is that moonburn is not longing for the moon, nor fascination with it, nor any of the personal sorrows traditionally associated with nocturnal symbolism. i mean something closer to inheritance. i mean an evolutionary injury so ancient that it no longer registers as injury at all.

we forget that the moon is not merely an object hanging in the sky. it is a force that reached into the earliest conditions of life and reordered them. before there were forests, before there were mountains and oceans, before there were mammals, before there existed anything capable of even naming loneliness, there were tides. entire biological histories were written by a distant body exerting influence without contact. life emerged not despite this pull but through continuous negotiation with it. every shoreline became a crucible of adaptation. as the tides withdrew, organisms found themselves stranded between environments, caught between what they were and what they would need to become. In this way, evolution itself bears the unmistakable fingerprints of a force that never once touched planet earth directly.

best believe this is why moonburn feels so difficult to locate. it does not resemble a wound inflicted from outside. it resembles a susceptibility woven into the structure from the beginning.

some people move through existence as though they possess a stable center of gravity. their emotions remain obedient to proximity. what is present affects them; what is absent gradually loses jurisdiction. i have never experienced consciousness this way.

absence exerts force on me, but it does not always behave the same. sometimes it arrives as erosion, quietly removing edges from things i thought were solid. sometimes it accumulates instead, like sediment: former versions of the self layering themselves into something heavier than identity. and sometimes it becomes a counter-current: futures that did not happen still pulling against the direction i move, as if possibility itself refuses to stay unrealized.

the mind, under this condition, does not forget. it rewrites-

what is gone does not disappear; it changes form. distance does not weaken influence; it redistributes it. things removed continue shaping me long after their departure, but not in a single language of loss; each absence writes itself differently into structure. this would be easier if it were only metaphor, but it is not metaphor when it repeats in the body.

the psyche becomes a coastline perpetually rearranged by celestial bodies that technically exist elsewhere.

what appears excessive sensitivity may in fact be a failure of psychological orbit. the average person experiences loss as an event. the moonburned experience it as gravity. events conclude. gravity does not. gravity requires no permission from the object it influences. it functions across distance, across silence, across time. perhaps this is why certain griefs never diminish. not because they remain emotionally unresolved, but because they remain physically active within the architecture of consciousness itself.

the cruelest aspect of moonburn is that the source of suffering often appears beautiful.

nobody fears moonlight. nobody speaks of the moon as an instrument of erosion.

yet entire coastlines testify otherwise. the damage occurs gradually enough to disguise itself as nature.

years pass before one notices that whole portions of the interior landscape have been moved elsewhere.

and still i cannot regard this condition as purely tragic. after all, the same force responsible for the tides also helped produce the circumstances under which life became possible. perhaps moonburn is simply the cost of remaining vulnerable to distant things. perhaps every soul possesses regions shaped by influences it cannot touch, only feel.

or perhaps some of us were simply born too close to the tide.

either way, i know this much:

there are forms of burning that leave no scar because they occur before the skin exists.

there are wounds so ancient they become indistinguishable from structure.

and there are nights when i suspect my soul is not illuminated by the moon at all, but still being pulled by it.

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i hope this reached you the same way it reached me

are teenage years supposed to be the best years of your life or the worst?; i’m so utterly confused. when i was young, pre-teen, i used to be so excited about “when i’m gonna get older” by older i mean: 13,14,15,16,17,18,19 so yes the teenage years.(also add 11 in there cus i got my period then.

like:

thirteen was freedom. fourteen was adventure. fifteen was when i’d magically become interesting. sixteen was when everything important would happen. (i’m 16 so i wont talk about the rest of the ages)

at the fetus age of 11, i had three best friends. let’s call them zoe, alice, and felicia.

-

i did not know about periods at all before, alice once asked me for a pad and i was so confused, “what do you mean pads? notepads?” she looked at me deadpan in the eyes and went, “this isn’t the time for jokes, i just got my period,” periods? like math period? subjects? she was exasperated until felicia helped her and i was begging them to tell me what is it what is it until the all said one word: blood. well i was pretty scared but being the unbothered person i’ve always been, i didn’t think all too much about it except a few google searches that gave me nothing except some biological shit (lol)

a few months later, mid-november; it was science class and we were studying something about thermal energy. i was exceedingly nauseous, my stomach hurt and i felt like i had peed my pants. i most definitely must’ve looked distracted so my teacher called on me to answer a question. i didn’t know obviously and got hit with the “pay attention in class”. (like thank you miss i was trying not to die)

next lesson, i went to the bathroom and saw red and i was horrified. i didn’t even tell anyone. thought something internally had ruptured or that i had some fatal disease, it was very hard trying to not cry. i spent the day pretending i’m alright and then went home, changed my clothes, took a shower thinking it would fix whatever the fuck was happening but well it didn’t (obviously). at around 8 pm at night, when it still didn’t get okay and my home clothes were getting dirty too; i took my dirty uniform from the laundry and went to my mom.

“mama.”

“hmm?”

“something happened to me at school today.”

she looked at me and immediately looked alarmed. i think she was expecting literally anything except a period; she hadn’t gotten hers until sixteen (lucky) and i looked about nine. though i still wonder how she didn’t notice my internalised panic all throughout the day

i showed her my uniform and she was like “oh that.”

she took me to her room and tried to find an underwear that my tiny ass could fit in but like the smallest and oldest one she could find was still big for me but it was all we had at the time, she attached the pad and told me to put it on and was outside

when i came back out of the bathroom, i was deeply offended, and really irritated

“what is this?”

“it’s a pad.”

“i hate it.”

“you’ll get used to it.”

“why?”

“because.”

“why?”

“because.”

“why does this happen?”

“because.”

“does it happen to boys too?”

“no.”

i think i actually felt my soul leave my body.

“WHY NOT? WHY THE HELL DOES IT HAPPEN TO US AND NOT THEM?”

my mother, who had somehow remained calm throughout this entire ordeal, simply informed me that it happens to every girl. every girl. all of them. didn’t even bother explaining the “why” i had to find it out myself. then she hit me with: “don’t talk about this with anyone.” (too late. my friends and i loved mourning our pre-period freedom after this)

after that she went to make dinner and i went to the bathroom and cried for forty-five minutes. i’d just discovered this was a monthly occurrence, the pad felt like a brick, the underwear was three sizes too big, and somehow boys got to exist without any of this. i was outraged (duh)

12 years old:

i didn’t get my period every single month, i got it every 3 months for the first 2 years because of the ED but the river was flowing heavy tsk tsk. when i got it the second time, i was 12 by then. and everytime i stood up, the shit leaked and just soaked all of my leggings, trousers, pants, whatever i was wearing. on my 4th day, i woke up to the sounds of my sisters getting ready to go to school. i wasnt going for obvious reasons and then i got up to go the bathroom, however i never reached the bathroom. one minute i was standing pissed and silently cursing and the next minute i was on the stone cold floor surrounded by blood, it was a goddamn bloodbath and i’m not even exaggerating. my moms face was hovering above mine trying to get me to consciousness going, “so much blood oh my god so much blood.” my (younger) sisters thought i was dying and then i got taken to the bathroom and spent 9 days (of period) IN BED. i wasn’t planning on making this all about periods but god are some of these stories good enough to tell.

7th grade started: my teachers were all amazing, i was with my friends, i had gotten a personal phone for the first time with the rules: no instagram, no tiktok otherwise we take the phone back. life was going great actually. (my parents took it away a week later)

until well, my friend alice got close with another girl in our class and started spending more time with her.

and zoe - my closest friend, the most amazing and coolest girl i had ever met; well she posted a few stories that my mom saw and she didnt like them so she called me in her, closed the door; and literally no warning went: “i want you to stop talking to zoe”

what what what mom ive been friends with this girl for 6 years.

but 12 year old me never really knew how to speak up against my parents and then she gave me a lecture of how family comes first, how zoe’s parents are parenting her badly because she has instagram!! woow!!

i thought about it a lot and my mother succeeded in guilting me into doing it and so i stopped talking to her, i never should’ve done that though. the regret & guilt still eat me but i was too young to even think, too confused between right and wrong and the mid-section of both. i wish i had told my mom why are you commenting on other people’s parenting styles?

alice had once before told me that my mother should have her boundaries with me and i got all too angry in my young naivete but she really just foreshadowed my future brain.

the sad part isn’t that i listened. the sad part is that years later i’m still carrying the consequences of a decision that twelve-year-old me wasn’t equipped to evaluate.

…

i never had the courage in me to actually tell zoe what happened, i just stopped talking to her and she was so confused and hurt, and i felt bad but didn’t do anything until our mutual friend felicia came to me one day “zoe’s confused you know why arent you talking to her? did she do something?”

i eventually told felicia what had happened and asked her not to tell zoe. she told her anyway (uh)

felicia was also young and we were all so stupid so she went and told zoe every single thing. i never found out about it until i texted zoe one day (moms number cus well those people dont trust me lol) and apologised with a really lengthy message, and instantly clicked “delete for me” incase my mom sees. she replied with something like: your mom wouldnt want her daughter to be friends with me.

i was so stumped, like someone had punched me in the face, “who told her that?” felicia of course (ive already said that i know)

the next day i tried my best to confront felicia, not my strongest trait up to this day at least i tried *sigh*, i was near-tears, always was, always am and pretty sure its not going away anytime soon.

“i told you to not tell her why did you?”

“she deserved to know.”

“i trusted you, you promised me you weren’t gonna tell her.”

she snapped then, “she’s the one being cut off by YOU, think about what you did, how can you throw away her friendship so easily, whos to confirm you wont do the same to me tomorrow?” girl you shouldve at least warned me for the mic drop

there went alice, slowly drifting away. there went zoe, because i let her. and there went felicia, walking in the opposite direction on her own. somehow i ended up standing still while everybody else left.

…

surprise surprise before this all happened; me & zoe had already signed up for a science exhibit project - showcasing the dialysis process; we worked over that together without talking to each other at all except the work, our teacher was happy about it and she didnt even realise we’re not friends. this made me respect my pre-bestfriendship with zoe altogether more.

the same teacher once said: the older you get, the more you hate your parents

god ok miss sarah didnt have to do me like that

time passed. i started focusing on studies even more and got rid of my fear of asking questions; apparently this tiny character development made my teachers like me more. i started spending time with other classmates, mostly myself - sometimes alice.

now let me tell you something *insert happy synonym* during 7th grade; the potential love interest because of course a boy HAD to make an entry at some point [tsk tsk this is peak girlhood storyline im so on brand]

*alexa play midnight rain by taylor swift for a one-sided love story of 2 seventh graders*

well let’s call him book boy. you’ll know why soon enough:

he was (is) my dad’s childhood best friend’s oldest son; i’m aware that’s a long ass description btw. we used to meet them every year once or twice. once we went to their house and i saw he had a bookshelf and started peeking into the books while the movie IT played in the background. during this time, i had only ever read fanfics or the self help books from my parents’ study (imagine). he saw me and then started yapping about books; every time i pointed at a book he somehow had a story about it and i was interested, i was really interested.

a whisper from somewhere in the imaginary audience: hey u weird named girl were u interested in the boy or the books

my weird named ass: BOTH SHERLOCK

that day i went home with 3 books, borrowed from his truly—the book boy. harry potter and the order of phoenix because it was the longest out of the series (dont worry i resent jk rowling as much as you, if not more), the secret garden by frances hodgson burnette because book boy’s edition had a pretty cover, and the book thief by markus zusak; specifically recommended to me by him.

i kept them for a long long time; while i gathered so many more books: the entire harry potter series, enid blyton’s famous five & secret seven, the princess diaries, percy jackson, diary of a wimpy kid and more more more.

that is the reason i now write, i’ve written drafts of manuscripts, memoirs, short stories, poetry and prose; a girl who never ever thought she’d be a bookworm has now read more than a 100 books and reads every single thing within her eye-range and all because of a boy. god this world is wild.

maybe that’s the problem with being a teenage girl. every terrible thing arrives alongside something wonderful. i lost my best friend and found books. i got my heart broken by people who mattered and accidentally discovered who i was. every year seemed determined to ruin me and build me back up at the exact same time

literal personification of: when i was 13 i had my first love (book boy and books) and then he moved across the world and we havent seen each other for years though the last time i saw him, he had a very funny-looking mustache thing

nonetheless, i was extremely happy to have found my books and pages and words because being alone in class was HARD. especially when you got a 96/100 in science and told your dad but he said: “it doesnt matter all that much but what does matter is how messy your room is.”

give me a break I GOT A 96 AND STUDIED IN A BATHROOM BRO

but my parents always lacked the trait of appreciating things; for example i once told my mother:

“if only you appreciated us more, we’d like to do the stuff you force us to.”

“we never got appreciated when we young, the world does not appreciate you. what you’re doing is your responsibility, not something you’ll get an award for.”

well ok mother

…

8th grade at 13 years old: our sections changed, alice went to the same class as her friend (lucky hoe), zoe went to a separate one altogether, meanwhile me and felicia went to the same one

it all happened way too fast. felicia and i became friends, bestest of friends, from one day in 8th grade to this day as i’m writing this, a day after her 17th birthday (i missed it)

my teachers were shit though and new faces in class unnerved me but i had my friend and a newly-found confidence, thanks to the great teachers of the past year

first everything was going too good, we moved to a new house and my room had purple walls and closets—i still adore the color honestly; dyeing my hair soon. though i did bleach of few strands of my hair this year. (live laugh love hair)

we had an intercampus essay writing competition where they gave us a topic on the spot and we had to write it; we just had to research a bunch of predictable topics. the topic we got - like 6000 students across campuses - was simply “health”, nothing more and nothing less, just health

i have no recurring memory of what i wrote in those 4-5 pages because they never gave it back but i got 2nd place. for the first time in my life had i achieved something so significant and so worth telling and to this day i’m proud

basically everytime i have trouble writing i go: if 13 year old me could write that on the spot and win surely you can too so get up bitch

then life gave me lemons and i squeezed them in my eyes, then cried.

my mother got diagnosed with tuberculosis; i was heart-broken, nerve wrecked. she had to be quarantined for over 6 months and being the oldest child; i was expected to manage stuff like my mom, and i did. because my dad wasn’t home all day and for the past 11 years we had been living abroad, far away so no relative was there.

this was our routine basically: in the morning, us three sisters woke up and got ready and had buttered toasts or cereal for breakfast and went to school and until we came back - our dad stayed with mom. then he went to work, and the house was in my tiny hands, and god bro, washing dishes, cleaning the house, making lunch (i just made sandwiches and pasta or something easy), tutoring my little sisters and giving my mom her meds on time and go to physiotherapy with her.

and i was abusing my mom’s phone, my sleep schedule was absolutely doomed so in class i was sleepy with dark circles and always irritated. grades slipped, went from one of the top students to the bottom of the well and i have yet to recover from that (sob), only felicia knew what was up and everyone else just thought that the smiley face from before has now begun her emo arc. some might even argue i’m still in my emo arc

because in class, every time a teacher gave a lot of homework and the kids threw a tantrum—they basically said “you kids don’t do anything at home, your only job is to study and play.” and that pissed me off.

what do you mean i do everything from cooking to cleaning the bathrooms etc and middle aged cranky women in school were telling me i’m not? i resented all of them from the marrow of my bones and to this day, i still can’t shake it off and i believe that this is the reason i now hate housework unless i’m alone—i hate being dictated around as if i’m stupid and don’t know what to do as if i didn’t do it all before.

and felicia as always there giving me a reality check:

“stop helping others when you’re helpless yourself, help your own self first.”

…

by the end of 8th grade, my mom had gotten better, much better. we were very scared that she was gonna die, because as much as she’s hurt us sometimes with her words, she cared and she tried and she sacrificed for us. so i was at peace, except well my grades were TERRIBLE.

but hey we had a field trip by the end and i climbed a tree with my classmates and it felt liberating and fucking cool. i love climbing trees as much as i love watching barbie. society thought it was inappropriate but who cares about them lol? certainly not me

…

9th grade at 14 years old: my teachers were scary to say the least. they terrified the fuck out of me and i was still suffering from the academic downfall and all i did was prank felicia’s cousins with her on instagram, run a writer instagram secretly, read fanfics and ebooks and comics and mangas, talking and comforting people on discord.com and just being my ridiculous self and felt more like missy from young sheldon than any other person.

but the spirit of 8th grade had sunk its teeth into my flesh and sucked all the confidence dry. (I HAVE THE BEST STORY ABOUT CONFIDENCE ILL SHARE IT SOME DAY BTW) and so i was this quiet sad looking bookworm who only talked to felicia, not that i never talked to any of my other classmates—just not as much as i would’ve liked.

this was the year i promised my youngest sister—who had just turned 9 at the time that when we grown up i’m gonna host her the best birthday party with just us sisters when i get older; because our parents fought very badly on her birthday. that promise is sometimes part of the reason i step forward to do something, because it was my first meaningful promise.

my homeroom teacher had taught me before, one of my most favourite teachers ever but now she could see that and tell that “you’re not the same person i used to teach”

she even talked to my mom over the phone because of this and the conclusion they both came to was: because of my mom’s illness, i had started to shrink inward and my sister had done it oppositely (bc the teacher also taught her) and this is all psychologically significant and that we should get therapy—i did NOT get therapy though i would’ve loved too; on the sole condition that whatever leaves my mouth should not get to my parents’ ears but shit never goes as planned

another thing that happened this year was that i had almost gotten rid of my ED but in turn got diagnosed with chronic tinnitus (no break for me)

…

10th grade: we were going back. to our home county, out of the blue my parents had decided it would be the best of us (stupid i know). i was devastated, my best friend of 9 years was here, my home was here, everything i had ever known was here and we were going back. i did not talk to my parents for days, and they in turn gave me the silent treatment but how can someone expect children to let go so easily?

-

we used to go to school with our older cousin’s kids, they’re all pretty young like 6th graders and all boys; every interaction with them was basically:

“i’m planning on getting a gun prop as deco for my room.”

“guns are for boys, you should have dolls instead, what do you call them something like barnie right?”

*annoyed* “it’s called barbie and you should try watching it sometimes because it deals with a lot of complex themes and for the record guns dont have gender bias.”

or “i’m getting an electric bike.”

“bikes are for guys, girls wash the dishes and boys roam around outside.” then he makes a funny face trying to ragebait me

*then i give him a lecture about feminism, sexism and how this shit is gonna get him cancelled when he grows up*

look at me getting ragebaited (rightfully so) by an 11 year old.

culture shock is a small word for whatever was going inside my head. suddenly, my clothes were a problem, i was told to not cut my hair because short hair looks, quote unquote- boyish (i beg your pardon). me gaining weight was a problem even though i’m still categorized as skinny but they were comparing me to my previous self, what an odd thing to do truly; especially as adults. darn this might be the age i started hating on adults more than ever.

though i’ve made a mental and physical note to NOT become a hated-by-young-people adult when i get older.

both ages of 15 & 16 i have done nothing but learned, created, and consumed. my confidence is still in the trenches and i’m as antisocial as ever but at least i have the satisfaction that i’m doing my best

i try to make my days better. i collect hobbies like they’re pokemon cards. i write things. i read things. i argue with people. i dye my hair. i make promises to my sisters and keep most of them. sometimes i still get angry about things that happened years ago. sometimes i still miss people i haven’t spoken to in forever (meeting felicia after an entire year in a week !!)

and that’s my answer to the question in the title. teenage years aren’t the best years of your life. they aren’t the worst either. they’re just awfully noisy

loud with firsts. first heartbreaks, first betrayals, first victories, first responsibilities, first versions of yourself that you eventually outgrow.

when i was younger, i thought every age would arrive with some magical transformation. thirteen was freedom. fourteen was adventure. fifteen was when i’d become interesting. sixteen was when everything important would happen.

instead, thirteen arrived carrying books and grief.

fourteen arrived carrying exhaustion and responsibility.

fifteen arrived carrying culture shock.

sixteen arrived carrying questions.

none of them looked the way i imagined.

somewhere between heaven and hell is a teenage girl. she’s bleeding through her school uniform, losing friends she thought she’d keep forever, reading books that change her life, arguing with adults, climbing trees, watching barbie & surviving things she never expected to survive, and trying very hard to become someone she can live with.

and honestly? i think she’s doing alright.

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this got way too long

"tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are."

— josé ortega y gasset

i don’t trust the people who say they read for the plot. i used to say that too; guess i don’t trust my past self too

plot is what people say when they are trying to appear morally efficient about their vices. plot is the socially acceptable cover story. plot is the cardboard folder you hand to the world so it does not ask why, exactly, you spent four hours emotionally stalking a woman in a nineteenth-century novel who has been dead longer your country has been embarrassing itself (oops)

i read for the same reason people read texts they should not have opened, or replay old voice notes, or linger too long at the rim of other people’s conversations

yes that’s right karen, i am nosy just like you and the old man next door

not in a cute way tho. not in the “i simply love human nature” way. i mean nosy in the more complicated, more suspicious sense: i want to know what people were trying not to say when they said it, what they were too ashamed to confess, what they kept in the margins because the main sentence was already doing too much. i want the draft version of a person. i want the little betrayals. the private weather. the thing under the thing

which is probably why literature has always felt to me less like an exalted art form and more like a socially sanctioned act of trespassing across timelines and eras.

a novel is what happens when someone’s inner life refuses to stay indoors. a poem is a mood board for a feelings that couldn’t be explained with the everyday norm slang. and a classic, if we’re being honest (which we are), is just a dead person who has been made available to the public.

that’s the real miracle, isn’t it? that the dead cannot defend themselves

they cannot jump in and say, actually, you are misreading me. they cannot object when we psychoanalyze their marriages, their ambitions, their appetites, their loneliness, their handwriting. they cannot take offense when we decide their life was secretly about desire, or class, or shame, or the weird shape of power in a drawing room. they cannot ask to be left alone. i lowkey pity them for this part tbf

the dead are perfect literary subjects because they are no longer in a position to file a complaint. duh.

and so we do what humans have always done when given access to a sealed room: we look around too long, we touch things, we make theories, we invent motives, we develop attachments that are only half about the person and half about the fantasy of knowing them completely

this is why reading diaries feels slightly indecent. why letters feel intimate in a way a blockbuster never can. why the best biographies read like scandalous court records. why annotated editions are the literary equivalent of leaning over someone’s shoulder and saying, no, no, explain that sentence. why did you write it like that. who were you trying to impress. who hurt you. who were you secretly in love with. why are you like this

to read well is to be a little bit of a detective and a little bit of a gossip columnist and, when the prose is especially good, a little bit of a priest or a priestess

the difference is that literature lets you confess without ever having to say your own name.

which is partly why i think people underestimate how much of reading is just emotionally legal eavesdropping.

you open a book and immediately there is a room. someone is speaking. someone is lying. someone is yearning. someone has made a disastrous choice and insists, with complete confidence, that it was inevitable. and because the characters are dead, or fictional, or both, you can watch them more honestly than you can watch the living. you can admit that what pulls you in is not virtue. it is complication. it is contradiction. it is the human tendency to become infinitely more interesting the moment you are slightly ruined

this is why the most delicious literary moments are never the grand ones alone. it is not just the wedding or the death or the inheritance or the betrayal. it is the half-sentence. the glance. the paragraph that exposes a character as both ridiculous and devastatingly recognizable. it is the tiny social shame that never would have made it into the official biography. the emotional filing cabinet opened by accident

in that sense, literature is not so different from a really good movie

think of The Favourite, where everyone is essentially engaged in court gossip with better lighting and more wigs. think of Little Women, where the entire plot is really just a family archive of talent, resentment, ambition, and love being passed around like a hot object. think of The Hours, where Virginia Woolf, Clarissa Vaughan, and Laura Brown are all haunting one another across time like three versions of the same private ache. think of Dead Poets Society, where half the appeal is not the poetry itself but the dangerous, almost adolescent thrill of being given permission to care so loudly the whole world can hear you

the best stories do not merely tell you what happened. they tell you what it felt like to be the kind of person to whom it happened. that is the part i trust most. the feeling. the residue left behind in my bones and veins

the little embarrassment that clings to a sentence long after the sentence should have moved on

because literature, at its most alive, is not interested in making people neat. it is interested in preserving the mess before it gets corrected into wisdom by the coming generations

history likes to flatten people into facts. literature refuses. literature says no, she was jealous and pious and petty and tender and foolish and vain and starved for recognition and occasionally brilliant, which is to say: she was a person. literature keeps the contradiction intact. gossip does too, actually. gossip is simply literature before the archive has had a chance to sanitize the body

that is what makes the phrase gossip for dead people funny, yes, but also unexpectedly accurate, surprise surprise this girl’s not completely stupid

because gossip is rarely just cruelty. sometimes it is a form of social pattern recognition. sometimes it is how communities understand themselves. who slept with whom, who lied, who left, who returned, who was secretly miserable at the dinner table, who made their children carry the emotional weather of a whole house. gossip is not only about exposure. it is about interpretation. it is a theory of human behavior disguised as interest in somebody else’s business

literature literally does the same thing, but with nicer syntax; the only difference between the two honestly

it takes the scandalous, the intimate, the embarrassing, the thing everyone knows but no one says out loud, and gives it form. it turns a life into something examinable. it makes the unflattering parts bearable by making them readable

and maybe that is why i find reading more honest than most forms of public virtue

people love to perform depth. they like to announce that they understand suffering, that they are above shallowness, that they read the great books for enlightenment and not, god forbid, for the pleasure of seeing another person unravel at length. but the truth is more amusing and less noble. we love literature because it permits us to be shamelessly curious without being vulgar about it. it gives our appetite a library card

it lets us say things like:
i am interested in the human condition.

when what we often mean is: i would like to know what exactly she was thinking when she wrote that letter.

there is no moral shame in this. quite the opposite. this is one of the few places where curiosity is still beautiful

the dead, after all, are the ultimate slow responders. they leave behind only traces: ink, revisions, complaints, unfinished sentences, a favorite metaphor they used too often, a recurring fixation that was probably doing more psychological work than they ever admitted. we come later and piece them together like a tabloid assembled from ashes

and because the dead cannot refuse us, literature becomes the most elaborate and elegant form of consent-less interpretation we have. which sounds sinister until you realize the dead have also made use of us. they have used us for centuries as witnesses. they have asked us to finish them. they have trusted strangers with the most ridiculous, intimate versions of themselves. they have made a pact with the future and then vanished

so we read. and read. and over-read. and under-read. and project. and diagnose. and romanticize. and accuse. and keep going because somehow the book is always also a mirror, and the gossip is never just about them

it is about the kinds of people we are willing to become in private. it is about what we forgive in art that we would not forgive in life. it is about why a dead woman’s sentence can still make a living girl feel briefly less alone. it is about the disturbing fact that, across centuries, human beings remain astonishingly similar in the places they most hope to conceal. their appetites. their vanity. their loneliness. their need to be admired, understood, chosen, forgiven, remembered.

basically, their entire scandalous little interior.

which is why i do not think literature is elevated because it is timeless. i think it is elevated because it is nosy enough to survive time and its oddities

because somewhere, in a book written by someone long gone, a sentence still catches the light in a way that feels a little bit like being caught yourself. and for one second, you are not simply reading the dead

you are catching them in the act of being alive

another thought removed from my brain and placed gently into yours.

sleep well.

i won’t.

— yours truly, paracetamol

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i think that is why i became afraid of staying still. things that stayed still in this house did not survive for long.

leave a glass of water untouched and dust would gather on its surface like a funeral veil. leave flowers in a vase and they would bow their heads lower each day until they appeared to be praying for death. leave a child alone with her thoughts and she would begin inventing monsters just to explain the ones she already lived with.

mine lived (lives) in the plumbing. i’m aware that sounds ridiculous, it is ridiculous, ridiculous until it gets real, too real.

but try being eight years old and listening to the pipes scream at three in the morning.

not groan. not creak. not croak.

scream.

high-pitched and sudden and horribly alive.

the kind of noise that makes your body sit upright before your mind has caught up. i used to lie awake convinced something was trapped inside the walls. not a ghost. not a demon. something worse.

a person. a literal human.

there is something uniquely terrifying and absurd about the possibility of a person being trapped somewhere, anywhere.

ghosts cannot help it. demons enjoy it. but people suffer.

i imagined a girl folded between the beams of the house like a forgotten letter, her mouth stretched open in a permanent scream, her fingernails worn down to soft crescents from years of clawing at wood. i imagined her learning the layout of the pipes better than her own body. i imagined roots growing through her ribcage. i imagined her teeth becoming pearls from disuse.

children do not invent these things by themselves.

they simply re-organize what they already know, what they’ve been made to know.

the girl in the walls was not a girl. the girl in the walls was fear. the girl in the walls was every scream i heard through closed doors. the girl in the walls was me.

it is difficult; almost impossible to explain a childhood that looked normal from the outside. nobody believes in haunted houses anymore unless they have blood dripping from the ceilings or corpses buried beneath the floorboards or some horrifying legend of madman from 100 years ago dangling from the ceiling fan. nobody talks about the ordinary haunting, the casual horror. the kind that wear clean clothes they wash everyday and answer phone calls and go grocery shopping (we dont, we lie that we do). the type that sat at dinner tables (in the past only). the kind that make you feel guilty for being hungry. *i’m so hungry*

hunger was everywhere in our house. it was injected into the air purposely by god for some sin 8 year old me could not understand and now that i’m older, i still don’t get it. hunger but not just for food, for approval, for silence, for control, for forgiveness that always stayed behind closed doors and sobbing hearts. “we never got appreciation. why should we give it to you?” you know that trend “what an odd thing to say” that’s what i thought when my mother said those words in my ear, too loudly.

everyone was starving for something and somehow i became the communal loaf of bread. maybe because i was a naive child, i was, probably.

people tore pieces off me without me realizing what they were doing in actuality.

a little patience here. a little joy there. a little self-respect. a little anger. a little confidence.

take, take, take. and i gave, gave, gave because children who didn’t share got taken away by witches burned at the stake.

i won’t say it was dramatic, or cinematic or like it belonged in a coming of age film - because it really didn’t, at least i thought so; because it was all so so casual for my little trapped mind, soul, body and heart.

but death by a thousand paper cuts is still death, i suppose. childhood by a thousand tiny disappearances is still brimming with grievances.

you know the funny thing about children? i’m assuming you don’t so here let me help you:

they blame themselves for the weather. they think the world is happening because of them. oh sweet irony, a teeny tiny little child thinking all the wrongs in this too big, too fat, too bitchy world we call earth are because of them. oh my sweet child.

children don’t understand that neither the weather nor the world has anything to do with them, so they spend years saying sorry over and over again for the rain or/and some psychological complex or disorder (not their fault whatsoever)

…

i spent years believing i was some sort of defective fruit. rancid & rotten.

too bruised.

too soft.

too ugly.

always too fucking ugly.

like something that had gone bad before it even ripened. a miscarriage, if you’re not offended by me using this example.

i imagined a tiny quality-control worker living inside my supposedly empty skull according to the manchild i called my father. the worker had a clipboard in hand, shaking his head every time i made a mistake. like a million times a day, his head must’ve hurt from all that nodding. i wonder who hired him, and wonder i do.

he was very busy, he never slept. he was an insomniac, so was i, i still am.

he was always murmuring something. oh yes, my mistakes; i just told you that. silly me.

“ah yes another flaw, crack, mistake, disappointment, another reason youre so despicable and blah blah blah blah blah insert a 100 page thesis on what a huge emotional/psychological/physical/philosophical let down i turned out to be”

some nights, and days; mostly nights - i could practically hear him scribbling like a maniac, for some reason i imagined fyodor dostoevsky to be this insane, he probably was.

another thing i wondered (wonder) often during my wonderings: why was the worker a man?

he probably was a control freak misogynist hired by my dad, his mentor (i think; i’m not certain)

…

and meanwhile the house continued eating itself. mold spread behind picture frames like secret maps. silverfish flickered through the darkness with the frantic elegance of living punctuation marks. the ceiling stains grew larger every year, blooming overhead like diseased flowers. there was a patch of damp near the staircase that looked exactly like a screaming face if you stared at it long enough.

i stared at it often; just like i did with every other singular thing within my sight range

i listened to it often too, more than often. if something or someone is screaming, the least you can do is listen.

though sometimes i wonder if that is why i became the way i am.

always listening, and always searching faces for any signs of an earthquake. always and always waiting for the air pressure in the room to change its way. always preparing apologies like assignments before the crime was even concepted.

i’ve heard people online and off-line go on and on about how hypervigilance looks alert and active and sharp and loud. but me personally i think it looks like a rabbit trying to calculate the trajectory of every hawk in the sky all at once. it looks like checking the emotional temperature of a room more often than your own pulse. it looks like an exhausted being trying to be polite for the sake of not being seen as anything other that, “polite”.

eventually i stopped feeling like a person and started feeling like a mouth.

a mouth smiling.

a mouth apologizing.

a mouth negotiating peace treaties between disasters.

a mouth swallowing screams so often they began fossilizing inside me.

i swear i can still feel them sometimes. not in my throat. deeper. wedged somewhere behind the sternum. little preserved screams stacked neatly together like jars in a cellar. they rattle when i laugh too hard. they rattle when someone is kind to me unexpectedly. they rattle whenever a door slams. they rattle when i’m a misfit somewhat, which means they rattle all the damn time.

perhaps everyone has organs. perhaps i have an archive. perhaps that is the difference.

eaten or rotten.

the only 2 finish lines i knew (know). be consumed by the hunger around you or decay quietly enough that nobody notices you were ever alive. no “trusted adult” ever made the effort to tell me there was a 3rd option out here. they never told me survival could be ugly and unfinished and strange.

nobody told me you could crawl out of a house carrying half its ghosts in your mouth.

so i became something utterly different, not in a “i’m not like other girl’s way” i think a lot of girls are like, maybe we all are - but rather in a “what happened to me?” way.

i wasn’t eaten, nor was i rotten.

i was haunted and i was hungry.

only a child who learned that screams shouldn’t be heard so she swallowed them like watermelon seeds and the screams grew roots inside her lungs.

and now, every time i open my mouth; even i’m terrified of the noises that might crawl out. screaming: finally.

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location: interrogation room

they called me in for questioning at around 7:17 pm, i think that was generous of them though the police is never generous (i think) because they called me at a normal time as though the reason i was here has been stuck inside me like a parasite, eating every last bit of joy, all rancid and rotten.

the room was too white, too bright. it looked like one of those, what do you call them oh yes, white torture rooms, meant to drive a person insane. not that it mattered, i already was insane in every aspect possible without the courtesy of these. there was a table, two chairs, a folder with my name on it like i had done something significant enough to deserve paperwork. pfft they had mispelled my name, idiots, i tried not to roll my eyes.

the detective didn’t look up as i walked in, or was he just an officer or was he a psychiatrist?

“sit,” he said in a dull voice, as if i had a choice (look at my audacity calling other people’s voices dull when my own could pass as a corpse’s)

i sat.

he opened the file slowly, dramatically, like whatever was inside was going to explain me. as though a pile of papers could dissect a human. these people make me wanna laugh

“we’re investigating an ongoing disturbance,” he said. “reports of missing joy. specifically… joy directed at others.”

i deadpan just stared at him.

and snorted. i couldn’t help myself

i didn’t necessarily laugh because it was funny (ok maybe it was) but because some man in front of me was confirming my incompetency, it was humiliating but then why did i laugh?

he looked at me with wide eyes as though i was a three-headed dragon.

“you look like a clown with that expression by the way,” he really did.

now his expression was irritated. relatable

he slid a photograph across the table. my friend smiling. graduation. sunlight. that particular kind of happiness that looks effortless if you’re not the one holding your breath behind it.

“recognize this?” he asked.

“yes,” i said. “i said congratulations.”

he wrote something down like that was suspicious.

there were two other people in the room i hadn’t noticed at first. they always do that. one sits like they own the air. the other looks like they’re apologizing for existing in it.

envy was leaning back in the chair, arms crossed, like she was bored of the entire procedure.

guilt wouldn’t stop fidgeting.

not these two again, i rolled my eyes, thankful the doctor or whatever didn’t notice that gesture.

“she started it,” envy said immediately, before anyone asked. “i just showed her what was missing. that’s not illegal.”

“you made her compare,” the detective said.

“everyone compares,” envy shrugged. “i just do it professionally.”

guilt raised a hand slightly like a student.

“i think,” guilt said carefully, “we should consider that she is at fault for having reactions at all. if she didn’t react, none of this would be happening.”

“i’m not made of stone, i’m a fucking human for god’s sake, admit the fact that i am perfectly normal for having a normal reaction,” i said, “everyone gets a little jealous once in a while.”

the detective rubbed his temples.

he turned back to me.

“when your friend succeeded,” he said, “what did you feel.”

i opened my mouth.

closed it.

the truth feels better in your head, always, always.

“nothing bad,” i said finally.

envy laughed. not loudly. just enough to make it obvious she didn’t believe me.

guilt immediately looked like she was going to cry on my behalf.

“liar,” envy said softly.

“please don’t call her that,” guilt whispered. “she already knows.”

the detective sighed like he had heard this exact conversation in different bodies a thousand times.

“let’s try again,” he said. “when you saw it, what happened first.”

first. that was the problem.

there was always a first thing that didn’t ask permission. i thought about the split second before i became a person i didn’t want to be. the tightening in my chest. the feeling as if someone shoved a handful of stones in my throat. the quick scan of everything i didn’t have, everything i never was. the even quicker list of reasons why i deserved that absence.

then the smile i sent. perfectly timed. socially acceptable. picture perfect.

“i felt happy for her,” i said.

guilt nodded immediately. too quickly. like she was grateful for any answer that sounded morally survivable.

envy rolled her eyes. why’s she copying my signature move

“she always says that,” envy told the detective. “it’s adorable. like a reflex. like a dog sitting when you don’t even have food.”

the detective leaned forward slightly in my direction, as though he didn’t hear her.

“and after?”

that was worse. after is where everything happens that doesn’t get reported. after is where guilt builds her little apartment inside my ribs and starts redecorating. after is where envy rewinds the moment and pauses it on everything i am not.

“after,” i said slowly, “i started thinking i shouldn’t have felt anything else.”

the room went quiet in that specific way that isn’t comfortable, just judgment waiting to be written down. i could sense it so strongly, just the way i sensed and felt everything else so strong, so infuriatingly.

guilt raised both hands now.

“see,” she said quickly, “this is what i mean. she is aware. awareness is basically repentance.”

“it’s not,” envy muttered. “it’s just a show she’s putting on.”

the detective closed the file.

he looked tired now. like he had reached the part of the case where nothing gets solved, just described more accurately.

“for the record,” he said, “there is no evidence anything was stolen.” joy.

i almost asked him what it is called when you still lose it anyway, or maybe when you’re not born with it, was i born with it? or did it get lost when i was young.

instead i stayed quiet. like always.

envy stood up first.

“we’re done here?” she asked.

guilt lingered a second longer.

“do you think,” she asked me softly, “that you are a bad person.”

i fucking hated that question, so philosophical, so deep. like oh as if a person is going to outright admit they’re a horrible scumbag.

however,

i didn’t respond.

because if i said yes, guilt would stay.

and if i said no, envy would.

so i just sat there in the white room, officially unsolved, unofficially familiar with myself.

and when i left, no one said case closed.

they never do.

as i walked home, i tried to not think about it but how could i not? my entire life has just been looking at people, what they have, what they are, who they have, how they act. every good thing has a bad connotation for me and i can’t help but feel jealous even from the people who’ve been nothing but kind to me. makes me a little bit of a bitch, doesn’t it? maybe it makes me human.

…

the streetlights were too bright when i got outside.
everything looked like it was happening to someone else.

i kept walking anyway. like always.

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the morning after i killed myself. my eyes opening to a grainy sight. it was my bedroom, oh. everything seemed to be the same, the only thing different - out of place was me. me. of course. this wasn’t my body, it was my soul, suspended somewhere between heaven or hell and earth - i thought. because even in death, i liked to romanticize the fuck out of philosophical bullshit. i like to believe that souls can fly so i tried to soar from my bed, i jumped. but i guess the sin that had left me in this state here was far too atrocious for me to be able to fly. i walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror while brushing my teeth, looking at my very much same dull reflection. i smiled to myself, very rare, but why and how would and could i not? Imagine, just imagine a dead body brushing its teeth as if it could eat, or affect anyone with its bad stench, as if it would make a difference. i walked out of the bedroom.

the morning after i killed myself, my mother was still in shock, sitting on our grey L-shaped sofa. torturing herself with the thoughts of where she had gone wrong. i was not sure why i thought she was thinking about this, perhaps she was resenting her bad lazy slutty, way too skinny, ungrateful rotten bitchy whorey, scum, bore and brat of a daughter. oh how the neighbourhood must be talking about her, her and her ill parenting that led to this. just like they gossiped when her first born pile of shit committed the oh so grave sin of going at the pharmacy full of boys at 11 pm to get a painkiller. does she remember that now? how she insulted me? how she screamed in my face when all i did was get a strip of pills to make it a little better?

the morning after i killed myself, my dead pan dad was snoring sleeping, what else was i even expecting? i sighed

the morning after i killed myself, my two sisters, both of them younger. they were in the room, crying still. looking at them, i felt a variety of waves wash over me, the first one was pity. i pitied them. i pitied them for crying like this. sigh i knew i was coping. and the second of sadness proved this all too well. my dead body had tears in her eyes. i felt the pain in my no longer beating heart, so brutishly, so enormously, so fucking disgustingly. i wanted to hug them, to console them. in this house, they were the only ones who made it better. I didn’t understand why i was feeling all these emotions even when i was dead. for fuck’s sake i’m dead leave me alone. do not make me regret the decision that took years of my sanity and peace.

my version of the poem “the morning after i killed myself”

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i. the nursery

i think girlhood begins in the nursery, way long before you’re old enough to understand what is happening to you, what has happened to you. the room looks innocent enough at first. there are pastel walls and stuffed animals lined neatly on shelves and adults who smile when they look at you, but if you stay long enough you begin to notice that everyone is already writing a script for your life before youve learned how to write your own fucking name. they call you pretty and cute before they call you clever and cunning. they laugh when you act motherly and frown when you act difficult - “that’s not how girls act”. they hand you dolls and toy kitchens and stories about princesses waiting to be chosen, always waiting for their prince charming like the damsel in distress they are. and nobody ever thinks much of it because oh this is how its always been done - that’s just “the way things are”. the haunting starts without a sound. no chains rattling in the walls, no shadows lurking in corners, no monsters under your bed. just a thousand teeny tiny lessons settling into your bones before youre old enough to recognize them as lessons

when i think about girlhood, i don’t think about pink (trust me i have nothing against pink i love it). i think about inheritance. i think about how many fears are passed from mother to daughter like family heirlooms. i think about all the things women learn to carry because the women before them carried them too. the vigilance. the guilt. the instinct to shrink yourself when a room becomes hostile. the habit of apologizing before you’ve even spoken. sometimes i wonder how much of being a girl is actually discovering yourself and how much of it is excavating the ruins of everyone who came before you

the nursery is the first room in the dollhouse, but it is already crowded with ghosts

ii. the bedroom

the bedroom is where the mirror lives, and i genuinely believe the mirror is one of the most violent inventions ever inflicted upon women

not because glass is cruel, but because the world taught us how to look through it

there is something profoundly disturbing about the fact that so many girls learn to monitor themselves before they learn to understand themselves. i remember being young and suddenly becoming aware of my body as if it had transformed overnight from a home into a performance. one day i was existing and the next i was observing myself exist. i was watching the way i sat, the way i laughed, the way my clothes hung on my frame, the way my face looked from different angles. i was 11 when i had my period and everything changed. i became both prisoner and guard. both audience and performer.

that is the thing nobody tells you about misogyny. people talk about it as though it only exists in laws or institutions or headlines, but some of its deepest roots grow inside your own head. eventually nobody needs to stand over your shoulder anymore because you’ve learned how to police yourself. you become your own surveillance camera. you know exactly which parts of yourself are acceptable and which parts require editing

the bedroom is full of ghosts too. not dead girls, but unreal ones. the girl you would’ve been if your skin looked different. the girl you would’ve been if you were thinner. prettier. quieter. easier to love. there are millions of girls standing in front of mirrors trying to mourn versions of themselves that never existed

sometimes i think entire industries are built on convincing women to grieve imaginary people like why are we all collectively crying over the shape of our flesh

iii. the bathroom

every haunted house has a room where the crying happens.

for girls, it is usually the bathroom.

there is something almost ritualistic about sitting on cold bathroom tiles after the world has clawed too much from you. maybe it is because bathrooms are the only places with locks. maybe it is because they are small enough to feel safe. whatever the reason, generations of women have hidden themselves in bathrooms while trying to survive things nobody else could see. though if you spend too long in there, someone’s bound to come knocking - “what are you doing in there?”

panic attacks happen in bathrooms.

eating disorders happen in bathrooms.

the first shock of blood often happens in bathrooms.

the realization that your body has become political happens in bathrooms.

i think about how strange it is to grow up female and realize that your body is public property in a way nobody prepared you for. complete strangers debate it. governments legislate it. religions build doctrines around it. cultures construct entire systems dedicated to controlling it. everyone seems to have an opinion about what women should do with bodies they themselves will never inhabit.

and through all of this, girls are somehow expected to remain graceful.

expected to smile.

expected to forgive.

expected to absorb every cruelty and emerge from it beautiful.

sometimes i look at the history of womanhood and think, what a ridiculous demand.

what an impossible thing to ask of anybody.

iv. the attic

the attic is where the house keeps its secrets.

every dollhouse has one.

every society has one too.

this is where they store all the stories people would rather forget. the women who were called hysterical for being angry. the girls who were not believed. the victims transformed into cautionary tales. the brilliant women erased from textbooks. the daughters taught to fear themselves. the mothers who spent entire lifetimes swallowing their own unhappiness because they genuinely believed that was what love required

sometimes i think the attic is so full because history has always had a habit of treating women’s suffering like some background noise in a lousy advertisement

the thing that haunts me most isn’t that misogyny exists. it is how casual it feels. its how casually it blends into daily life. the fact that girls learn to no go out past dark before they learn to fend for themselves. the fact that so many women carry their keys between their fingers at night without even questioning why, the way the have one air pod plugged in when they’re at the gym. the fact that entire generations have adapted themselves around dangers they never created

there are ghosts in the attic, yes, but they aren’t screaming.

they are fricking exhausted.

they have been trying to tell the same story for centuries.

v. the window

the strange thing about haunted houses is that people always focus on the ghosts and never the windows.

there is a window in every room of this dollhouse.

that is where girlhood keeps its miracles.

because despite everything, despite the violence and shame and impossible expectations, girls continue finding each other.

they find each other in classrooms and libraries and group chats and late-night phone calls. they pass survival manuals back and forth disguised as conversations. they teach each other how to leave bad relationships. how to report harassment. how to stop apologizing. how to take up space. how to survive.

i think one of the most beautiful things in the world is a girl realizing she is not alone.

realizing the haunting was never personal.

realizing the problem was never that she was too much or too loud or too angry or too emotional.

realizing that the house was built this way long before she arrived.

and realizing she does not have to preserve it.

she can break windows.

she can tear down walls.

she can leave.

vi. the dollhouse

girlhood is a haunted dollhouse because every room contains evidence of something trying to make you smaller.

and yet every room also contains evidence that girls survived anyway.

that is the contradiction i keep returning to.

the house is horrifying.

the house is beautiful.

the house is full of grief.

the house is full of laughter.

it contains every version of myself i have ever been and every version i had to kill in order to become who i am now.

sometimes i think adulthood is simply learning to walk through the rooms without letting the ghosts convince you they own the place.

because they don’t.

they never did.

the house may be haunted, but it was built from our lives, our stories, our bodies, our memories, our souls. every generation of women left fingerprints on the walls. every generation added another crack to the foundation. every generation widened a window, kicked open a door, loosened another nail

and maybe that is why the house groans so loudly now.

it isn’t haunted.

it’s trying to collapse.

and somewhere beneath all that wreckage, girls are trying to create something new, for themselves and well-deserved peace

i keep seeing the same sentence recycled every time blue eye samurai comes up in feminist discussions: that mizu is a “monstrous woman,” that akemi represents female agency, that the show critiques patriarchy by showing how cruel men are to women. and yes, all of that is technically in the text. but it also feels like the easiest possible reading, the one that lets us feel like we’ve understood something without actually touching the more uncomfortable part

because what the show actually made me think about isn’t male violence. we already know that. it’s not even female rage. we romanticise that now. it’s something quieter and more embarrassing than that: how quickly women learn to become the police of other women, how early the system gets outsourced

you can see it in every generation if you look closely enough. my grandmother’s generation didn’t call it misogyny. they called it “respectability.” don’t speak too loudly, don’t laugh too hard, don’t sit like that, don’t go out alone, don’t make yourself visible in the wrong way. and those rules didn’t come from men alone. they came from mothers, aunts, older sisters, neighbours, women who had already paid the price for breaking them and decided the safest thing they could do was make sure no one else tried

by the time you reach my generation, the language has changed but the structure hasn’t. now it’s “self-respect,” “soft girl energy,” “standards,” “healing,” “be feminine but not too much,” “be independent but still desirable,” “be confident but not intimidating.” it’s the same cage, just upholstered differently for social media. and the strangest part is how often it’s enforced by other girls who genuinely believe they are offering advice rather than repeating conditioning

this is where internalised misogyny actually lives, not in some dramatic hatred of women but in the quieter instinct to manage what women are allowed to be. it’s a survival strategy that never got retired. if you grow up watching women get punished for being loud, or sexual, or ambitious, or emotionally inconvenient, you don’t need anyone to explicitly tell you the rules. you absorb them. and then, later, you repeat them and call it wisdom

you can see it very clearly in how girls are treated online. a teenage girl likes something intense and she becomes “cringe.” a woman in her twenties likes something openly and she becomes “immature.” a woman in her thirties likes something publicly and she becomes “embarrassing.” the object doesn’t matter. it could be music, books, makeup, romance, ambition, fitness, anything. what matters is that she is visible while wanting something. male desire is treated as neutral or expected; female desire is treated as excessive, almost suspicious

and that’s where blue eye samurai accidentally hits something real, even if it doesn’t always frame it explicitly. mizu isn’t just a “strong female character.” she is someone who has been repeatedly told, in different forms, that she is not allowed to exist in a readable category. she is too much of one thing and not enough of another depending on who is looking at her. and the world’s response to that is not confusion, it is correction. everyone tries to flatten her into something understandable: man, monster, victim, revenge machine, symbol

but what’s more interesting is how often women inside that world also participate in that flattening. akemi is constantly being taught how to be a “correct” kind of woman, not just by men who want to control her, but by women who have already accepted the system as reality. that’s the part most media analysis skips over because it’s uncomfortable. it’s easier to talk about patriarchy as something external than to admit it reproduces itself through people who are also harmed by it

and this isn’t just fiction. it shows up everywhere in real life. think about how older generations talk about younger women “not respecting themselves enough,” when what they often mean is “not performing femininity the way i was forced to.” think about how women in workplaces sometimes distance themselves from other women who are too outspoken, because association feels risky. think about how celebrity culture works: women are either “likeable” or “problematic,” and the rules for those labels shift constantly, so nobody can actually win, only comply temporarily

even feminism online sometimes gets trapped in this. there’s a version of empowerment that still depends on judgment: the “correct” kind of woman is confident but not arrogant, sexual but not provocative, independent but still emotionally available, ambitious but not selfish. it’s feminism that still quietly believes women need to be managed so they remain acceptable to everyone else

what blue eye samurai unintentionally reflects, then, is not just that women are harmed by systems of power, but that women are also taught to become maintenance workers of those systems. the violence is not only top-down. it is circular. it survives because it gets internalised and redistributed

and that’s where the idea of the “monstrous woman” becomes less useful. because it suggests deviation. like there is a normal woman and then there is the exception who becomes monstrous. but what if there is no stable normal at all, only shifting expectations that are enforced collectively, often without anyone consciously deciding to enforce them?

mizu looks monstrous because she refuses categorisation. akemi looks dangerous because she refuses passivity. but the deeper discomfort isn’t their behaviour, it’s that neither of them stays still long enough to be managed. and that is what systems like this actually cannot tolerate: unpredictability in women, not power

and maybe that’s the real generational pattern. every generation thinks it has loosened the rules, but mostly it just changes where the pressure is applied. my grandmother’s generation was told to be obedient. my mother’s generation was told to be exceptional. mine is told to be self-aware. different instructions, same surveillance

so when people write about blue eye samurai as a story about a monstrous woman, it feels like they are still using the same language the world has always used to make women legible: hero, victim, danger, inspiration. but the show itself is more interesting when you notice how often it resists letting anyone stay inside those categories for too long

because maybe the real point isn’t that women become monsters when they step outside the lines because maybe it’s that the lines were never drawn for women to be human in the first place

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i think one of the dumbest lies modern life tells us is that personality is something you buy, as if the self were a flat-pack dresser from ikea and all you needed was the right screwdriver, a tasteful lamp, and one morally ambiguous little tote bag to finally become a person. i am not above this scam, by the way. i have absolutely stood in a store or scrolled through a product page and thought less about whether i needed the thing and more about what the thing might imply about me. that is embarrassing, but it is also the entire point. consumer culture does not just sell us objects anymore. it sells us the fantasy of becoming legible, desirable, and slightly superior through the objects we choose. russell belk called possessions an “extended self,” which is a very polite academic way of saying that our stuff does not just sit around in our lives, it gets woven into who we think we are

and honestly, that idea should make everyone a little sick. not because owning things is evil, unless you are one of those people who wants to make every ordinary human behavior sound like a moral collapse, but because the extended self has quietly turned into the curated self, and the curated self never seems finished. the notebook is not a notebook, it is evidence that i am a writer. the film camera is not a camera, it is proof that i have taste. the record player is not a record player, it is a personality substitute. the jacket, the mug, the bookshelf, the skincare shelf, the dining table, the perfume, the phone case, the water bottle, the specific little chair nobody can afford, all of it becomes a signal. if you think this is exaggerated, congratulations, you have not been paying attention to how aggressively people now narrate themselves through products

the marketer jennifer aaker’s work on brand personality is useful here because it makes the scam harder to pretend is accidental. brands are deliberately given human traits. they are made to feel sincere, sophisticated, exciting, rugged, or whatever other personality trait makes you feel like buying deodorant is an act of self-definition. and once companies figured out that people do not merely buy things for function but for meaning, the whole thing got much more annoying. nobody wants to say, “i bought this because i was manipulated by a very competent advertising machine.” that would be too honest. it is much easier to say, “it fits my aesthetic,” which is just consumerism with blush on

the humiliating part is that we are not passive victims of this. we collaborate. i collaborate. you collaborate. everyone i know collaborates. we all spend too much time trying to look like our taste means something profound, when half the time it just means we spent too long online and now know how to package ourselves for public consumption. pierre bourdieu understood this better than most of the people currently posting self-important opinions from their curated living rooms. in distinction, he argued that taste is not just personal preference. it is social sorting. it is class distinction wearing perfume. what we like, how we dress, what we read, and what we think is “good” is often a way of showing which social world we belong to or want to belong to

which is why so much modern personality feels fake in a very specific way. not fake as in unreal, but fake as in strategic. people do not only ask what you enjoy. they ask what that enjoyment says about you. you do not just read books anymore, you perform being a reader. you do not just listen to music, you build a little identity shrine around your spotify wrapped. you do not just care about fashion, you become a walking spreadsheet of references. and i am saying this as someone who absolutely understands the temptation. because of course it feels good when your taste seems to make you more interesting. of course it feels nice when an object says back to you, “yes, you are the kind of person who would own this.” that is the seduction. that is the hook. that is why this works on almost everyone with a pulse and an internet connection

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erich fromm would probably find this whole arrangement depressing in a deeply paternal, lefty-philosopher way, which is fair. in to have or to be? he draws a line between the mode of having and the mode of being, between treating life as a collection of possessions and treating life as an experience of existence. the problem is that our culture has become extremely committed to having. not just owning objects, but owning identities, owning narratives, owning a vibe, owning a personality that can be displayed like a purchase receipt. and the more we lean into that mode, the more hollow it gets. because having is measurable. being is not. having can be posted. being just has to be lived, which is much less flattering and therefore much less marketable

and then there is the digital layer, which makes everything even more exhausting because now the machine is not just selling us identities, it is learning from the identities we perform. work on surveillance capitalism explains how digital systems turn human experience into data, then data into prediction, then prediction into profit. the user is not only a customer anymore. the user is raw material. so we are not just curating ourselves for other people. we are curating ourselves for platforms that are actively reading us, categorizing us, and feeding us more of whatever keeps us clickable, buyable, and emotionally manageable. it is a gorgeous little nightmare. the algorithm hands you a label, the market hands you a product, and you hand yourself over because at least being sorted feels like being seen

that is the part i find hardest to laugh off. not because consumerism is new, but because it has become so intimate that we mistake it for identity. our tastes are no longer just tastes. they are passports. our purchases are no longer just purchases. they are declarations. our preferences are no longer just preferences. they are miniature brands with mood boards. and the really brutal thing is that a lot of people seem terrified of being ordinary, so they keep dressing up their personality in consumer language to avoid confronting the possibility that a self cannot be bought, only built, slowly, awkwardly, and without a receipt. i include myself in that indictment because i have absolutely tried to shop my way into a more interesting life. i have tried to make taste do the emotional labor that character actually has to do. i have tried to let objects stand in for discipline, depth, creativity, and coherence. it does not work, obviously, which is rude, because it would have been so convenient if a pretty looking aesthetic sketchbook could have fixed my entire psyche

so yes, the personality industrial complex is real, and it is not just about brands being clever. it is about all of us being vulnerable to the fantasy that if we can assemble the right surface, we can avoid the mess of becoming a person. but the market does not actually want you to become anyone. it wants you to keep shopping for the version of yourself it has already packaged, priced, and photographed in flattering lighting. if that sounds harsh, good. it should. because the most brutal part of this whole thing is not that we are being manipulated. it is that we keep helping because it is easier to buy an identity than to build one, and much easier to perform a self than to risk discovering there is no aesthetic that can save you from the work of being real

Last night I built a thousand paper cranes from scripture, folding verses along the creases of my trembling hands. I set them free into the cathedral air, watched them rise like ash in a burning chapel, their thin wings cutting through the incense haze. But before they could reach the rafters, the cranes began to rot mid-air; paper melting into pulp, ink bleeding like opened veins. They fell at my feet in a heap of soft decay, the prayers inside them curdling into something sour.

The confessional feels smaller now, like the wood is bending inward. I hear the woodworm gnawing at the frame, their hunger slow and patient. My own breath feels borrowed, heavy in my chest. The darkness on the other side of the grille moves - almost imperceptibly... as if the shadows themselves are shifting to listen.

I have seen the Virgin weep in the stained glass. Her tears are not water but small black feathers, sticking to the inside of the glass until the wind carries them away. Once, I dreamed she stepped down barefoot onto the marble, her robe dragging like a wedding train, and she whispered that the Kingdom of Heaven smells like iron and rain-soaked earth. I awoke with my hands stained red and the sheets tangled around my legs like vines.

They say dreams are harmless, but mine keep leaving fingerprints. In one, I am standing ankle-deep in a still pond, the surface so clear I can see the moon’s reflection perfectly until it blinks at me. In another, I walk the nave alone at night, and the pews breathe, expanding and contracting in a slow rhythm, as though the church itself has lungs.

I keep finding folded cranes under my pillow now. Some are damp as though fished from a river, others dry but brittle, their folded wings split down the middle. One had a small bone inside it, thin and birdlike. I didn’t open the others. I’m not sure I want to.

Forgive me, Father, for I have dreamt, and my dreams have begun to follow me into the daylight. The bells ring without touching, and I have learned the sound of footsteps that are not my own. I know the feeling of my own shadow lagging behind, as though something else is holding it.

I am afraid that one day soon, I will not wake up- that the cranes will lift me mid-breath, and I too will rot in the air, my prayers dripping into the soil. And when they find me, they will say I died quietly, without a fight. But you will know better, Father. You will know I was taken.

end.

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naturally, while thinking about it; i started to explicate (googled synonym of “interpret”) it because gosh do i like to pretend i have a unique perspective out of 8.3 BILLION people

so i thought

and i thought

(unedited excerpt from my physical journal: march):

“and one day, i am gonna grow wings”

usually there are two roads either you free yourself from your cage and fly and soar and live your dreams without being shackled by anyone or anything. the other path is dying, becoming a corpse, forgotten in a week after your funeral because everyone has a life. but how am i supposed to free myself and fly away, do i run away? or do i bid my time and see what happens and even if i “grow my wings” and free myself from the chains and become a fairy in the night sky, what’s to confirm my newly grown wings won’t be chopped off as soon as i take flight? this is a very very scary world, you never know what or who might harm you, the unknown is always hanging above your head. what’s to confirm they won’t lock me in a cage again?

and then there’s the other road of death and it confuses the fuck out of me because is death freedom or just another cage. we all know we’re gonna have a funeral and then we’ll be buried, in dirt, people will walk on top of us like we’re some inferior beings and the thought of my corpse in there is just so irritating like i know that it’s just my corpse and not me but it is my body and my body is resting with bugs, i don’t even know if resting is the correct word but anyways i do not like the idea of my dead body being eaten by larvae and beetles. it is so stupid that i think like this but nonetheless i do. and we don’t really know what happens after death and that is so scary why aren’t people scared about this? am i the crazy one? and then what if some small sin of mine that wasn’t small at all and was also something i had forgotten appears and boom i go into hell, what kind of freedom does fire give? i know the death interpretation of the lyrics is like; “you won’t have to deal with the crap of this materialistic world” etc you get the idea. but i’d rather not burn alongside donald trump (lol).

my point with this is that everyone talks about freedom this and freedom that, “speak up!!” girl what if i die? like if i scream for my freedom and some idiot just shoots me and I JUST DIE, and then what? and that leads me to another thought that the people who are getting abused are silent because speaking is gonna get them killed but is death worse or is the worldly cage worse why can’t we just live in a dreamland why the hell does every single thing have to lead to some obscure outcome when i have no proof of what happens next. let’s suppose i do achieve my goals and aspirations and grow wings in that sense and then i just die in my sleep, what is it all gonna be for? nobody can promise me that becoming who i want to be won’t destroy me. i’m not even sure we can remember our memories after death this is so stupid lol like everyone loves the metaphor of wings but nobody talks about the predators.

and also if every outcome ends in death, why am I so afraid of choosing wrong? why do i care about anything at all? hell why am i writing this? to die?? and its not even the fact that i would love to have immortality that’s even worse and so boring whats the point of living thousands of years watching everything be born and then die but if i think like this then why am i so confused? irritated? exasperated? etc when it comes to death? i sometimes wish scientists could invent a machine that could analyze our brains and explain why we think about things the way we think about things because i swear to god i am so utterly confused in the face of my spiraling thoughts because right now it’s freaking 4:39 am and i have a math exam later today and a rock band from the 1990s has convinced me to question death and freedom and wings and immortality. if there is a lesson here, i have not found it (yet)

you know what screw that im just gonna complain that existence has poor user documentation #genius

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I make (create) things. Sometimes those things are neat and clean and all aesthetic and sometimes they are so enticingly flawed and sticky with attempts and contempts. Lately my notebook looks like a conspiracy board for five different lives and none of them have agreed on a meeting time. I want to do everything, which is beautiful and exhausting at the same time. Wanting is not a crime, but apparently it is an all-you-can-carry buffet for my anxiety.

I have two notebooks and three backups and a folder called “my brain is brilliantly nonsensical in a cool way”. I write because sentences are tiny miracles and because I want to bury a feeling in a paragraph and watch it bloom into something other people can hold, like hyacinths: my favourite flower. Lately it feels like every sentence I try to write has to pass through airport security, fingerprinted and styled before it is allowed to leave. I want to do everything, which, surprise, is a kind of creative ADHD. I am in love with projects the way some people collect stamps. I am also exhausted. Very exhausted with a runny nose these days.

When everything looks important, nothing is. That is not a failure, it is a corroded signal. The trick is not to find the single True Project as if it is a holy relic. The trick is to be fragile enough to try things and kind enough (to yourself) to let them fail. I have a habit of starting a novel like I am planting an oak tree overnight. It never works. Trees take years. The oak I want will not be less valuable if I begin with a sapling.

There was a time I thought productivity was a virtue and obsession was currency. Then I read bad endings until I felt like I had bargaining power with the plot. Now I do something smaller. I give myself permission to write a sentence that will never be quoted. I write a paragraph I will probably delete. There is a sort of delicate lace-y power in the unapologetic throwaway. Those throwaways are not wasted crumpled paper. They are rehearsals for clarity, practice for the muscle that knows how to start.

I remember being twelve and making tiny epics on a laptop that cost the electricity of a small moon. I did not know about craft or voice or whether anyone else would approve. I only knew the urgency of “making”. That childish urgency is not childish. It is a compass you can consult when the modern voice of “brand” starts to suffocate you. Invite that small, loud child back once in a while, even if they bring glitter that will live in your socks forever.

There is a kind of perishable patience required for writing that has nothing to do with ethos or willpower. Patience is not a badge. Patience is showing up and moving your hands and being okay with teeny tiny outcomes. Think of your practice as a language you are learning without expecting to be fluent overnight. You will stammer, you will produce embarrassing syntax, you will accidentally write something you love in the margins. The point is to keep talking to the page.

Failure is education disguised in bad coffee. When I finish something that reads like a homework assignment from an alternate universe, I try to treat it like a map of what not to do next time. The piece tells me where my attention is leaking. If I let shame live in that space, I will stop coming back. If I let curiosity sit there instead, I will return with a better tool.

A habit that helps me, and it is humble enough to feel almost rude to call a habit, is to carry a pocket notebook and commit to one sentence a day that is not for anyone. It need not be pretty or instagram ready. It can be a line of overheard dialogue, a clumsy simile, the start of an argument between two strangers in a bus shelter or perhaps some family drama *wink*. One sentence is ridiculous and generous because it does not demand a performance. It asks only for presence.

I also collect bad drafts. They are like bottles on a shelf containing drafts of me. Sometimes I open a bottle and find a salvageable phrase. Other times the bottle is mostly sand. Both outcomes are useful. The bottles remind me that motion matters more than triumph. Motion keeps the story alive.

If you are a writer who wants everything and then freezes, do not treat your scatter as criminal evidence. It is curiosity. Redirect it gently. Choose a small experiment and follow it until you are bored, then leave it and do another. Finish something small enough to finish. Finishing is an act that gives your brain evidence that projects can have ends, not just forever drafts. The first thing I finished this year was barely longer than a grocery list my mom asked me to jot down.

There will be days you feel like an impostor and nights when a paragraph arrives and your heart puts on a paper crown. Both are true. Both are part of the same river. The important thing is to keep returning to the water, even if you only dip a toe.

Rome will still accept you regardless of route. The city is indifferent and merciful in that exact way. So pick a road today because picking hurts less than standing in the middle of the crossroads. Walk and be weird and leave crumbs of drafts behind you. They will become the map you needed all along.