Sinligh

It’s June,

summer is just a concept yet, everything i know is already melting Into something that resembles a wax like mold that’s made of a collection of my doubts

my hesitancy to exist

where do i stand ?

have i crossed the line ? or am i wrapping it around my neck subconsciously?

for i feel it tightening with certainty that could only hold the weight of my existential dread; if i built it on delusions

this isn’t an interrogation, but an act of rebellion.. a crisis Masquerading as romanticism and decay

And I seem to be losing more and more of myself to those with every day

that passes as “my twenties”

I walk and walk Aimlessly, Blindly dragging one foot in front of the other

Hoping to find purpose to define my existence

only to settle for trivial validation and numbness

that I pay for by letting fatigue like necrosis feast on my raw nerve endings sitting up a pathway for anxiety

And i wonder if it’ll ever come to an end… Or will i ?

Will i embrace paranoia and let melancholy embrace me ?

for how long will i be able to romanticize this catatonic state of consciousness ?

with what will i pay when it consumes my youth ?

And where does the sliding scale of my self destruction measure ends;

if not at the base of my ego induced highness

Where do i end ? Because lately..

I’m all beginnings and potential that i forgot how to digest

before it got rotten

•••

•Quotes: Sylvia Plath/ Virginia Woolf/ Franz Kafka/ Franz Kafka/ Sylvia Plath/ Clarice Lispector/

•Original content: Sinligh

Art reference:

something stands between me and all the feelings I’m trying to dissect

maybe it’s melancholy made into flesh holding me down as a base to my wavering relationship with all that i am and all that i want.

an Imposter syndrome ?

maybe it’s all the goodbyes December held on a leash..

Impermanence scares us humans but so does stability

all the insecurities and self doubts wrapped around my neck with a gentleness that competes with a lover’s embrace.

As the weather gets colder I burn through thoughts and distant dreams abandoned prospect

incandescent potential burnt to ash underneath my skin

And as i do so, i can’t help but wonder:

If I left you my letters as an offering will you put them together for me ?

Form endless strings of words and attach them to anything you deem familiar In me?

Wrap me up in poetry?

Or will you burn it the way i did my dreams; to warm yourself up ?

Will you prosper?

“Love” is nothing but a fabricated fairytale Sung by desperate heartbeats who have been poisoned by forfeited hope

Is the cup half full or half empty? I'm not sure anymore..

But the content of that cup is all that's left of my share of happiness in this world

and I'm willing to share it with you...

Even if it left me groundless.

Lost in the terminology of love, And the ideology of death and self sabotage

While disillusionment feed on my lifeline.

would it be so wrong to let myself dissolve in a little love knowing it won’t last?

•••

• Quote: Sylvia plath/Mary Oliver/ Fyodor Dostoevsky/ Simone de Beauvoir/ Maya Angelou/ Marina Tsvetaeva/Anne Michaels

• Original context: Sinligh

You seek approval,

my subconscious implemented in my dreams. you build up illusions of yourself

and like a bridge thread of a spider web you give them to others

silky, sticky yet somehow,

you’re smooth enough to lure them to wrap you in all that you desire,

even if it’s their own pleasure.

you’re not stuck you’re waiting, for an ending or a beginning

an unsolicited death, an indefinite life

you fear your own madness but the edge of it is what you live for.

you wait, and wait and wait for love to visit the fragile home you made for yourself in this temporary world

but it’s not what you want, is it ?

because the moment it knocks on your door you rush to the arms of another,

paranoia or melancholy? It doesn’t matter.

you writhe and hiss until you shed a skin of a past life that you held on

For acceptance alone, if nothing else…

what is it that you truly desire?

•••

• Quotes: Susan Sontag/ Edgar Allan Poe/ Emily Dickinson/ Halsey/ Sylvia Plath/ Christa Wolf.

• Original context: Sinligh

• Art reference:

In certain lights I'm beautiful, delicate and absolute

In certain moments, i feel it.

I worry too much about the future so sometimes.. subconsciously, i yearn to capture those moments

along with the exact lights,

and plant them like seeds in my unknown, future lover’s brain, weave them into his being and give them time to marinate into truths,

unmarred memories of me, just in case...

nameless worries, masked with sorrows and sarcasm

What other than that is girlhood ?

a timeless pill in a timed trial of existence

measured, documented neglected

and yet, fixed with delusions and rage

Like a bait left by a spider to attract a bigger prey

I feel tied down, with the ideation of love crushing my bones and reshaping them to resemble those of a bird

hollow and weightless

until it’s filled with the same doomed love and I’m left a flightless bird

I want to step out of my body and fill the empty space I leave behind with love that doesn’t root back to paranoia

to lay peacefully on the shore of life, and let that pure love rock gently with the consistent waves towards me

but instead, I’m taught to master the art of subtly giving all that defines my existence,

in fragments, of course

because as a woman you’re always at risk of being too much

I’m taught to accept the mass placed by the hand of love on my chest dragging me deeper and deeper into an ocean of uncertainties and existential worries, feeding me insecurities

until I’m washed out of all that I know about myself, motionless…

docile diluted.

•••

•Quotes: Louis Tomlinson/ Sylvia Plath/ Anne Carson/ Anais Nin/ Taylor swift/ Virginia Woolf/ Jane Austen/ Franz Kafka

•Original context: Sinligh

•Art reference:

It’s early summer,

the hopeless romantic in me found her way to the surface when the heat melted couple of my overprotective layers.

so here i am, allowing her a moment of spotlight and myself some vulnerability.

it’s past midnight, I’m sitting in floor of my kitchen eating fruits with a knife

wondering, if it’s really safe to romanticize life?

I indulge myself anyway, and think about how fruits can be considered a love language if you’re starved enough to taste love that’s throughly stained with muted apologies. 

I trust, that when the sun rises tomorrow all my attempts to romanticize life will sublimate and create a thick fog of melancholy that I’ll have no other option but to get lost into.

even so, tonight I’m tired enough to let it be and so i write this, my own report of pathology

officially it’s untitled, but I’m thinking: the pathology of love.

i start by resecting pieces of all the habits that i define my existence based on along with some of the heartache that i held onto for too long

deep down, i know some of it belongs to my mother

At least its mature flavor says so, that, balanced with the sweet essence of an overly ripe fruit that never belonged

Young and brash and an acquired taste.

it’s a poorly fixed microscopic tissue, preserved in a high percentage of feminine rage

Low expectations stained with love and paranoia alike and the question that asks itself:

is it benign or malignant?

is it infiltrating my soul, taking away from my potential to grow ?

It stays unanswered, an unforced error

because i always carry those little versions of me that vary in the percentage of their belief in my own bone marrow

a core biopsy will always show that i still believe.

•••

•Quotes: Anaïs Nin/ Sylvia Plath/ Virgina Woolf/ Franz Kafka/Marcel Proust/ Simone de Beauvoir/Anne Carson/ Andrea Gibson/Anaïs Nin

•Original context:

•Art reference:

i want peace,

not the measured one that life offers me from time to time like a band-aid that will be ripped off before I heal

I want it like a graft,

patching up the exposed areas that i scraped off of my soul to feel lighter..

to move on.

I’m trying to write an independent story from all the tragedies of the women around me

digging my own plot with my nails on the exact same rocks that were used

to stone them..

carrying the guilt of that, the way they carried the shame of existence. The only difference is i refuse to ask for forgiveness.

sometimes it feels like all my feelings are over felt, if not by me then someone else.

I've seen it over and over again I, the eye of an outsider

or that of the storm

stood still when it all spiraled around me, I held on to the rubble,

and cemented myself back together

more often than not, I did it with rage so whenever i got spilled, like blood under an old rug,

with all my particles separated into different identities, unseen, uncared for while i floated in an astral projection status

Ironically, the core was always one

rage, rage again…

aging rage!

It's all that i know, it's all the shades.

I exist, Like an ugly bruise

Violet fading to blue, violent, contrasting the softness that i long for.

I can't seem to explain my existence to anyone, not even myself.

a bruise, self inflicted or not, I can’t stop examining it, obsessively

dissecting pieces of my soul, trying to find a marker for the malicious cells that overgrown my own.

In the daylight I get fascinated by the way it changes colors, and when sleep sits heavy on my eyelids i press on it harder,

curious to where will i draw my threshold line.. do i know how to exist without all this pain?

am i just a phantom of coping mechanisms, and survival instincts,

Shades of hysteria, along with estrogen ?

this world constantly seems bigger than me, that’s my only comfort.

•••

• Quotes: Taylor Swift/ Charles Bukowski/ Henry Miller/ anne sexton/ Louis Tomlinson/ Anaïs Nin/ Rainer Maria Rilke.

•original context: Sinligh

•Art reference:

1. painting by marta astrain. 2. Omen, 1886, by Emile Corsi 3. Oil paintings by Jen Mazza 4. Art by Liu Yuanshou 5. Art (detail) by Arthur Gain

•••

Stable.

a presence that changes nothing I control nothing,

Not the rhythm of my breathing Nor that of my emotions.

I share my blood with a phantom of melancholy, a tempered shadow that shields me from grief

I sacrifice, as all women learn to do;

In this life, you either choose violence, or it comes knocking at your door

until your heart starts beating with its rhythm, erratically.. until you’re “hysterical”

But what woman hasn’t been called that at least once in her life?

today, i scheduled an appointment with death first thing in the morning

physiological or metaphysical, what difference does it make ?

around 4 hours between time and space.

I haven’t slept yet, this is my Eurydice and I know better than to look back; but I’m weighed down with grief, and rage alike.

what colors does it take? sometimes i believe it to be the exact shade of my eyes, dark brown, like blood that’s been accumulating under a layer of skin for too long

Or chocolate like...

I think I’ve tasted it; a lucid dream..

an early state of decomposition a tree with branches that are made of coping mechanisms and abandoned reveries taking up the place of my lungs

Grief like, it grows just as much as i do.

my age now is double what It was when i first discovered what grief means…

a decade of steps that i took while i try to redefine it, this time it felt like :

your last step was my first and now I live everything halfway through because I’m always concerned: what if I’m not missing you.

a lifetime of me trying to accept it, like a foreign organ that my body kept on rejecting until it failed, in a random day; and built it’s walls all around it

life with a core of undeniable death…

that’s the beginning of all that i am,

an exsanguination.

and at my weakest, i resent you for leaving me with no other option..

I don’t know when it happened, but subconsciously, I started associating the day I lost you with the day i was born

my reincarnation, unwillingly.

All those terms... bloodstains that I must leave behind

A temperament gene. Isn’t it clear ?

I stand still in the past, where my vulnerability lies in a grave

with all the unknown. and I think my greatest regret

was thinking that i needed more time, to come up with a language that we both understand to tell you that l love you.

and that’s of little to no value..

I regret believing i had time, now as a redemption, I’ll forever live as a skeleton of fragmented existence underneath a flesh that’s sewed on with patches of half chewed rage.

•••

• Quotes: Sophocles/Caroline M. Mar/ Taylor swift/ Nicole W. Lee/ Sara Luisa Kirk/ Sylvia Plath/ Louis Tomlinson/ Emilie Autumn/ Fyodor Dostoevsky/ Franz Kafka/Forugh Farrokhzad,

• Original context: Sinligh

• Art reference:

As the year is ending,

The residual of all the life I’ve forbidden myself out of habit

is barely drawing a new beginning line

So where do i start ? today ?

By the time I woke up today i was already late, not in the sense that i had somewhere to be. No, but the urge to up and leave was almost hysterical

The only thing contradicting it

Was the hesitancy I chained my feet to before I went to sleep last night.

One foot in December, the other in January.

I thought i could still put an effort in trying, but then i started counting all the steps that i took away from reality

I’m so full of life that i don’t know how to put any of it to use; bits and pieces are falling behind because i have my hands so full of myself.

I rationalize the amount of love i absorb into my body, but.. it’s never wasted on me.

If it’s too much for me today, I’ll save it in, store it in a dark corner in my brain that resembles a personal pandora box

my prefrontal cortex

and when everything gets overwhelmingly dark I’ll open it then, let all the leftover love roam my world, and if it ruins me then so be it and if it fixes me…

Well, i don’t see it.

I strive for depth but the more i dig the deeper I’m buried

Naïve enough to expect that someone on the surface will surely notice, and walk back on my steps.

But it’s nothing to worry about now, is it ?

I’m young and I’m invincible and I’m on top of the world

I’m hesitant and I’m rotten. and I can’t stop thinking about throwing myself into this world

The way i was thrown in a pool as a child, expecting that contact will trigger an instinctive response and I’ll swim.. I’ll live.

So.. if I start spinning around myself in my kitchen like a dervish would do in sufi whirling..

it’s only because I’m overflowing with all that I want to be.. but i can’t.

•••

•Quotes: Nelly Sachs, tr. by Eric Plattner/ Anne Sexton/ Fariha Róisín/ Sylvia Plath/ Mayclair/ Taylor Swift

•Original context: Sinligh

•Art reference:

I’m soft spoken,

In a way that contrasts my sharp teeth and my pointed corners.

Unapproachable, unapologetic yet, open and falling apart at the seams

Fierce, and guarded with expectations that are as high as my walls, the same walls I spend my days painting the colors of all the flowers I have never received.

Lavender to grey Girlhood to decay

I yearn for things that will wither if I dare to embrace and my moral compass is almost always out of my hands reach. I exchange a piece of it for every new defense mechanism i pick up, and I regret nothing…

not even my tongue that is still stuck in my windpipe because in my hast to run away from spotlight I forgot to tuck it right.

I hold on to ghosts of sentiments that i let filter through me

I, a distant soul that walk through earth aimlessly.

I linger but my traces refuse to hold I don’t get close because i can’t afford being left behind, I dwindle, but i don’t let anyone touch me because being starved taught me that we don’t need to overanalyze the intentions behind every touch; we just need to prevent ourselves from getting hurt.

It’s a collective we, because I learned to stand behind a wall of who I’m supposed to be.

Even if I do it inadequately.

I’m hypersensitive, yet i’d rather shed my own skin than cling to unwanted love that have no potential for growth.

I’m lovable, that much I know

but I don’t believe in falling, It’s not that I don’t want to believe in an unadulterated emotion..

but however I look at at love. it seems fabricated

So now, i only want it with a pre-negotiated price.

With a clear definition and stable steps that I can take one at a time.

That’s how it goes for kindnesses too, as something in me believes that we need to earn it.

Maybe it’s the part of me that i inherited from my mother,

the same part that is still searching for ways to sacrifice more, otherwise we’re selfish.

•••

•Quotes:Louis Tomlinson/Roland Barthes/ Taylor Swift/Meggie C. Royer/ Nikki Giovanni/ Helene Cixous/ Margaret Atwood/ Sylvia Plath/ Anaïs Nin

•Original context: Sinligh

•Art references:

Undoubtable anguish, that children have to carry along with adults. Innocent civilians are under constant attack, basic human needs such as water and electricity are now luxuries for civilians.

It sits too heavy on my heart, all the grief they must be experiencing, i feel so guilty to be living in a world that is still silent.

I can’t fathom that human beings are capable of choosing to turn a blind eye on all the injustice that innocent people are suffering.

50,000 pregnant women in Gaza cannot access health services. 5,500 will give birth this month. -source: united nations population fund-

If you are a human being with consciousness and functioning brain, if you’re a feminist, if you simply believe that nothing should be above human rights, that no one should be forced to live a life stripped of mercy or be killed.

THEN SPEAK UP. have conversations, organise, and push for an end to this mass killing of civilians.

here’s a reminder: the blood of every woman and man, every fetus, infant, child, teenager, adult and elderly. Every animals EVERY SOUL are on your hands if you’re okay with the genocide that’s being committed against Palestinians.

WAKE UP, open your eyes. Think for yourself, take history into your consideration and don’t let it repeat itself.

#freePalestine.

It’s late July, A lost breath of soulful desperation bled half the year that has passed over my eyes, painting a veil like fabric that blinded me mercifully.

can time really heal anything? I’ve been struggling with digesting all that it stored for me…

My cruel heart is only a result of the ignorance that i built brick by brick from its remnants

I even named the process defensive mechanism.

It’s early august, I’ve held on to a routine for as long as i can, living off of small accomplishments; cause what’s the alternative?

Prisesstant melancholy? Undoubtable anguish?

I became insensitive to time passage, like a child that never knew health only saw it as a blanketing apology covering everyone they love.

a child that can vividly touch the heaviness of the life they’ll carry for as long as they’re allowed to.

I’ve been accumulating feelings like corpses that are waiting to be identified in a morgue.

frozen above my brainstem, that until the heat of the summer caused them to melt and overlap into a storming ocean; leaving little versions of me to drown in their waves

and I as a helpless outsider watching from a coast and hoping i could pour all of this in one single poem, or maybe aspire it all like you’d do a patient with fluids in their lungs: Thoracentesis.

And use it as a supply to wash away the catatonic rage that flows through my veins.

reality is ringing it’s bell inside the cavity where my eyes should be, and even though i can hear it.

It’s taking me longer than I thought it would to reach; cause thats all i can do.. try.

I measure my self value interchangeably with all the pieces of me i left behind to comfort others.

That and all the leftovers of my mother’s life.

My soul is constantly tugging.

Tugging, tugging, tugging. Never in the same direction but it’s still clear that it wishes to be free from me.

Emotionally attached to this and that to her and him

But they’re never enough; i never am…

And I’m so tired of it all, the never ending self loathing.

But to whom do I confess ?

Who would acknowledge my longing, Who will embrace my infelicitous desire to be held together or even just touched,

an innocent reminder of my existence, to ease me into being a human again, especially after I starved myself for the sake of nourishing others.

•••

•Quotes: Louis Tomlinson/ Taylor swift/ Henry Miller/ Rainer Maria Rilke/Helen Oyeyemi/Anne Sexton/Franz Kafka/Susan Sontag

•Original context: Sinligh

•Art reference:

I’m my mother’s favorite child; I’m full of sacrifices.

Hers and mine, and so many women before us Substituting security and affection with systematized delusions.

I'm falling down the rabbit hole, not because of curiosity, nor distraction. But because of something akin to reality call.

All the rage that belonged to my ancestors before me, spilt ink that I spend my days crying over

And i wonder if I’m the one dragging it along with me, or is it the emotion that keeps weighing me down.

I was raised to be paranoid mother said that will protect me when she’s not around..

Now, I’m just my mother’s child and I only know how to define versions of myself through her.

Always free, never enough.

A mother lullaby can blend into her child's bones, my mother used to lull me to sleep by humming

"I love you madly, enough to embrace you in my eyes and see the world through you as I cover you with my eyelids"

I’m my mother’s daughter, a wound that refuses to heal.

I poke at it every time I question how can i convince someone who spends days and nights writing and rewriting my future that i grew up to be blind to all that is prewritten ?

That l'm building a pathway for a little life In the shadows of dreams that are out of my reach

That silk sutures hold my organs in place and lies dressed in white sew me dreams that my brain didn't dare to conjure.

That i learned to dilute the amount of love I have for everyone in my life. I don't understand the whys and hows of it but I know that I'm at the stage of life where I don't love without guarding myself.

And I refuse to be punished for feeling anymore, even if it meant I'II only ever know rage.

Meaningless and absolute.

I lose my details as i go. Leaving tracks of my soul behind me.

I shed pieces that i don't know how to define, like a snake does its skin. The only difference is that a lot of my potential lay there underneath it.

I think i overlooked discipline in my journey to search for wildness and inspiration,

and it seems like the only consistent in my life is my desire to change.

I know empathy the way I know my father. Should be present; but isn't. And I'll never be my mother, doesn't matter how much of herself she sees in me.

•••

•Quotes:Elana Dykewomon/ Chelsea g. summers/Azra.T/Robert Goolrick/hayan charara/Hannah Green/Sylvia Plath/ Fariha Róisín

•original context: Sinligh

•Art reference:

I woke up hyperaware of every inch of my body. A bone must be missing, a tooth or two my hair feels like an extension of the pillow that i hide my dreams underneath

And my head is too heavy with the weight of everything I said i will think about later…

Childhood, adolescence, adulthood

It all overlaps sometimes, and I worry that my childhood is all I’m going to grow up to live and relive.

I worry that it’s a punishment,

Like Prometheus; that I’ll spend my nights picking at it trying to cleanse myself from all that a young version of me wasn’t strong enough to process

only to wake up and realize I’m carrying it between my ribs again.

To be pregnant with another girl that will relive my life like I’m reliving my mothers.

I’m overthinking again

Stages of life like gates to the many graveyard’s that I have built inside me.

A sanctuary

A place of residence to all the feelings i had no time to over analyze.

I digged my phone from underneath the pillow, something must be said..

A phantom of the words that are trying to escape is at hands reach..

An Aura. A migraine.

Its 04:51 am. The sun didn’t rise yet, why am I awake again?

Thoughts are fighting each other for a way out, like a newborn waiting to be called by a name, any would be fine; as long as it gets acknowledgment.

On my way to the bathroom, i stumbled upon keywords

Some that I believe i missed the night before..

When anxiety was eating another pathway for itself. A way out, out of my brain

Necrosis.

I spent the past couple of months studying all that can go wrong in a woman’s body.

Starting from puberty highlighting child bearing period and ending with menopause.

It’s all prewritten

And I get mad with rage because improvisations are treated like a sin that can never be forgiven.

I watched women bleeding incomplete lives from between their legs, that without shedding a tear.

We’re used to that, aren’t we ?

Bleeding.

And incomplete lives.

Distant dreams of motherhood bleeding classic tragedies into an ink jar

to be hand written as another passage in the wrenching history of all the fabricated religious books that swore by women.

•••

•Quotes: Blythe Baird/ Paul Guest/Molly McCully Brown/ Uma Thurman/ Sylvia Plath/ Joel Coen/ Emily Rose Cole

•Original context: Sinligh

•Art reference:

Hi !

High fences of realization built on the liquid like foundation of my murky soul.

My desire for love when kept untouched grew into resentment towards myself.

Soothed only by the hands of death on the base of my spine stitching me back together I, her only leftover with words of comfort.

"Life goes on". Is its construction mantra.

Out of deaths lips its arbitrary, a stolen promise; like all the souls that it deemed unfit to be renovated.

The hand of death on the base of my spine, on the back of my neck

it grounds me; I find comfort in it.

the way it caress me so lovingly, a threat of a postpartum psychotic mother to an oblivious child.

Death was never particularly appealing to me, it’s the thought of not existing

not now, not in the past, nor the future. to never be, with no trace whatsoever.

To cease to exist all together With no leftovers, nor broken lovers.

It’s not a constant desire, more of a lure, a forbidden love. A slow burn romance with a happy ending

One that I’ll never reach out to willingly but if it ever reached out to me then I know for sure that I’m not strong enough to reject it.

Because life loses its colors from time to time…

And that leaves me, like a person suffering from aphasia. I lose the ability to understand the point of it all…

I try hard to redefine everything, yet, I can’t express it not even when I reach for a semi-stable ground with all my words.

sensitive, i let life play me like an instrument, so responsive.

i increase the tone of whatever melody goes through me..

do it so i hurt anyone who loves me enough to listen. And because I can’t just fade…. And because I don’t have the upper hand…. I make sure to leave my mark, I make sure I have a way to I leave.

And then I choose not to.

•••

•Quotes: Christa Wolf / Joyce Carol Oates/ Sylvia Plath/Susan Sontag/ Virginia Woolf / Ocean Vuong / Molly Brodak/ Halsey

•Original context: Sinligh

•art reference:

1. Painting by John Bagnold Burgess (detail)

Painting by Roberto Ferri ( detail)

2. Painting by Émile Vernon (detail)

3. The Grasshopper by Jules Joseph Lefebvre. (detail)

4. Painting by Valeria Duca.

5. red" by Hei Shan.

6. Sleeping Beauty by William Oxer.