I am having one of those days

I am having one of those days where this feeling is so impenetrable that I can’t believe I am able to sit upright. It feels like the force of my traumatic past is colliding with a bleak future that promises nothing but the same amount of pain.

Yet, here I am, sitting at my laptop, writing. How is this possible? The truth is that I don’t know how it’s possible for me to be coping with this as well as I am. Over time, however, I’ve learnt that my brain tires itself out by trying to reason it’s way through this feeling and my thoughts quieten. I am thoroughly numb from it.

Perhaps, it is this numbness that lets us survive these feelings, or rather, the fluctuation between feeling overwhelmed and feeling nothing. Our brains constantly tries to make sense of what they don’t understand and this feeling is so complex that we may never fully understand it.

So here I am, stumbling through the path, the pages, the words, the cages. Crushed under ticking clocks, desperately walking, kicking rocks. Somewhere on that road, I found a word so the only thing left to do is to discover some more, so for now, I’ll just stay at home and die some more - a new normal.

Origami Folds

Origami Folds is an ongoing series that aim at exploring the curves and folds of the human body (self and others) and use it as a medium and metaphor for hopeless frailty and hardened impenetrability, from which emerges the themes of identity, dysphoria, the commodification of the body, and denial and loss of autonomy as conditions of globalized society and cultures. Within this stifling framework, the skin has separated from the body, both physically in the act of medical dissection and alterations in an effort to meet popular standards of beauty, and metaphorically in the separation between skin and psyche. The skin here also represents time and wraps us up like cellophane wraps hard candy. ​ Excerpts from the series have been published in Skin, a zine by Forbidden Verses and Brown Bodies, a zine by The Rights Collective in 2021.

Preview.

Moving past old hauntings

How can one embrace the future if one is still yearning for the past?

Alone, I walk past my old haunts, the bittersweet entangles. I can no longer recognize them with my sore and weary eyes. Still, I behold the visage of those I’ve chosen to abandon as I moan and ache in silence. They try to reach but I recede. My hands ascend over my head searching for something larger to keep me; the mundane, the mould away. My search persists. The haunts, all vacant; old reveries of memories held dearly no more; they persist, and like nails, they pierce through the skull like hellfire to the soul.

I behold it now, with no control and no vision, just subtle haunting sensation and scourge after scourge, I endure. More and more unsure of whether I’ve reached ashore, or still treading as before.

Nails are sinking in my head.

[From my series, Whispers To My Shadows]