august
monthly update #2
excerpt from the journal: saturday, august 30th, 3:12 am
it has been raining without pause for four days and four nights, and i know this because i have been awake through all of them. the rain has attached itself to me like a stubborn thread, tugging whenever i grow heavy inside, it carries both grief and comfort, an endless leaking, a rhythm that insists on being listened to. the page in front of me waits, one word sits under my finger like a stone i cannot turn over, i press it harder as if weight could coax it open. my breath clouds the window at my side, the glass already slick with condensation. through the blur i watch the balcony, nineteen plants lined in quiet procession, tilting their faces toward the sky. each leaf is glazed, trembling, bending under borrowed weight, rain moves down them in quicksilver lines, gathering at their tips before falling again to the drowned tiles. the window sweats with its own weather, my hand leaves faint streaks whenever i rest it there, a failed attempt at reaching through. even the page feels damp though it isn’t, its edges softened from being held too long. my body is folded forward, knees drawn up, as though i’m bracing against something more than air. in my throat a ghost of coffee rises, two months without it, but tonight the craving is sharper than hunger, the smell imagined so vividly i can almost feel the bitter heat cut through the fog, a knife in the lungs. i picture myself outside, seated among dripping leaves, the cup warming my palms while the steam tangles with rain, yet i stay. the chair creaks, the storm writes its own story on the balcony while i hesitate over a single unfinished word. part of me suspects i’m already out there anyway, watching from beneath the leaves, waiting for the body inside to find the courage to move.
i keep circling back to this question, would i still create if no one were there to see it. if there was no reader at the end of the sentence, no stranger nodding in recognition, no witness at all. if the words i write were to live and die in the same breath, sealed inside the four walls of this room. i imagine them sitting in piles on the desk, heavy with their own uselessness, curling at the edges, dust gathering on the pages like a slow erasure. sometimes i think about what it would mean to write for nothing, for no one. the thought drags me under. language without a listener feels like screaming into a pit, the echo swallowed whole, or like setting a fire in a forest only to watch it extinguish itself in smoke before the first tree catches. i fear that i do not exist without someone else’s eyes confirming me. i fear that the only reason i gather words at all is because i hope someone will carry them, carry me, even if only for a moment.
what is my life for, what am i meant to do with it. i do not know. i repeat the words until they scrape against each other, i do not know, i do not know, and still nothing comes. the uncertainty presses down like a stone on the chest, like an anchor tied too tightly to the ribs. i stare at my hands and cannot decide what they were built for. they lift cups, they fold clothes, they turn the page of a book i may never finish. they trace circles on the desk. they write sentences that may never mean anything to anyone, not even to me. and yet the hands keep moving, restless, as though they are trying to remind me that this is living, this is enough, even as my mind argues back.
i am afraid. i am afraid of the smallness of it all, the terrible tininess of my life when set against the vast, indifferent sprawl of days. i am afraid of the hours, how they keep folding into each other without edges, without shape, like fabric carelessly piled until it collapses under its own weight. i wake, i move, i lie down again, and in between there is nothing that feels sharp enough to leave a mark. i am afraid that nothing i touch will ever matter, that the objects i arrange, the conversations i hold, the things i write, will all dissolve into air without ever pressing their weight onto the world. i am afraid of vanishing, not with a scream but with a sigh, slipping through the seams while the world continues its grinding machinery, unbothered, unnoticing, untouched. and when i try to soothe myself, to tell myself this fear is only melodrama, that everyone feels it and survives, the reassurance curdles. because at night, when the quiet grows thick around me, the fear does not shrink but swells until it is uncontainable, pacing the room as if it owns it. i walk in circles and it walks with me. i imagine the future not as an opening but as a long corridor stretched endlessly forward, its walls bare, its air stale, no doors, no windows, no escape, only the echo of my own footsteps for company. and i think: what am i walking toward. what am i walking for. the questions fall out of my mouth like coins into a well, and still no sound comes back. i cannot answer.
writing has always felt like the one rope dangling in this dark, a single frayed line i could hold onto when everything else dissolved. the act itself has been a way of proving i was here, as if pressing words onto paper stamped my existence into the world, even if faintly. the letters stacking into sentences, the sentences collapsing into paragraphs, each one whispering: you were alive, you passed through, you left something behind. but when i hold that thought too long, it unravels. if no one ever reads it, if the pages remain closed, gathering dust in the corners of drawers, then is it really a trace at all. or is it simply a secret i bury alive, the words gasping for air until they choke in the silence of their unreadness. i do not know if the act alone is enough, if creation without recognition can keep me alive in the same way. some days i convince myself it is, that i would still write even if every page were to stay locked in notebooks, never opened, never carried by another’s eyes. because writing has never been about choice; it is breathing, it is blood, and to stop would be to drown in my own silence, suffocated by all the words unsaid. but then the other days arrive, darker, heavier, and on those days i see only futility in every stroke of the pen. i see the words as dust before they are even dry, i see the sentences collapsing into meaninglessness, and i feel the futility stretch its hands over me, swallowing me whole, convincing me that nothing i build will ever survive.
i circle back, again, again, again, pacing the loop like a caged animal. the question scratches at me until my skin feels raw: why write, why create, if there is no one to see. i come to the page as if it might offer relief, but the page resists me, its blankness more brutal than silence. the words will not stay where i put them. they scatter like frightened insects when light touches them, darting into corners where i cannot reach. i try to gather them but they slip through my hands, leaving behind only the ache, only the pulse of the question. i ask myself until my throat burns: would i still create if no one were there to see it. if not, then what am i, what is this life for, what am i meant to do with it, what happens if i never find out. the words circle but do not land, the questions multiply like shadows, and i am left sitting in their weight, heavier with each attempt to escape.
somewhere in the midst of all this, i found myself crying to movies and books and for someone who is dearly close to me again, and this time i did not fight it. i did not hold the tears in my throat until they burned, i did not swallow them back with an embarrassed laugh, i did not try to invent reasons that would make the crying easier to justify. i simply let it happen. the tears came in quiet streams at first, sliding down my face almost cautiously, as though testing whether they were allowed, and then, when i did not resist, they grew freer, unashamed, almost eager to leave me. maybe that is the real highlight of august.
one afternoon, when the air outside was swollen with late monsoon dampness, i sat by the window with the new books i had bought, as though their weight alone could steady me. the curtains hung limp, half drawn, stirred only by the ceiling fan, letting in strips of a grey, exhausted sky. it was the kind of weather that presses against the skin, that slows the blood, that makes you aware of every small discomfort—the way sweat pools at the back of the neck, the way each breath feels thick, reluctant, as though the air itself resents being taken in. i pulled my chair closer to the window, not for light, but for that slight, intermittent draft, a mercy that slipped through the fabric when it wished.
i placed the thickest of the books in my lap, eight hundred pages, dense and patient, its weight enough to bruise my thighs if i stayed still long enough. my parents had laughed earlier, gently, almost indulgently—how will you manage to sit through this much yapping? i smiled, told them dostoevsky had broken me in, trained me to endure the endless spirals of restless minds, the circling, circling until the circle collapsed into either madness or revelation, just like my life. what was eight hundred pages to someone already initiated? but i didn’t tell them the other truth, the truer one, the one that made my hands tremble when i first pulled it from its paper bag.
someone i love lives with this book. they carry it as though it were an organ outside their body, dog-earing it, underlining it, feeding themselves from its sentences. i thought if i could live inside it too, then maybe i could live closer to them, understand something unspoken, touch the same phrases that had once touched them. i imagined their eyes slowing over a line, their hand pausing at the margin, the way breath might have caught in their chest before they moved on. i thought if i leaned far enough into these pages, elbows pressed into the wood, forehead nearly grazing the type, i might cross into that moment where they had once stood still. my chest ached at the thought, but it was not quite sadness, not quite longing, more a peculiar closeness, a sense that absence could still be held, if only i pressed hard enough.
once, my parents found me there—hunched, fingers pressed to the margins as if steadying something invisible. i laughed it off, told them i wanted to know this person better, that to do so i could not skim, i had to listen, word by word, as they once did. they smiled then, that parental smile that is more shelter than comprehension, and left me there with the fan humming and the sky bleeding its grey indifference into the room. and now, after two weeks of carrying the book’s shadow with me, i think it was strange, yes, but also inevitable, how a book could become an act of love, how paper and ink could let me graze the edges of another’s life. to hold their book was to hold their absence in a gentler form, to turn grief into an object that did not crush but companioned. maybe this is what love means, i thought—reading not for myself, but as though each word were a way of brushing against someone else’s pulse.
mid august, everything tilted in a direction i couldn’t name, as though the earth had turned one degree off its axis and left me leaning, stumbling inside myself, unable to find a steady center. the air was swollen, damp with monsoon weight, and each hour dragged its body across the day like something sick, unable to move quickly, unable to end. time stretched like rubber pulled beyond its limit, thin and trembling, on the verge of snapping. i lay in bed at night, my phone glowing faintly against the sheets, be my mistake by the 1975 drifting in low circles around me, the ceiling fan above whirring without conviction, its blades dragging the dark into slices too small to matter. i thought the sound might quiet me, soothe me, but my head spun anyway, restless spirals coiling tighter with each hour i refused to sleep. it wasn’t only fatigue, though my bones hummed with it, my eyelids grit with it. it was the humiliation of helplessness, of wanting to be useful to the ones i loved and finding my hands empty, finding distance mocking me, my own fragile body betraying me, hours dissolving into work that multiplied faster than i could keep up. i watched my life unfold the way you watch rain behind a windowpane—you can see the shape of it, the movement of it, but your hand presses to glass and never touches the wetness.
out of that claustrophobia, something strange began to grow. i caught myself sitting differently with people, quieter, not rushing to sew up their unraveling, not desperate to mend with clumsy words. i let silence open its arms between us, let it be the bridge instead of speech. maybe i’d always known how to listen, but this was something else entirely—this was the discipline of refusing to perform comfort, the odd courage of stillness, the slow teaching of presence without interference. i don’t know if i chose it or if my body forced it on me, but the shift rooted itself deep, too quiet to be dramatic, too deep to be undone. then the anger came, raw and uninvited, pressing itself into my ribs as if it wanted to split them apart, as if it needed more room than my body could hold. it wasn’t anger at any one person, not really, it wasn’t even anger at life in its neat, abstract unfairness. it was anger because i was powerless, because i wanted to be everywhere at once and could not. i wanted to reach across the distance and touch the hands of people i loved, but the miles turned solid, like concrete walls i couldn’t break through. i wanted to carry them through their storms, but my own body sagged beneath the weight of its exhaustion, betraying me again and again, forcing me into stillness when all i wanted was to act. i wanted to give time i didn’t have, hours that had already evaporated into endless work calls, meetings, duties that drained me dry.
the helplessness was unbearable, and so it curdled into rage, because rage at least had edges, sharp ones. rage made me feel less invisible to myself, less like a ghost pressing palms against the glass of my own life. but the rage had nowhere to go—it circled in my chest like an animal, gnawing at the bars, refusing to quiet down. i clenched my fists until the nails dug crescents into my palms, i pressed my teeth together until my jaw ached, as if pain could trick my body into believing it had done something. but the truth was i hadn’t done anything. i couldn’t. i was left watching, wishing, pacing through thoughts that spun and spun with no release.
that’s the cruelty of helplessness. it doesn’t drain you empty, it fills you with a storm you have no way to release. the body burns but there is no outlet, no act, no motion that can make the fire useful. all that heat, all that urgency, only to be turned inward, scorching the very vessel that contains it.
sometimes love is not about what you say or how you fix, but about being willing to sit there quietly, even when your own hands are trembling.
during these last ten days my body kept begging for rest, begging for sleep thick enough to swallow me whole, but i would not give in, not because i was brave, not because i was disciplined, but because something meaner and sharper inside me refused, i lived on five hours, sometimes six, and my health was collapsing around me, but i kept going, floating through the hours like they had no edges, one hour bleeding into the next until i did not know what day i was inside anymore, the exhaustion was not the old kind, not heavy chains around my ankles, no, this was stranger, it felt almost clean, like being underwater and discovering i could breathe, it was not rest but it was something close to surrender and i let it carry me because what else was i supposed to do.
i worked, absurdly, i worked when i should have collapsed, i went to doctors, i made the calls, i sat with my team, i answered messages, i pushed the body forward though it was a carcass, though it was a ruin, and still i kept performing the small rituals as if they could tether me back to something living, i switched skincare, i bought the blueberry body wash, syrupy and artificial, clinging to me like a memory i could not shake, sweet and chemical at once, and i told myself, here, this is proof, i can still exist inside the ordinary, i can still hold the bar of soap and the bottle of cream and call it living.
but what startled me most, what cut me open in ways i did not expect, was that in between the collapse and the carrying on, i caught myself showing mercy to myself, mercy, of all things, something i never believed i deserved, something i had always spent on others, even those who hurt me, even those who did not ask for it, while i left myself to rot under the acid of my own voice, i saw the bruises on my legs, the scratches on my arms, i knew they saw them too, her eyes catching them, others’ eyes too, and still i said nothing, i let them guess, i let them sit in the silence of my undoing, but this month i surprised myself, i heard the cruelty rise in me, the familiar spit of glass, and i turned it back just slightly, just enough to whisper, it’s alright, it startled me like hearing a stranger speak through my own lips.
maybe it is not softness at all, maybe it is the same stubbornness i was born with, the refusal to bow, the refusal to vanish, bone refusing to rot, root refusing to loosen, i have always seen myself somewhere beyond this pit, even when the map was blank, even when i thought i would rot here forever, i kept seeing myself climb, and though i am scarred in ways invisible and in ways anyone can see, though my body carries the proof of old harms, though my mind is full of its own hidden graves, i am still here, and maybe that survival is nothing holy, nothing pretty, but it is mine, it is victory in its ugliest form, and i will not give it away.
i do not know what hope is supposed to be anymore, maybe it is foolish, maybe it is a trick, maybe i am only keeping myself alive with a lie, but even so i feel it crawling through me, brittle and trembling, like a candle flame licking in the wind and refusing to go out, i think of it as something i must grip with bloody hands, something i must claim even if it makes me naïve, even if it makes me ridiculous, i have been everything else, i have been steel and wound and silence and knife, i have been the graveyard and the ghost that walks in it, why not hope, why not let myself be the one who dares to believe.
there are moments these days when i have to remind myself, quite literally, to breathe, not in the casual sense of take a breath and calm down, but in the animal sense, the body forgetting its own function. sometimes i catch myself in the middle of the night wide awake reaching for my macbook with the same instinct as reaching for a glass of water, the glow of the screen spilling across the bed before my eyes have even adjusted, and without meaning to i am already buried in twenty different tabs of product references catalogues sketches of edits i want to try for the business. it is like a fever that does not burn on the skin but beneath it, in that quiet cavity where rest is supposed to live, and in those hours i can hear my pulse louder than thought, louder than breath. it is not healthy, i know, the body begs for sleep in its own languages, heavy eyelids, the ache in the neck, the pounding in the temples, and still i push. the cruelty of it is that no one is forcing me, no boss, no hand, only me, dragging myself into this current because some part of me believes that the work the search the desperate building of something out of nothing is more important than closing my eyes. call it madness, i do, but it is madness laced with purpose, the kind that feels holy until it hollows you out.
this month i also brought home four new plants and they, like children i never had, have already begun teaching me patience again. one with wide green leaves leans greedily toward the window in the morning and another smaller one makes me anxious because it looks too fragile for the heat, and when i pass them on my way to the kitchen i catch myself hoping these walls know how to hold them better than i know how to hold myself. sometimes i stand there too long as if my presence could be a promise, as if by sheer will i can keep them alive. it is foolish, i know, but i have always believed it is not they who live in my home but me who trespasses in theirs. we humans carved earth into rooms, cut sky into windows, and told ourselves we belonged, but when i am here with plants, or if i am ever lucky enough to share space with animals, it will never feel like they are inhabiting my house, it will always be me learning to live in theirs. this thought keeps me small, it keeps me quiet, it tells me to listen.
between the work and these small rituals i have been caught in experiments. i reached triple digits in my typing speed, a ridiculous milestone, yes, but the flicker of pride was real when i saw the number climb. i have also been fumbling with the rubik’s cube, trying to solve it with one hand, absurd, of course, to make something already difficult more difficult, but maybe that is who i am, restless, always inventing new hurdles because stillness terrifies me, because i want to be tested until i break.
and still, outside all of this, the world tears itself open daily. i read the news, i let it slice into me, and then i hate myself for letting it, because peace is already fragile, peace is already a splintered thing, and yet i want to know, i cannot stop knowing. i will not write of it in detail here, not because i am indifferent, but because i am porous, too porous, the suffering enters me and will not leave. so i whisper instead a prayer, not only for myself but for you, wherever you are, that you are taking care of yourself in your own quiet corners, that you are finding laughter, or silence, or any small safety to keep you steady. i pray that you get better, lighter, freer, that you heal from the inside out, and i send this prayer to whatever higher power listens, yes, there is acceptance in that this month. and if i allow myself one hope, it is that we all become softer, not weaker, never weaker, but softer, that we choose empathy before arrogance, that we stop carrying shame like a torch to pass along, that we remember to be human before we are anything else.
i love this post and writer (for writing this post) more than anything in the world
Overcome with so much emotion but technology hinders my response, so I'll leave it at greatfull to have read your introspectively radioactive piece , sparked up a lot of reflection in me...
I am overcome with emotion. You are an incredible writer.