When she opened her mouth, all I could imagine were her poltroonish friends in their Sunday best, nodding and agreeing with every vacuous point she made. Their lack of care for the world was disturbing, and something I couldn’t help but admire. The world seemed to exist according to their perception of it.

When I’d return home from nursing, my aunt would call my name out loud, which I knew was her way of asking me to offer them tea.

“It was a long shift. I’m making myself a cup. Would any of you like some?”

It was always that same line, to which I’d receive their orders. Specific, all different, never bags, herbal is cleaner… all doable.

After all, I was in debt to my aunt.

My parents sent me to live with her in the city to get educated as soon as I hit puberty. They had heard of a girl she took in years before me, who went on to have a successful career and married rich. It seemed like a no-brainer.

I must admit, she was terrifying at first. Curfews and rules that not even my father had imposed on me in the village. She’d like to have long conversations at dinner, with her speaking at me.

She was generous to an extent. She’d offer her things, her place, to any stranger, only to complain when they took her up on it. She’d make these awful, absurd comments about her neighbours, the friends she hosted, the women she knew.

I’d often try to get to know her. Not out of judgement. No, out of true curiosity. A desperate need to find a bridge between myself and her.

“What makes you feel happy?” I’d ask.

“Prayer.”

I wanted to ask what exactly she prayed for besides the chorus of health, abundance and blessings. Which, to me, meant nothing.

What was it that she wouldn’t dare say out loud? What made her ashamed? What would make her and her friends squirm?

Perhaps she hated her life. Truly hated it. Perhaps she hated the God she looked up to. Maybe holding onto the lunches and the comments and the rituals was what made her reality feel true.

“Your hair falls quite a lot.”

She’d pat her leg and I’d sit on the ottoman below her.

“The women in your family are cursed, you know that, dear? All that beauty gone to waste on men who didn’t provide.”

That we fell for fruit flies.

Never marry a fruit fly, she’d tell me.

I never asked what she meant, but soon the suitors came. She would drape me in her friend’s hand-me-downs. Pearls from the neighbour, a coat from the woman she swore she couldn’t stand. All of them pitched in to pull me upright.

The kind of guys who were traditional: high noses, thick eyebrows. Each with a similar smile and gaze. Except one, with curly locks and a bit undone. There wasn’t much to him besides that he made me laugh. That hadn’t happened in a while, until then.

It was him, I pointed at.

Perhaps it was less him, and more leaving her.

It wasn’t that long after until the fruit flies broke the shape of the man I’d chosen. He would soon quit his job and start drinking. Say it was an exercise of his youth. I nodded, willingly.

Then came the reports and lies, and the late-night cursing and shouting. Something inside me always screamed: leave. There was no use trying to make anything out of something already rotten. But I was stubborn, and she was crueler.

I tried to swat the flies, hoping its collective mass would mesh into a figure that resembled him. But the fruit flies fed on their victimhood and began to chew at the finger.

It was only then that I realized that my presence was only food.

I returned to the apartment. I hadn’t seen her since I left five years ago. Her hand covered her face. She was angry. For the first hour, it seemed that she wanted to give me the silent treatment, but she was never one to keep things to herself for too long.

She was devastated that all those years of building me up went to a man who’d only miss me when he needed me. She told me of all the whispers he’d spread.

“He wasn’t one to trust. All those years you built him up, only for him to turn each thing sour. What a waste! What a waste on your heart and beauty. I took care of you, let you in since you were a child. Let you around my friends so you’d know what sense of self looks like.”

I itched my head, a knit bouncing against my scalp.

“You must not look back. You must be comfortable with whatever demise will come out of this. You must be comfortable with the stories your head will feed you. The guilt and shame that will come.”

She stood by the window, her height trailed by her shoulders arching forwards. Her fingers were scarred and shrivelled with age and polished with a pop of fresh red manicure.

She swatted at another knit above me. In truth, since I left, I never looked back or checked. I never asked mutual friends. I never looked for him, or thought of how I’d be received. Not to him. Not to my parents. Only to her.

I felt fuzzy as she spoke, and found the bottom of my chest touching her rough purple carpet. As she spoke on God, spoke on men. Men and their mothers. Men and their fathers. And women too. All of them in dispute.

She turned to me, fanning the air of my untangle.

Fruit flies.

The danger of being close to people who are fixated on narratives is that they often reveal themselves to be the greatest of thieves and the greatest of liars. I think that’s the truest of shame: self-pity.

If you were to ask me openly, would you rather be called a bitch or have pity? I would pick being a bitch. A truthful, hardworking, honest bitch.

It was during the height of Covid, and I had just thrown myself a Zoom graduation with friends I had made online when I received the notification:

“Stop messaging my boyfriend, you desperate slut.”

My first instinct was to understand: what was it about myself that permitted her to speak to me in such manner? I questioned whether it was something in my personality, or my Arabness, or perhaps something I had done in the past that had caught up with my present.

But I didn’t know the girl, nor had I messaged her boyfriend.

I began asking questions, trying to figure out what had happened. Maybe it was the boyfriend, making up lies and trying to pass the blame. Men do that. “Oh, it wasn’t me. SHE was coming on strong.”

All she responded with were screenshots of a profile that had my image and a handle that had my name. An account that didn’t belong to me.

I tried to explain that it wasn’t me, and that someone must be impersonating me. I asked if this was all just a joke.

“Fuck off, you’re truly an awful human being.”

She blocked me right after.

I had grown obsessed with figuring out who this person might be. I requested them from my own account, my official account, only to get rejected within seconds.

I tried messaging a friend from school who used to be great at hacking. He was no help. I tried to email the customer support of the platform, but nothing. It was one dead end after another.

I was left staring at this tiny digital wall clutched between my fingers, with my name and likeness staring back at me and a locked private icon underneath. Watching the following and follower number increase. It was apparent, The Other Me was only beginning.

The girl who called me awful was the first of many.

After that, more messages poured in.

“I can’t believe you’d do that.”

“WTF is wrong with you.”

Screenshots of me saying things, personal, political, degrading comments, all done in my face and name.

I tried to put up a post, a screenshot of the account, explaining that someone was impersonating me. Instead, it opened the floodgates.

A friend sent me a screen recording of a video in which I was announcing that this was my only account and to ignore everything else. That was AI! A deepfake made from a photograph I had posted of myself on my story. Look.

I wanted to scream at people to use their discernment. To remember me as the good person they knew, or at least the person who was trying to be good.

I was left with my contradictions: confused, manipulative, a liar.

Even the girl who had done blackface in high school told me I needed to keep my venom to myself.

I was angry.

On the way to work, I imagined everyone on the carriage had encountered the Other Me and were hissing curses at things she had said. I imagined myself getting spat at, or being slammed into concrete. And at that point, perhaps I wanted that ripening truth to bleed somewhere else besides inside.

I wanted to know why a person would go to such lengths, and why me?

Say I had done something terrible years ago, at twelve or thirteen. Would that make this just? Say I had caused some irreparable rupture in the life of the Other Me. Was this then the natural consequence, the punishment owed to me?

And if I really were as horrible as they believed, as manipulative and conniving and cruel, would I have been stupid enough to announce it so publicly? Wouldn’t the more human response have been to ask what had happened to me? To wonder whether I needed help? To show some concern before deciding upon disgust?

But perhaps that was the part I could not understand. People had already chosen the more coherent version of events. The Other Me was easier to believe because she made sense of everything they had decided about me.

And see. See! I wanted to say. I am right here.

And I can do the same. The betrayed girlfriend as insecure and jealous. The confused girl from high school, a racist twat who just had anger spilling everywhere she walked. And you, the person behind the Other Me, I can make a doppelgänger out of you just as desperately.

I chose to disappear. Let the Other Me take over until they got tired. It went on for months, so I heard.

I moved out of state. Quit my job. Packed my bags into a cabin near the forest. I took in a stray dog and called him Buddy.

I chose to no longer exist as any of the Me’s. Only in my solitude and loneliness did I find my peace.

Writing by the window. I’d often look at Buddy, staring out the glass door. Lifting his leg and pissing to mark his territory. He would take his food, eyeing the window after each bite. This is mine. I’d watch his teeth dampen with foam dripping from the folds, as he stared into the eyes of a dog belonging to his own fading reflection.

Woof.

AI Disclaimer: An AI tool is strictly only used to correct my grammar and spelling.

SHELBY

I mean that's not really how you phrased it to me but okay

so anyway

it's like

your name was made up

your ancestors were like

"ooh there are a bunch of blacksmiths in our family, better call ourselves Smith"

like that's what names are they're fiction

but my body is a fact I live inside of it

MR. SMITH.

were going to have to wrap up this point pretty soon, Miss Holcomb if you could please bring it back to the tex!?

SHELBY.

Abigail was a human being

she like

she existed

that's a fact

but John Proctor is just obsessed with this made-up thing

BETH.

yeah but

his name stood for a lot more

it's like

his reputation

his honor

STUDENT (or IVY).

and Abigail's been trying the whole play to like ruin him

NELL.

nope

he made choices

SHELBY.

exactly!

but hes just pretending like

I dunno like

his fiction is more important than her fact?

Narrative has the power to acquire historical authority on an event. Facts, may tell us what happened, yet narrative determines what those facts come to mean. A fact can exist without being believed, remembered, or understood- meanwhile, a narrative can provide an interpretation of the weight of the truth. The two simply exist in a parasitic bond with one another, each gaining power at the expense of the other. The great tragedy of John Proctor is how deeply he invested his sense of self in maintaining a particular story about who he is. His name becomes a construction he is willing to protect, under the circumstance of hurting another person.

I think one of the many powers of Belflower’s play lies in the question it poses: Who gets to decide what becomes the truth: the facts themselves, or the story we tell about them? More-so, how do we interact with truth in our day to day lives?

We are all storytellers, governed by the need to make sense of what we cannot control. We intellectualize and curate elaborate narratives to make the incomprehensible bearable, to soothe ourselves from what we would rather avoid. Honesty only exists when the narrative falls, and we are left with the difficult fact of: what we felt, what we said, and what we did.

Simon Martin

AI disclaimer: AI is only used to correct my terrible spelling and grammar.

Every night, when I carried the ship’s waste to the rail and emptied it into the sea. I would look out below. There was always a strange foam, rising like teeth to shred the night’s smooth reflection.

Hunger is only learned after being fed.

I’d sometimes close my eyes and picture myself jumping. Being met with vastness and venom, yet still, space.

Three years ago, I had failed my final examinations that were supposed to secure my scholarship and get me out of my sea-side town. If you have ever lost something you had been told was already yours, you’d know, how flat disappointment is. Days fold into each other, blurring into an osmotic shape.

I spent most of that time with my friend Nasr, throwing shells back into the sea. The way we’d be able to tell that time was passing, was through the color of the water, and when the foreign ship would come in and repair its sails.

It was always the same one. Nasr called it majestic once, then seemed embarrassed by the word. It was certainly larger than any of the local boats the fishermen took out each morning. I remember the crew. Charming us with their foreign tongue and travel stories. They’d let us smoke their leaves in alleyways before patting us on the back, making us promise not to tell anyone. I think they liked us. We weren’t like the locals, so they’d say.

Among the travellers, I found something resembling a home. It was not long before they asked if I wanted to join the crew.

I had never travelled before. I had never seen the ocean beyond the distant island that appeared when the fog lifted. I remember the first time I saw that particular blue. I had not known water could hold so much colour.

The crew told me that the man whose place I had taken was a madman. He had jumped overboard after seeing a mirage of a prince. They spoke of it without much interest.

“He killed himself,” they would say, brushing the matter aside before handing me the broom.

Waves crashed against the ship for months. I found it strange that the captain never showed his face. Whenever I asked the others about him, they would tell me, in their own manner, that this was the way of the sea.

We never docked anywhere. We never stopped to bargain for exotic fruit or fresh water. We ate only what we had stored in barrels, prying up the floorboards when the supplies ran low to see what might have been hidden underneath.

I wanted to belong. I wanted to be them. Content with their chaos, stubborn in their beliefs. I wanted to rid myself of the place I came from, to stitch a heart so foreign I would no longer recognise the villager who beat within it.

I wanted to stop being hungry.

Under a full moon, they began to look like ghosts.

I imagined they had brought me onto the ship to kill me, to return my body to the water that carried them. Sometimes I thought the ship itself was feeding on us. That we were only food for something larger beneath the waves.

When I stood at the rail and closed my eyes, I pictured the water taking me into its own. I wondered if I would find the eyes of the madman there, staring back at me. Perhaps he had seen the same thing I had. Perhaps he had simply understood before I did that there was no difference between choosing a fate and being given one.

So I stepped onto the ledge, looking at the water pursing its lips.

And jumped.

The last thing I heard was the crew screaming: “snake!”

^{Assisted by Grammarly for spelling check.}

with my fingernails

along a shore line.

the guards charged in

waffling that i stole their grains.

trialed in a dim cave

they took my hand.

fed it to a giant

who crunched at the nails.

i laughed

as i raised my empty sock

a flag to my own land

“don’t worry about your grains.”

I know my way

september blowing strong.

i’ll let august be august

and let what’s weary

find a pillowcase

latched with hair strands

plucked from a voice

reassuring his mother

that i won’t be his wife.

don’t worry,

i know my way.

morning dew grunts

is this the one?

as i step barefoot on a pointing blade

don’t be fooled by its broad peaks

i know his arms and shoulders

i know the warmth in his eyes ablaze

i know my way.

i see my hand in the way the stars land

in a light made just for me

i carve my calling

to an orange tree

or 444 being hummed by a bee

i’ve learned hunger

from being fed

swooning to lullabies

of the day i’ll wed

i’ve danced with strangers

who threw at me bricks

for shelter

i know my way

there was a man

with a voice loud enough

to sound like a stove

he let me tell my stories

if i carried

the weight of his own

whenever i finished

he clapped

he called me a diamond

in a sea of stones

i told him I loved him.

and i built a castle

with all that I owned.

My stories

his suitcases.

my friends would ask,

are you sure?

as i hushed them away

with my arm,

my flag.

i know my way.

I was six.

His arms were around a girl much older. She stood with her back against the wall, beyond the reach of the school cameras. Her scarf had slipped behind her head. Beneath the black dye, her roots had begun to return, a tired maroon. One of his hands held her waist. The other fumbled with the zip of her uniform.

I had never seen affection like that before. A passion wrestled with urgent violence and the pull to hide from everyone around them. I ran upstairs, making sure my battered Skechers clacked against every step. Halfway up, she looked at me and smiled, dragging her tongue slowly across her teeth.

At the school gates, the taxi driver was always waiting. My mother paid him to take me home each afternoon. The journey lasted two hours, leaving the city behind until the roads dissolved into farmland and the mountain bent around us like a closed hand.

My father called it home. It was the house he had grown up in, an old mud-brick building he liked to say had once been constructed from the finest materials money could buy. Time had become another building material. It settled into the walls, darkened the ceilings, gathered in the corners. The rooms were dim even in the middle of the day. Small fans, fixed high above, pushed warm air from one end of the house to the other. Black iron bars guarded the windows. Sheer red curtains bruised the very little light that entered.

For years I thought this was what the inside of a womb looked like.

I played this game in my head. Whenever someone opened the front door, I would run towards the rectangle of daylight before it vanished again. For those few seconds, with the light on my face and the mountain beyond it, life felt less like a promise.

My mother hated the farm. Each afternoon she carried a white plastic chair into the yard and read from her mushaf beneath the sun. From a distance she looked like a woman at prayer. Up close, she was waiting to interrupt God with my father’s name. The man she had defied her own family to marry.

“I should have listened to my father,” she would say. “He told me that one day this man wouldn’t make you cry with your tears, but with your blood.”

She would return to her book without another word. I used to look up and wonder whether God was listening to her, or whether He was waiting for her to finish reading.

I would find my father beneath the date palms, walking slowly between the trees. There were dates, limes, and, in generous seasons, vegetables we would eat for dinner that night. My father was proud in the way only men with very little can afford to be. He spoke of the land as though it possessed a memory. He told me how his father had taught him to read the soil, the water, the sky. He liked to say that he was the last person who knew how to work it properly.

When my grandfather died, the farm was left to him. His six siblings took him to court, insisting it should have been divided between them. My father fought them and won. The land remained his. His brothers and sisters did not.

After that, there was only the three of us. The days repeated themselves until they became almost indistinguishable. We had no neighbours, no visitors, no children to wander in from the surrounding farms. Summer ripened only through heat and the occasional journey into the city, where I rode beside my father as he sold whatever the land had yielded from the back of his ageing pickup.

I often invented lives for the people my father bartered with. A woman buying limes became a widow. A man haggling over dates had a daughter waiting for him at home. The exchange itself was never enough. I wanted to know what came before it, and what happened after.

Then I saw her again.

The girl from beneath the staircase.

The girl who had smiled at me with her tongue pressed against her teeth.

Only this time she looked smaller. Younger. Whatever violence I had remembered had nowhere to live inside her. She stood a few meters from the pickup truck, crates of bottled water at her feet and bags of pink cotton candy swaying from a wooden pole she carried across her shoulders.

She looked at me and smiled. There was more absence than presence in it. I began to wonder whether the girl beneath the staircase had existed at all, or whether memory had simply borrowed her face.

For weeks afterwards, I asked my father to take me with him into the city. He believed it was because I liked the cold air spilling from the vents, or the radio turned louder than conversation, or the long pauses while he bargained with customers. I let him believe that. In truth, I wanted only to see her.

She occupied the same square of pavement each afternoon, beneath an umbrella whose colour had long ago surrendered to the sun. Cases of bottled water rested at her feet. Pink bags of cotton candy trembled from the wooden pole across her shoulders whenever the traffic coughed past her.

I imagined she was saving for a holiday, a bracelet, a dress she had seen behind a shop window and carried home in her mind. I believed the summer was temporary for her. That this was something a person endured because there was something waiting on the other side of it.

As the weeks passed, it became harder to believe the story I had made for her. Her shoulders seemed to sink a little lower each day. By the afternoon, she rarely lifted her head. The sun remained above her for hours. What I had taken for determination began to look like something else. Not choice, but obligation.

Just before sunset, a white saloon car arrived. A man stepped out, folded the umbrella, loaded the remaining bottles into the boot and drove her away.

I had never seen the face of the boy beneath the staircase. After a while, I no longer needed to.

I found him in every man who stopped at her stall. In those who bought water without appearing thirsty. In those who stayed a little too long. In the ones who smiled before walking away. I no longer searched for him as a person. I searched for him as a possibility.

“Oi, S. Give this to the girl.”

He placed a bowl of mangoes and kiwis into my hands. My father nodded towards her.

I remember the air blowing heavy that day, the dust catching onto my feet as cars flew by. I tapped her on the shoulder before handing it to her. It was in her eyes that I remember, the same one I ran from.

“Thank you.” She looked down to her bowl, there was ant by the lid, I prayed she wouldn’t notice. “Do you want one?” I nodded at the sight of the cotton candy, it’s pink juice melting into the corner of the bag it was suspended in. “It’s 100 baisa.”

“Oh, I’ll have to ask my dad for money.”

“I’m just kidding, take two.”

It was then that I watched something in her give way. She was no longer simply the girl folded around a boy beneath a staircase. She became someone with depth, someone whose interior life I could suddenly sense pressing against the surface.

After that, my father began sending fruit over to her stall each afternoon. In return, she always slipped me two bags of cotton candy. I would climb onto one of the wooden crates beside her, and we would talk.

At first, it was music. Then books, most of them stolen from the bottom of my mother’s mandoos. We argued about politics, about the countries we wished existed, about the decisions we would make if either of us were ever left in charge. Mostly I listened, repeating opinions I had overheard at the dinner table until I slowly began forming my own. We complained endlessly about where we had grown up. We mocked Western ideas of freedom while imagining our own escape.

We liked to tell ourselves that at least our societies were honest about it’s flaws. The West, we said, merely wrapped its own cruelties in the language of liberation.

Our nations were young, we insisted.

Still forming.

Still confused.

I became fascinated by the machinery of her mind. Once the armour she carried began to loosen, she became almost impossible not to love. She was funny in a reckless, badly timed way that made adults distrust her immediately. She laughed too loudly. Challenged authority before it had finished speaking. She possessed the rare ability to make embarrassment seem like a worthwhile price for honesty.

During lunch we would walk to the corner shop. She always insisted on paying.

“I’m eighteen,” she’d say, waving away my protests. “It’s on me.”

To the shopkeeper, she introduced herself as my older sister.

For the first time in my life, I found myself liking the way someone had mistaken who I belonged to.

One afternoon I asked, “Do you want to come to the farm?”

She looked away before answering, lifting her eyes towards some fixed point in the distance, a smile already beginning before the words ever arrived.

She never said yes.

It was a Thursday.

My mother was packing for Mecca.

She folded each garment with the same care she gave to everything she believed might outlast her. White scarves. Prayer clothes. A toothbrush wrapped inside a towel. I stood in the doorway tying my shoelaces, watching her arrange a life small enough to wheel behind her.

“What shall I ask God for?” she said.

I thought of money. Rain. My father’s harvest. Good grades. Travel. My mother’s happiness. I thought of wanting so much that it no longer resembled wanting, only a permanent reaching.

“Ask Him to ask me and read my mind,” I said.

She smiled, drew me into her, and pinched the flesh of my shoulder before letting go.

Outside, my father waited beside the taxi with his head lowered. As my mother rolled her suitcase across the gravel, he reached for her hand. She shook him off as the driver lifted the suitcase into the boot.

That year the farm yielded little beyond dates and limes. Even they struggled to justify the petrol it took to drive them into the city. My father and I loaded the pickup in silence.

Halfway down the motorway, he switched on the English radio station. Usually he complained that he could not understand a word they were singing. That day he turned the volume up.

When we reached the market, her place was empty.

The umbrella stood open above no one. Wind lifted small ribbons of sand across the pavement. Every few minutes I caught myself looking towards the road, then away again before anyone noticed.

The afternoon slipped by slowly. Customers came and went, patting my father on the back, shaking his hand firmly. The sun drifted lower, and every few minutes I found myself looking towards the road before forcing my eyes away again. Then, just as the heat began to loosen its grip, a white saloon pulled in. Before it had fully stopped, I was already climbing down from the pickup.

She stepped out first. Her father followed.

She was wearing red lipstick.

I wrapped my arms around her without thinking, but she didn’t hug me back. She remained perfectly still, her eyes fixed somewhere beyond my shoulder as my father walked towards hers.

The two men shook hands, and it was only then that I noticed her eye. A thin red crescent had spread through the white of it, as though something beneath the surface had quietly burst. She lifted her face slightly, refusing to blink.

I followed her gaze. Across the road stood the devil from beneath the staircase.

He did not wave.

He simply watched.

My mother never returned from Mecca.

Instead, somebody else took her place.

She wandered through the farm in a white satin nightdress and pink slippers, as though she had always belonged there. She opened cupboards without asking where anything was kept. She shifted furniture from one room to another. She chose new curtains. She told my father which walls ought to be repainted. By the end of the summer, there was almost nothing left in the house that still remembered my mother.

For years I believed she had failed to return because the devil had reached her first. That somewhere between Muscat and Mecca he had taken her in exchange for the woman my father had kissed beneath the staircase. It seemed a fair trade. I spent so much of my childhood wishing she would disappear that, when she finally did, I found I could only love her through her absence. It was the only place my heart seemed willing to keep her alive. Whenever I imagined looking for her, I remembered she knew where I was. Perhaps she always would.

My father became ill. His world contracted until it ended at the bedroom at the far end of the corridor.

Each morning I crushed his tablets into water, lifted him upright, rubbed warmth back into his legs when they cramped and carried bowls of boiled herbs to his bedside. She seldom entered the room. When she did, it was only to replace the bukhoor. She tipped the old ash into the bin, laid a fresh piece of charcoal in the burner, scattered resin over its surface and waited until the smoke rose thick enough to blur his face. Then she left.

After he died, the bukhoor continued to burn for weeks.

The farm yielded almost nothing. Tangerines hardened before sweetening. Dates swelled, then burst upon the branches, collapsing into themselves before they could be picked. I have never known whether the land had begun dying before my father did, or whether grief merely sharpened my eye for things already perishing.

Sometimes, unable to sleep, I would knock on her bedroom door and ask if she wanted to walk.

We crossed the fields before dawn carrying a yellow can between us. The soil cracked beneath our feet. The mountains were still blue with sleep. Neither of us spoke. We poured petrol around the trunks of the date palms, through the irrigation channels my father had spent a lifetime digging with his hands. She looked at me. I looked back. She nodded once.

I struck the match.

For years I remembered it this way.

The flames climbing higher than the palms.

The mountains dissolving behind smoke.

The two of us standing side by side until there was nothing left to inherit.

But memory has never been interested in accuracy. It prefers the life that should have happened to the one that did.

The truth is quieter.

She lit a match beneath a blackened cooking pot while I rinsed vegetables at the sink. The flame remained where it belonged. We waited for the water to boil. We ate without speaking. Afterwards we carried our empty plates outside and stood looking across the fields.

Nothing burned.

I have never tried to remember the devil again.

AI disclaimer: AI is strictly only used for spelling and grammar checks.

An older woman sits shuffling tarot cards. A mother. A grandmother. I cannot tell. She has familiar eye bags, and a scent: warm skin, something floral melting on musk. She lays my deck in a candle-dim room. I cannot tell whether I’ve been here before.

She turned over six cards.

The Devil.

The Nine of Swords.

The Emperor reversed.

She looks at me without surprise.

“There are only seven fates in the world, every daughter just repeats them differently.”

Beyond the wall, voices rise. Then silence. The floorboards unwinding with a slow procession of creaks and thuds. Dew against the window. Cotton soaking into something medicinal.

I lift my hand above the candle.

The lines of my palm shimmer until they loosen from my skin like threads in hot water. I wonder whether fate yields to fire. Whether, beneath His gaze, there is still a place where we remain unwritten.

The woman laughed, she knows there’s a bounty there somewhere. Tears wet her face, her brows drooping as the fine lines of my palm sealed themselves into the melting wax.

She gathered the cards before I had finished looking at them.

Though I already felt what was to come coursing through my veins.

She fed one to the fire.

The flame curled it’s lips and strummed:

Come join your sisters on the toilet floor.

Come join your sisters like old before.

In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

What stayed with me was the grammar of the definition. Love is not described as a feeling but as an act of will. It exists in conduct.

Until then, I had thought of love as something that happened to you. You either felt it or you didn’t. It belonged to the realm of the inexplicable, something larger than intention, almost cosmic in its inevitability. We speak about it as though it precedes us, as though it had already been written somewhere while we were still stardust, waiting for us to stumble into it.

Peck proposes something far less mystical. Love is a verb. It is a discipline of choices. Something that can be witnessed. Something that leaves evidence.

I found that strangely reassuring.

The thought has lingered because it seems to extend beyond love. If love is constituted through action rather than feeling, perhaps identity is too.

We are taught to understand ourselves retrospectively. We explain who we are through childhood, through inheritance, through the peculiar circumstances into which we happened to be born. Personality becomes something received rather than continually negotiated. There is truth in this. None of us exist outside history. Nor can we escape the conditions that first named us.

Explanations have a tendency to become verdicts.

For most of my life, I would have described myself as shy. I said it with the confidence reserved for facts that have been repeated often enough to lose their origins. It was true when I was eight, lingering at the edge of birthday parties. It was true in classrooms where my hand remained stubbornly on the desk.

Recently, at a social event, I met a group of strangers. I said hello, and immediately forgot how conversation worked. My mind emptied itself. A colleague smiled and rescued the moment.

“Forgive her. She’s just shy.”

The sentence was intended as kindness. Instead, it revealed something I hadn’t noticed before. I heard my identity spoken as though it required no participation from me. As though it existed independently of whatever I chose to do next.

So I asked someone a question.

There was nothing courageous about it. The question itself has long since disappeared from memory. What remains is that someone answered, and then someone else joined in. The conversation continued. Before long, I was no longer standing outside it, observing myself as the shy person in the room. I was simply participating.

Nothing essential had altered. My nervousness had not dissolved. I had not become extroverted in the space of five minutes. The feeling persisted. The action did not.

It made me wonder how often we mistake repetition for identity.

We tend to imagine that actions express the self, as though there were some finished person concealed beneath them. Increasingly, I suspect the opposite. Actions do not merely reveal identity; they accumulate into it. The self is less a hidden substance than a pattern continually revised through behaviour.

This is what Peck’s definition illustrates. Love is not authenticated by the intensity of feeling but by the consistency of practice. Perhaps the same is true of character. And just maybe who we are is not determined by what we experience internally, but by what we repeatedly make visible.

If our actions gradually accumulate into identity, the more consequential question is this: according to whose philosophy are those actions being organised?

Freedom Is Letting Go of the Market’s Definition

I learned recently that BP helped popularise the phrase carbon footprint, and that some of the companies most invested in the production of plastic have also been among the loudest advocates of recycling campaigns. I don’t mention this because it absolves us of responsibility. It doesn’t. I mention it because it demonstrates how responsibility is narrated.

Of course, individual action matters. I recycle. I try to consume less. But I have become suspicious of moral frameworks that distribute responsibility more evenly than power. One of the most successful ideological achievements of the last century may have been persuading every day people to experience structural problems as private moral failures.

Once blame is sufficiently internalised, systems become almost invisible. We stop asking why the world is organised as it is and begin asking whether we are good enough to live inside it.

I recognise this instinct because I practise it constantly.

Who is to blame is a question I return to with unreasonable frequency, though I have realised that I almost always begin with myself.

I have an anxious relationship with waste. Not only wasted food or wasted money, but wasted possibility. At fifteen I was convinced my life had somehow failed because I had not become an international pop star or founded a technology company before I learned how to drive.

Looking back, I wonder how much of that anxiety belonged to me, and how much belonged to the culture that produced me.

Meritocracy has a curious habit of disguising itself as common sense. It tells us that outcomes are principally reflections of individual effort, and that failure is therefore an autobiographical flaw. The system recedes into the background. Character steps forward to take the blame.

It is an extraordinarily efficient arrangement.

My parents belonged to a generation that believed profoundly in work. Not simply as necessity, but as virtue. Productivity was treated almost sacramentally. To work was to deserve. To achieve was to justify one’s existence. Exhaustion itself acquired a moral glow.

I inherited the vocabulary without ever fully believing the theology.

Whenever that logic becomes too persuasive, I find myself performing a strange thought experiment.

I imagine humanity before it became fluent in optimisation. Before quarterly reports and personal brands and networking breakfasts. Before the peculiar modern conviction that every hour should yield measurable returns.

I picture caves. Rivers. Forests so dense that fruit falls unnoticed to the ground because no one has yet invented scarcity as an identity. Human beings with no biographies to curate and no audiences to persuade.

The fantasy is embarrassingly brief.

Even there, I suspect we would begin sorting ourselves into hierarchies. Someone would discover ownership. Someone else would invent prestige. We would exchange objects until eventually we forgot that they had once been objects and started calling them value. Civilisation may simply be our most sophisticated method of mistaking coordination for meaning.

What fascinates me is not that we organise ourselves. We have always done that. It is how quickly organisation begins to colonise imagination.

I doubt our earliest ancestors spent their evenings wondering whether they were sufficiently productive. They painted cave walls. They watched rivers. They danced because there was music, not because dancing could be transformed into content. Somewhere along the way, utility expanded until it occupied almost every corner of experience. Even leisure now arrives carrying a performance review.

I think that is the real waste.

The enabling of inherited systems of value to become indistinguishable from reality itself. To mistake an economic logic for a philosophy of life.

For a long time, I thought the answer was simply to try harder. To become more disciplined, more productive, more efficient. But all that did was make me better at inhabiting a framework that had made me anxious in the first place.

What finally changed wasn’t my work ethic. It was my relationship to time.

I stopped treating time as a resource that existed solely to be extracted from and started asking what kind of life I wanted it to contain. I began constructing a philosophy that measured days less by their output than by their attention. Reading without trying to optimise it into content. Walking without needing it to become exercise. Conversations that existed for no audience. Rest that did not require justification.

Paradoxically, that was what allowed me to escape the paralysis I had mistaken for laziness. Once I no longer believed every moment had to prove my worth, I became capable of moving again.

There is a beast in the form of a parasite, in the outline of us.

By three in the morning, everyone has stopped pretending to belong anywhere.

The techno room in Coventry had emptied until only a handful remained. Bare feet blackened by pavements. Piercings catching the strobe. Eyes that looked permanently half-awake. Someone asked if I wanted to come with them. I followed.

The flat was somewhere above an off-licence. Posters peeled from nicotine-yellow walls. Incense burned beside overflowing ashtrays as though one smell could negotiate with another. The sofa had split open years ago. Foam pushed through the leather like exposed fat.

Nobody introduced themselves.

A man with violet hair emptied his pockets onto the floor. Rizlas. Lighters. Loose tobacco. A dead disposable vape. He searched each object hoping to pull out a cigarette from a pinch of air.

Outside, the high street convulsed beneath us. Girls folding over in broken heels, mascara liquefied into bruises. Boys marched shoulder to shoulder, roaring football chants for a club already predicted to another losing season. A bottle burst beyond the buses. Blue lights drifted across the shuttered shops without stopping. By morning there would be no evidence any of it had happened, only the faint sweetness of stale beer rising from the pavement in the sun.

Someone walked through the front door.

“Anyone order a baggie?”

I think I’m going to lie to my therapist about this.

Four years earlier I conducted an experiment in absence.

I had read that more than nine thousand people die alone each year across England and Wales. Days pass before anyone enters the flat. Sometimes weeks. Rent leaves the account on schedule. Direct debits continue their indifferent procession. Dust keeps falling whether you shake it or not.

The dream came to me every night. Bass.  A frequency so low it seemed to rearrange the body from the inside. Men and women in office clothes moved beneath it, each suspended by a single strand of thread. The strings tightened with every swell of the synth, tangled, frayed, then drew taut again, as though something beyond the room were testing how much tension a body could bear before it broke.

At the centre I watched myself dancing in a dress woven from the same thread. I could never tell whether I was leading it or being pulled.

Roberto was always somewhere nearby, weaving between ankles as though he belonged there. He was eight when he disappeared. I tell people he died. Death has an ending. Disappearance keeps a door half open.

I wondered how long it would take before my own life registered my disappearance.

Back then I lived in a house share with girls from art school. They were five years younger than me. They smelled like floral bubblegum and argued over stolen Tabasco sauce. As long as my rent was in on time, none of them cared or questioned me.

My room was on the third floor. The only room up there.

The window leaked. I kept towels folded beneath the frame. By afternoon the sun settled against the glass until the room became a magnifying lens. The heat collected without anywhere to go. Trapped under the convex weight of the light.  I would find dead ants beside the towels. How little pressure it takes to preserve a life. How little to scorch it.

That was where I decided to disappear.

I deleted every account I had. Carried food and bottles of water upstairs. Locked the door.

Then I lay there.

My heart crackled against its cage. I rehearsed the sequence. A manager knocking. My phone filling with unanswered calls. My family converting hours into concern. Somewhere, paperwork. A report. A key turning in the lock.

None of that came.

The clock shaved the afternoon away, metal scraping against metal. The sun emitted colour until it spilled across my body. Dirt settled into my skin as though searching for purchase.

How little labour existence demands from the world. Stop presenting yourself and it quickly redistributes your place.

Inside that room I relinquished every designation. Employee. Friend. Daughter. Sister. Those identities existed elsewhere, maintained by repetition and recognition. Here they decomposed.

I refused language. I refused books. Days passed without accumulation. I splashed in the bath until the water turned cold. Here, I only exist, only erase.

When I turned my phone back on, the world resumed without hesitation. My parents had sent messages. Links to documentaries and fake news articles. Work had sent meetings. Someone had forwarded a video of dancing penguins.

There were no police reports. No unanswered questions. No evidence that anything had briefly fallen out of existence.

On Monday I returned to the office.

Seventeenth floor.

Cubicles. Fluorescent light. Beige carpet absorbing every footstep. Landline phones refusing extinction. Keyboards chattering with the rubbing rhythm of insects.

I had worn my shirt inside out. No one mentioned it.

Marie called my name.

She placed a report in front of me.

Her finger crossed the page slowly, dampening itself against her tongue before each turn. The gesture repeated often enough to become liturgical.

It drifted across the graph, paused over my employee number, circled a column of red, then returned to her mouth. Tongue. Paper. Tongue. Paper. The corner of each page darkened before she turned it. She spoke continuously, but the words had detached themselves from her voice. They became another office sound. Like keyboards. Like ventilation. Like lights humming.

The finger kept travelling.

Across my name.

Towards my pen.

Back to her tongue.

My mouth closed around it before I recognised the decision as mine.

Metal.

Salt.

Then silence.

A weight heavier than the withdrawal of sound. The kind that descends after an animal realises the forest has stopped breathing.

The scream never found the ceiling.

It fell back into the room and dissolved beneath the bass.

The fluorescent lights began pulsing. The security guards advanced without haste.

I ran.

My shoes struck carpet, then laminate, then the polished backs of desks. A boot came down across my foot. There was no fracture. Only release. The fibres beneath the skin gave way, coming apart themselves strand by strand until my leg ceased to possess the conviction of bone. It trailed behind me, unravelled, dragging pale threads across the floor.

Hands found me.

Not to restrain.

To harvest.

One drew a thread from my wrist. Another from the hinge of my elbow. Someone caught the seam of my shoulder and continued pulling until the joint surrendered without complaint. My body yielded with the quiet obedience of old fabric coming apart at its weave.

The room tightened around me.

Every pull answered the bass. Every beat claimed another filament. The office had shed its disguise. Cubicles became barricades. Desks became altars. The lights throbbed overhead.

They continued pulling until there was almost nothing left to distinguish me from the web itself. My weight deserted me. I rose slowly, suspended among the threads that had once convinced me they were bone.

At its centre something breathed.

An appetite.

Its body barely disturbed the web. It remained there with the patience of mould, waiting for the next thread to tighten. My teeth loosened one by one, falling silently through the lattice.

It never looked at me.

When the day of judgement comes, will I go to hell?

I was always afraid of questioning God directly.

I had many questions, though most remained unasked. I suspected the questions themselves might constitute a form of disobedience. So I believed, or tried to believe, that beneath the visible disorder of things there existed a hidden logic. That suffering was not random. That humiliation, grief, and disappointment were not evidence of abandonment but components of a design whose meaning exceeded my understanding.

“God does not burden a soul beyond what it can bear.”

It was first period in Year Four. Religious Studies. Miss Nawal stood at the front of the classroom repeating that very phrase.

My hair was pulled into two braids so tight they seemed to lift my eyebrows. My mother had slicked them with coconut oil before school, flattening my curls and frizz straight. Hilal was passing notes to Khalid across my desk. One of them slipped from hand to hand. I caught a glimpse of my own name. Coco girl.

Outside the window, two secondary school boys were hiding between the pillars. They were passing a dokha pipe back and forth, disappearing briefly into clouds of smoke before reappearing, laughing at something I couldn’t hear.

Miss Nawal noticed them. Without interrupting the lesson, she reached across the window and drew the curtains shut.

The world disappeared.

She turned back to the board and continued teaching us about the Day of Judgement. She divided the signs into two columns: the minor and the major. There was something reassuring about the taxonomy of it all. The end of the world transformed into a classroom exercise. Categorised. Ordered. Broken down into manageable parts. An apocalypse made legible to children.

Her voice blurting on a forced high pitched voice at every point.

The sun rising from the west.

The false messiah.

The sounding of the horn.

The dead emerging from their graves.

We copied each sign carefully into our notebooks. She cleared her breaking throat for her next point. On the Day of Judgement, we were told, every human being would watch their life played back before them from beginning to end before receiving their verdict.

I tried to picture it: every human being confronted with the evidence of their own existence. Not only the significant moments, but the accumulated substance of a life. Conversations repeated. Habits repeated. Mistakes repeated. Entire years spent circling the same preoccupations. The same episode of Friends playing. The same aspirations. The same grievances. The same disappointments. Manifested across generations with only minor revisions.

A girl named Kayla raised her hand. She was German-Lebanese and spoke Arabic with a slight accent. “What if your mother doesn’t believe in God?” she asked.

“What if she’s an atheist?”

Miss Nawal, licking her lips, pinching her voice through her shoulders, and chest. “Then she will go to hell.” The certainty gurgitated between her teeth before spilling into the room.

She wheeled in a television and dimmed the lights.

Buildings collapsed. Cities folded in on themselves. Fire moved through crowds. People ran without destination, swallowed by waves, swallowed by smoke, swallowed by the end of the world. Much of it, I would later learn, came from the film 2012. At the time, the distinction seemed irrelevant.

Outside, beyond the classroom walls, the secondary school boys had found an iPod speaker. Akon bled into Jennifer Lopez. Laughter followed. A football struck a wall.

Inside, twenty-four children sat in silence. The air conditioning rattled above us with a constant metallic hum.

Someone sniffled.

Kayla began to cry.

No one comforted her.

We were all too busy imagining our own mothers.

When I returned home, I crawled beneath my bedsheets, my feet tangled in the stars and rockets printed across the fabric. Sound seemed charged with significance. A car horn in the distance. A telephone ringing in another room. The click of a camera shutter on the television. Any one of them could become the horn. Any one of them could announce the beginning of the end.

What unsettled me was the possibility that nothing was ever exempt from consequence. A careless remark. A hesitation. One door chosen over another. Gestures appeared to outlive the moment that produced it, extending into futures I could neither anticipate nor perceive. There seemed to be no action too slight to leave its trace, no thought sufficiently private to escape the world’s hidden archive. Life acquired the character of an invisible register, accumulating silently beyond the limits of perception. I could not see the record being assembled, yet I felt increasingly certain that somewhere it was.

It was not punishment that frightened me.

It was implication.

The discovery that I belonged to processes I could neither witness nor comprehend, that I was altering the world without possessing the means to understand the alterations I had made. The self, which had once seemed to end at the boundaries of my body, began to exceed itself. Decisions reverberated beyond the instant in which they were made. Every act entered a chain of relations whose terminus remained inaccessible. The Day of Judgement ceased to resemble a distant event. It became a way of thinking about existence: the suspicion that nothing is complete until the final contour of its effects has disclosed.

In some respects, I never left that classroom.

For months afterward, each morning before school, I climbed onto the roof and searched the sky. Thin clouds spread across the light, softening the edges of the sun until it became difficult to locate precisely. I stood there trying to determine whether it had risen in the east or the west.

Whether the world had remained faithful.

I wanted certainty.

The first time fear entered my life physically was on holiday.

I walked into a bathroom, looked down, and screamed.

“I think I’m dying.”

My mother’s footsteps arrived almost immediately.

Later, we sat together on a bench in the hotel lobby while she explained what had happened to my body. Suitcases crossed the marble floor. The automatic doors opened and closed. People passed carrying towels, drinks, children. Conversations rose and faded in languages I could not understand.

I shifted closer.

My mother continued explaining.

Then she said:

“The angels begin writing.”

“It all counts.”

I remember very little of what she said after that.

Her lips continued moving. The lobby continued around us. Somewhere a suitcase wheel squealed across the marble. The doors sighed open and shut. I sat there working my tongue against the last loose tooth in my mouth, pressing it deeper into the gum until I tasted blood.

13:00. I leave the office carrying a cardboard box with both arms. Not because there’s much inside it, but because it feels heavier if I hold it with one hand. I pass the desks of my colleagues. Nobody really looks up.

My manager, ex-manager, points at an AI-generated finance chart on his screen. “Pretty impressive, right?”

He seems proud.

He doesn’t shake my hand.

15:30. The vacuum cleaner is still broken.

There are crumbs lodged deep in the grooves of the sofa, beyond the reach of fingers. A reality show plays from the television. An auteur film streams on my laptop. An audiobook narrates from my phone.

Three stories at once.

I absorb none of them.

18:30. I force myself outside.

My shoulders hang lower than they should. My heart feels misplaced, as though it has slipped into the wrong part of my body. 110. 111.

The walk is supposed to help.

Sometimes it does.

23:30. I upload my résumés to another website.

The progress bar fills.

The page refreshes.

The document disappears into whatever place résumés go when nobody reads them.

01:00. Bob Dylan.

I think about my grandparents.

I send a message asking if they’re alright.

03:00. Tomorrow I’ll get better things done.

The day I left him, I swore I saw the sun rise from the west.

Long before I met him, I had already outlived many endings. They rarely assumed the proportions of cataclysm. They disclosed themselves quietly, through the smallest disturbances in the fabric of a day. A front door closing. A train departing. Music drifting from another room. The sound seemed unremarkable until much later, when I realised it had marked the conclusion of a world. I had spent years waiting for trumpets, while the endings that shaped me had always preferred quieter instruments.

We held each other for what we already knew would be the final time.

Then, almost instinctively, we began to waltz.

There was no music. Only the peculiar rhythm that remains once language has exhausted itself. We turned slowly, neither attempting to postpone the ending nor hasten it, but accompanying it. It struck me that acceptance possesses its own choreography. We were no longer dancing towards a future. We were escorting one to its conclusion.

Eventually, he let go at my nod, and walked away.

I remained exactly where I was.

Then I heard it.

A whistle.

Miss Nawal.

Twenty-four children appeared around me carrying exercise books pressed against their chests. They moved in single file before quietly forming a circle. None of them looked surprised to find me there. They lowered themselves onto the pavement as though beginning another ordinary lesson.

Miss Nawal wheeled in a board.

She lifted a piece of chalk.

The children opened their notebooks.

Minor signs.

Major signs.

Then they looked up at me. And not with pity.

Their pencils began to move.

They were no longer drawing charts of the Day of Judgement.

They were drawing me.

My life would be rendered almost entirely in verbs. It would not survive as sensation, nor as intention, but as practice. Listened. Protected. Chose. Stayed. Apologised. Forgave. I had always imagined the private life possessed a certain sovereignty, yet the accounting appeared interested only in what had entered the world and altered it. Feeling, however sincere, remained inert until translated into action. The soul seemed less a repository of emotion than a sequence of interventions upon reality.

Only much later did I understand that a life is never simply lived.

It is selected.

We imagine ourselves gathering worlds until a self gradually takes shape. The movement is almost the reverse. A life becomes itself through continual acts of relinquishment. Every choice permits one world to continue while innumerable others quietly lose their claim upon the present. They are extinguished because this reality required their absence. What remains is composed as much by what it excludes as by what it contains. Identity is not the accumulation of what survives. It is the form left behind by everything survival required.

This was the part of the Day of Judgement I had misunderstood. I imagined it as the final evaluation of a completed life. I understand now that it concerns something stranger. The question was never simply whether I had been good. It was what a life is.

The angels were never recording virtue.

They were recording selection.

We mistake survival for necessity because we inherit only the world that remained. Afterwards, every path acquires the appearance of inevitability. Destiny is only the name we give to the surviving world once all the others have fallen beyond our reach.

Hell is the knowledge of the worlds you extinguished by choosing another.

The Day of Judgement restores those worlds to their proper proportion. The unlived ceases to resemble imagination. It stands beside the lived with equal authority. It was one surviving configuration among innumerable others that possessed the same capacity to become real. A life is measured less by what it achieves than by what it relinquishes in order to exist at all.

I once believed existence moved forwards.

Now I think it settles.

Worlds gather beneath worlds. They preserve their own weather, their own languages, their own afternoons suspended before evening.. They do not disappear when they relinquish the present. They continue beneath it, exerting a quiet pressure upon the life that succeeded them. Occasionally the ground gives way-a familiar street, a voice overheard, the smell of rain after heat-and another world briefly recovers its gravity. We call it memory because we have no better word for the persistence of realities that no longer possess the present.

The final reckoning belongs there.

I spent my childhood waiting for the Day of Judgement.

I think I was waiting to see them all at once.

Subscribe now

Do you remember when I was fourteen and swore I would leave? I said it with such certainty then. I remember standing in the kitchen announcing that one day I’d go somewhere bigger, somewhere worthy of me, and never come back. You laughed a little and said, “Go.”

At the time, I took it as a test. Now I think you simply understood something I didn’t yet: leaving and arriving are never the same event.

I don’t know what I imagined, Ma. I think I believed adulthood would greet me ceremonially. Trumpets, perhaps. Or at the very least some finished version of myself waiting on the other side, polished and articulate, carrying trophies that all this wanting had amounted to something.

Instead there was Terminal 4 at Heathrow Airport. Fluorescent lighting crackling with such intensity that it turned the air faintly green. A queue that lasted nearly an hour, everybody clutching folders and passports with the same quiet panic, rehearsing themselves internally before reaching the desk. At the end of it sat a British immigration officer named Khalid.

I remember his eyes most clearly. The whites of them had a yellow tint that made the dark centre glow. I lowered my COVID mask and smiled too hard, dimples out like supporting documents. He stamped my passport without saying a word.

That was it. My grand entrance into the world.

It’s a strange feeling, moving abroad. It’s like teaching your legs how to walk all over again, this time with a different rhythm. Confidence. Certainty. With the hope that, through some slow emotional osmosis, those beliefs might eventually enter me too. Every step, a stomp, deliberate enough to press a mark into the concrete and pebbles beneath me. I am here. I belong.

I learned how to do taxes badly. I memorised the number for the water company I still avoid calling. I have cried in public in ways that would once have felt unbearably exposing back home. I got into fights I never told you about because how do you even begin that conversation? “Hi Ma, today a woman on the 328 called me a bitch and I briefly became feral.”

Still, I overcame it all. Which, increasingly, feels like adulthood’s least glamorous achievement.

I fell in love too. Some of them you know about. Others I buried out of guilt, mercy, or fatigue. There are different versions of me scattered across London now. One crying to her Uber driver after saying too much too quickly. One standing in conversation with the sort of stranger who could empty her pockets and she still would not notice until later. One who never made it to the party. One who attended and spent the entire night calculating how much money I have left.

I keep cornering myself and then trying to write a way out of it afterwards. I hurt people sometimes. I bewilder myself way too much. Leaving Oman taught me I could become almost anything. Anyone. At any time. I think that kind of freedom alters a person strangely. Faced with too many possible selves, I began thinning out at the edges. Becoming slower. Flatter. It is difficult to remain concentrated inside a life with so many directions available to it.

It’s disorienting watching everybody grow older in different directions. You tell me about girls from school who are already married now, women I still remember faking asthma attacks during PE so we could sit against the wall together instead of running laps in the heat. Others are being promoted into offices and institutions we once spoke about with open contempt. Even the girl who used to engrave “fuck the system” into our school desk with white Tipp-Ex correction fluid has grown conservative now. Judgmental. Assimilated almost seamlessly into the very architecture we once imagined ourselves destroying. I suppose this is where revolution goes to die.

And still, in almost every situation, I think about you.

What would Ma do?

How did you carry responsibility without turning bitter from the weight of it? By my age you were already caring for me. I look back at photographs of you holding me with your thin arms and overplucked eyebrows and there is something unbearable about how young you were. Yet to me, you seemed gigantic. Mythic too. You stepped onto your purpose, a cemented road plated in gold, and sped through it.

I’m still reaching toward mine. From where I stand, it looks less like a road than a wooden plank disappearing into fog.

You used to tell me our fate is already written. If that’s true, I think I might be dyslexic. Everything feels difficult to translate lately. Everyone is moving. Time is moving. My body, my friendships, my ambitions. Even memory rearranges itself when I’m not paying attention.

I did stay true to one thing, though. I left.

And even when I come back, I realise something in me never fully returns. You lose something once you leave home long enough. The hills take it from you quietly. You split into two selves and spend years trying to determine which one is real. I have become foreign in both places now. A tourist everywhere. Homesick not for a country, but for my own certainty, arrogance, and naivety.

I want to go back fourteen again Ma, sitting beside you while the television blurted in the background, believing life was something waiting to begin rather than something already slipping through my hands.

Everything is fleeting, Mama.

Even me.

Subscribe now

Share

The downstairs room belonged to her entirely. Even now I remember it less as a room than as a climate. Light entered differently there. Time slowed. The curtains breathed with the afternoon wind coming off the wadi.

Four years ago she died, though I suspect the knowledge of losing a grandmother begins long before death. It begins at family gatherings, when you find yourself studying her hands instead of listening to conversation. Veins surfacing blue beneath the skin. Rings loosening year by year.

Nobody says this aloud, of course.

When you sit beside an elderly relative, there is always a third presence at the table: the awareness of ending. You become conscious, almost against your will, that one day this entire person will exist only through your ability to remember them correctly. Before everything disappears.

“Put your phone away,” my mother would whisper.

“Vicks?” my grandmother would ask a moment later, already opening her worn leather handbag, which smelled of menthol and old receipts.

Yet foresight rarely protects anyone from grief. If anything it deepens the guilt afterwards, because you realize how knowingly you participated in the illusion that things would continue indefinitely.

Her death entered me physically.

My grandmother was half Yemeni and half Kenyan. She grew up in Nairobi and married young. Marriage, for women like her, often functioned less as romance than as geography. A route out. Through it she arrived in Mombasa and trained as a nurse.

She possessed the kind of intelligence that unsettled people slightly. Even in old age she carried herself with the composure of somebody formed elsewhere, by another understanding of womanhood entirely. She watched American films from the fifties obsessively and spoke English in a strange transatlantic cadence inherited from actresses nobody remembered anymore.

My grandfather belonged to another story altogether. A Dhofari man who joined the communist resistance in the South during the civil-war, fighting British soldiers, only later to move to Muscat and spend decades working in finance beside the same structures he once imagined himself dismantling.

As a child I considered this hypocrisy. Later I perceived adulthood differently. Eventually survival enters the room and ideology leaves through the back door pretending not to have been seen.

My grandparents had two daughters. My mother was the youngest. My grandfather died not long after she was born, and as a child I never understood the way my mother spoke about it. She used to say that when her father died, she lost her mother too.

At first I misunderstood her. I thought she meant grief made my grandmother distant. What she meant was more complicated. The woman who raised me: soft-spoken, endlessly patient, was not the woman who raised her.

My mother described somebody sharper. Stricter. A woman exhausted by life. A woman with rough hands and more blood than a body should reasonably be asked to contain.

My mother used to say to me repeatedly when I was younger.

“You’ll understand when you become a mother.”

At the time the sentence irritated me because it seemed designed to end conversation rather than deepen it. Only later did I understand that grandmothers appear fragile chiefly because life has finally loosened its grip around their throats. By the time I knew my grandmother, the worst collisions with living had already passed through her body. Perhaps this is why I loved her with such uncomplicated ferocity.

After she died, I began sleeping with the kanga she prayed in folded beneath my pillow. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wrapped it around myself believing the prayers would reach quietly into my body and wipe whatever heaviness had settled there. Her scarf carried so many colors and patterns that, from a distance, they dissolved into grey.

Grey was the color of that year.

Subscribe now

My aunt saw it through the window and screamed. I startled at the sound, struck the unlock button with my hand, and was pulled out before it reached me.

The neighbours said it was black magic.

It was said a jinn had placed the scorpion in the car. That a child of one and a half could not have pressed the lock by herself. The adults spoke in lowered voices about dark rituals, about an old village in Oman where scorpions were used in spells. No one in my family would touch it. Evil moved through contact, they said, passing from body to body like inheritance.

My grandfather stood outside the gate and whistled for a boy playing football in the street with his cousins. He was thin, almost still a child himself. Eighteen. Nineteen, perhaps. My grandfather asked if he was brave, then held up thirty rials. The boy crossed the road immediately. He took a paper bag, pinched the scorpion between his fingers with a quickness that conveyed hunger more than courage, then ran off carrying it.

I think about him often.

About the ease with which misfortune changes hands. How, in that moment, everyone believed something intended for me could simply be redirected into the body of another person. As though fate were transferable, and suffering only required a substitute. I imagine the scorpion darkening inside the paper bag while he ran through the heat, carrying away what the family feared would otherwise remain with me.

Yet some things do not leave. They circle back. They wait.

My younger sister used to joke that I was born a teenager. I was witty and difficult. I played Peter Pan, spat into my palm, then led the neighbourhood children through the alleyways of the compound where we grew up. I collected personalities the way other girls collected charms. Women from the reality shows my mother watched. Shark Tank contestants. Actresses during press tours smiling too hard beneath studio lighting.

I was, in every visible way, the promise child. The high achiever who seemed to understand her purpose too early. The kind of girl adults speak about in front of you, as though you are already becoming something. The kind who might end up on the Ellen show for being unusually articulate. My parents never needed to announce my successes. They radiated from me whether I wanted them to or not.

My closest confidant at the time was a fake Oprah email address I wrote to almost every night. I typed into the void with terrifying sincerity. See me. See me before something terrible does.

What I did not know was that visibility itself can become a flare.

I felt danger moving underneath things. Beneath floorboards. Concrete. Rock. A bitterness gathering under the surface of my life, waiting for its moment to rise. Every swish became a tail. Every unfamiliar sound a warning.

It gathered inside me like a plastic bag filled with broken glass suspended somewhere near the centre of my body. Any sudden movement threatened to split the seams. Any sharp joy, any small impact, and the shards would scatter through me.

That does something to a teenage girl, living as though a debt is approaching to collect itself. I became angry from the anticipation of it. Bitter. Resentful that while I was still forming, some invisible corrosion was already advancing toward me. Toward my future love life. My health. My career. Toward every soft thing I had not yet learned how to protect.

I grew impatient. Short-fused. Stubborn. I slammed doors hard enough to make the walls answer back. By middle school, I had adopted a new violence. Or maybe it was protection. At that age the two are almost indistinguishable. Girls learn early that venom must reach the mouth before it reaches the heart. That cruelty can function as camouflage, as self-defence, as pre-emptive grief. We sharpen the tongue so the rest of the body may remain untouched.

So I spat poison around myself like a circle of salt, trying to protect whatever softness still remained inside me.

I isolated myself from friends and convinced myself they hated me, or worse, understood me. I believed people could sense my fate long before I could see it myself. The betrayal. The ruin.

I was nineteen when it finally came.

Except it did not reveal itself as a scorpion, nor through the boy in the street carrying it away in a paper bag. It arrived as a girl a few years older than me. A social activist.

I still cannot tell whether what I felt toward her was admiration or alarm. She spoke aloud the things I had only ever permitted to whisper at the back of my mind, then signed her name beneath them without shame. She was fierce in a way that seemed almost curated. Fast-talking to the point conversation became weather. She laughed often, called me babes in the cadence of a Love Island contestant, spoke with the certainty of someone who believed consequences were a form of moral achievement.

I befriended her almost immediately.

She spoke often about curses. About the evil eye. About the trauma she carried from her past, parasites still feeding on her daily life, our conversations, everything around her. I recognised something in it. Whatever had followed me through childhood had once brushed against her too.

She was everything I was not. Everything in her moved outward while everything in me turned inward and calcified. I cannot say whether I felt admiration or fear standing beside her, only that proximity to her made me feel temporarily defended. Perhaps part of me believed danger, for once, might choose somebody louder.

We became inseparable. The closer we moved toward one another, the louder everything became. Noise entered every corner of my life until I could no longer hear the quieter instincts that had once tried to protect me. The slight rupture in the atmosphere before disaster reveals itself. In her presence silence ceased to exist, and with it disappeared my ability to distinguish danger from devotion.

Looking back, the signs were everywhere. Violence in its larval form. Hidden carefully between bursts of laughter, confessions, ecstatic speeches about justice, suffering, love.

What joined us was not goodness, nor even similarity, but a mutual fascination with ruin. We recognised in each other the private conviction that suffering had marked us as exceptional. That our wounds carried a depth other people lacked. It is an intoxicating belief when young, to imagine your brokenness not as tragedy, but as evidence of special perception.

The closer we became, the more we sanctified the worst parts of ourselves in each other.

I was already at my lowest when it happened.

The pill. The sting.

The venom moved fast. Neurotoxic. Hallucinatory. It coursed through my bloodstream with such violence that the world began to molt at its edges. One scorpion became three. Their tails quivered in every corner of my vision. Heat flooded my body in waves. Sweat gathered along my lip and collarbone while my lungs searched desperately for coolness, for oxygen, for escape. I remember clawing at the door handle as though the car itself had become an exoskeleton sealing shut around me.

There was laughter. Screaming. Lies. My neighbour’s voice somewhere in the distance. The village. The boy with the paper bag. It felt as though every omen from my childhood had returned at once to stand around me and watch.

I cried in that car for what felt like hours. Folded inward like something scorched by its own atmosphere. Sweat cooled slowly against my skin. Crescent wounds formed in my palms where my nails had entered deeply enough to return me to the body.

Then I looked out the window.

A child had climbed onto the hood of the car. One and a half years old. Small enough that her fist still resembled a closed flower.

She began knocking against the glass.

A tut at first.

Then harder.

Faster.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Until it no longer sounded like knocking, but terror.

The streetlights fractured around her face. My own reflection kept swallowing her, then releasing her back. I watched her mouth open into a scream I could not hear through the glass. Her palm smeared against the window searching for the button. Desperate now. Certain something terrible was trapped inside.

Subscribe now

I would know.

We were giants then. We lived among the leaves of a tree that seemed without terminus, its roots moving beneath the earth like vast vascular systems, stemming from the seed of our soul.

The city diminished beneath our feet. Buildings appeared provisional. Distances collapsed. Every future felt attainable. Every loss remained theoretical.

You see, love possesses a cunning capacity for metaphysical enchantment. It persuades two regular people that what they are experiencing is the first of its kind. That we were exempted from ill-fate.

Every discord swelled to a mythic scale. What was a murmur between us reverberated below as thunder. Each step forward shook the town, knocking over a gaslight, splintering a fence, nudging a home from its place,  while the wreckage passed unnoticed between our toes.

The yellowing of our tree began almost imperceptibly.

A attenuation of sorts. A leaf paling at its edge. Fruit arriving with a softness that concealed decay. Branches that no longer reached towards the sun with the same certainty.

I became devoted to maintenance. To intervention. To the fantasy that enough care could suspend the laws of deterioration. I watered roots already feeding upon themselves. Pruned branches already surrendered to calcification. Dug my nails in the soil searching for evidence that growth remained possible.

You watched.

Occasionally helping. More often observing. Then chewing through the fruit and spitting the seeds into the dirt.

I never understood that impulse.

The need to subject something living to endless tests of endurance. The need to create a maze to a solution standing nose to nose with you.

Crickling under your effort, sprouted the rot. Mould bloomed beneath the bark. Fire ants fleeing at the stomp of your feet. Words breeding in the dark entanglement of roots. A violent parasitical coup gathering between jokes, beneath your finger pressing the volume of more reality television.

Years passed in this manner. My labour intensified as hope diminished.

At some point, without noticing, I became smaller. My skin shriveled like an oversized costume that no longer had my name in its tag. I swam in the remains of someone who once was, cutting flesh for a way out, a tunnel to breathe.

When our tree finally collapsed, the sound was almost disappointingly small. The quiet completion of a process long underway.

The roots surfaced briefly from the earth, exposed in all their terrible fragility. Those great veins we had trusted revealed themselves to be thin strands moving through the dirt. You pulled one free. Stretched it in the tether of your soft hands and made music from it.

I sat with you on the cracked earth and listened until you sang the last of its hymn.  The same chorus I once danced to, now repeated and unbelievable. There, among the fallen husks and splintered limbs, stood the true devastation.

And that, I think, is what finally undid me. We were only left with footprints, only left with hunger.

Gilbert Garcin

London in the summer has a different engine to it. People are always transiting in this city. Just last week, I trampled over an 8-year-old boy; his mother told me, with bitterness, that he was fine through my influx of distant apologies. Bus drivers hate me here, always delaying them as I chase them up the street, honking, when my “thank you” is too buried between my prostration and abjection.

I try to always find a seat on public transport. I rudely cut off charging bystanders. I only give it up to old people, mothers, and pregnant women. Children too, when I’m sure I won’t get light-headed or dizzy. I get tired often. Food’s only function seems to be to bloat. Water, I’m sure, seems to stream through a system different from hydration. And, like every twenty-something, my sleep is unreliable.

This city that I’ve come to call home cloaks me in a way that both locates and oppresses me.

R, the outside world, to me, is combative and hostile. The experiences I recollect are simply my commute to and from work. This morning I tried to ease the commute, cushion the extremities. I went out with no makeup.

For most people, that seems like an average statement. A glass raised to natural beauty. Alicia Keys-esque. No. My genetics made my natural face look tired, rougher. It often propelled people to ask me what was wrong, and whether I smoked weed. Shockingly, no.

Sitting on the 9 a.m. Tube, I felt ugly, R. Every glance given, or every instance of being ignored, was a reminder of that. I imagined my face peeling off and a newer one, a better one, being sewn in its place. A prettier version of myself. The kind that appears after FaceTune or hours in a makeup chair.

This feeling is not necessarily insecurity, R. It’s that, through time, I’ve met a prettier version of myself. Not just through an app, but through makeup and small alterations to my teeth, my chin. A good haircut. I know what she looks like. However, maintaining that image, the constant effort to soften my harsh features and crooked nose, is an amendment that is both draining and time-consuming.

Today, I pictured Emily Ratajkowski taking my place. Which is pathetic, as I know I look nothing like her. I walked the way I assumed she would, acted, and lifted my chin into model composure.

Then I realized, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

How depressing is it that all this comes to mind over simply going somewhere to work? How depressing to torture myself and compare myself to a higher image, because that is where I settled on what pretty looks like. The concept that if I do not layer makeup, or carefully place minimalistic, expensive products to create my version of natural, or pretty, or presentable, then I am deserving of this torment, is such bullshit.

That mindset is a room I called a house. One I only had to walk out of to set myself free.

So today, R, I sat on the Tube. I looked tired. My skin looked uneven. My nose remained crooked. A biker walked in. A woman chewed loudly, while someone opposite called a friend in a foreign language. Colleagues gossiped, and couples sloppily made out. Nothing transformed. And nothing happened.

I should explain.

I am someone who becomes overwhelmed by everything so completely that I often end up achieving nothing at all. Emails could delay my 9 a.m. start until noon. Assignments looked impossible. Even replying to text messages could feel like standing before some invisible wall.

I began feeding everything into AI.

I still altered the responses slightly, deleting the [—], replacing certain phrases, even including a spelling error, one in specific.

I had always been a poor speller. My grammar lagged embarrassingly behind the velocity of my thoughts. Yet internally there existed entire worlds. Passages. Images. Emotional cartographies. Psychic architectures so dense and overdetermined that they often collapsed into inarticulacy the moment I tried to express them aloud. At the time, AI felt like a translation. A doorway between the theatre of the mind and the theatre of life. It accomplished in seconds what I would spend hours psychically preparing myself to do: externalise.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, my identity, work, and art began to exist through the lens of AI. Its leniency toward the rule of three. Its repetition of the word “arrived.” Its conceptual, essayistic cadence. And honestly, maybe I spent so much time in university around it that I adopted its rhythm. Maybe all language is contamination eventually. Even this paragraph might bear its residue.

Like everyone else, I have since read the arguments. The ethics of AI. The questions surrounding originality. Its counterargument: whether any art is ever truly original and not borrowed. The metaphysical rhetoric of inevitability. But if I am honest, I do not yet feel equipped to contribute meaningfully to those conversations. And honestly, I do not care, at least not right now. What interests me instead is the ontological condition behind the use of AI. Why do people reach toward it?

I think, subconsciously, I had always justified using AI for the systems that already drained us anyway. I do not think I should take ten minutes out of my day to write an email to a bank. Or to my council. Or bureaucracy. Or Thames Water. (I have always believed water should be free. Or failing that, included among the things one imagines Council Tax is ostensibly for. There is something faintly absurd to me about a state capable of financing foreign wars while posting increasingly threatening letters about unpaid utilities. But this is another argument entirely.) I digress. AI seems valid when used to respond to systems that treat me like a component in a machine. Art, on the other hand, feels different. Art was one of the few spaces left where imperfection still possessed value. No one forces a person to make a film or write a play. Art emerges from obsession, melancholia, disaffection, erotic fixation, boredom, longing. From catastrophic self-awareness. To automate that felt wrong.

Until I tried it.

You see, after university the colour of life merged and diffused into a violent grey. Life narrowed into a repetitive cycle. Wake up. Apply for jobs. Try to finish scripts. Send emails. Reapply for grants. Meanwhile my head remained flooded with stories, scenes, art. Entire films unfolding internally while my actual life remained in a state of purgatory. There is a particular kind of existential vertigo that comes from possessing ideas you cannot materialise. I began to wonder whether this was perhaps my own imprisonment. Or whether this state was part of some larger spiritual lesson, the universe stationing me until I was ready to move into the next phase. For the first time, it forced me to stand face to face with the privilege and risk of being an artist.

One evening I downloaded an AI video generator. I spent hours feeding it drawings I had sketched, lines from potential scripts I had rushed into my notes app, descriptions copied directly from my journals. When the final image appeared on screen, it looked almost exactly like the image I had been replaying privately inside my head for weeks.

And I cried.

Dramatic, I KNOW. But confronting something that had existed only internally and suddenly seeing it externalised into physical form felt almost unbearable. Less because of how accurate and clear the image was, but because it confirmed two irreconcilable truths simultaneously: that the ideas inside me possessed substance, and that I lacked the access, resources, and infrastructure to fully realise them myself.

It made me sick.

I circled around what it could have been. In the corner of my North London flat, I mourned a crew I never befriended and swore to remain close to, only to never see again. I grieved the long treks to locations, the poor catering, the arguments about how horrible the first AD is. It could have been exhaustion, compromise, and chaos. Instead, what it cost me was £4.99 and three minutes.

Perhaps this is what AI collapses most efficiently: the entire emotional and social architecture surrounding creation itself. The accretion of experience through which art acquires texture, memory, and affective residue.

And yet I still cannot fully condemn it.

For people without funding, without institutional access, without equipment, without connections, AI is a translator of sorts. A temporary bridge between interior life and visible form. How ethical or exploitative will remain a debate, what feels more urgent to me is the question beneath the question: why have so many artists reached a point where artificial creation feels more accessible than human creation?

Perhaps the real crisis is not technological but structural. Who is allowed time to make art? Who can afford failure? Which flaws are permitted to survive?

I think often about how many films, paintings, and plays we now consider masterpieces would disappear beneath the hypervisibility and impossible standards of contemporary criticism. How many fragile, amateur, strange works would never survive our demand for immediate brilliance and marketability.

If we truly care about preserving human art, then we have to preserve the conditions that allow humans to create in the first place. Access to funding. Time. Community. Space for experimentation. Space for bad work. Space for unresolved work and bad spelling. Especially for artists in the Global South, where artistic standards land harsher, and where the journey toward visibility can feel less like recognition and more like an endless negotiation with distance, money, identity, and permission.

AI will not replace art because it is better. It will replace it because, for many people, it is becoming one of the only doorways left open. Which is why the solution cannot simply be a moral instruction to “not use it.” People do not lean toward artificial creation in a vacuum. They reach toward it after years of precarity, invisibility, economic hardship, and closed gates. The crisis is not merely that these technologies exist, but that so many artists have been left standing outside the conditions required to create without them.

If you wished to understand me, you would have to begin here : with the fact that I was born a seed placed in soil that never quite took. Over the course of my life, I was sown and plucked by the various people who encountered me, each believing they understood the source of my ailment. Sometimes the soil was warm. Sometimes cold. Each time, I was spat back out, brittle and shelled. Nothing held long enough for roots to deepen. No branches came. No fruit hung low enough for the townsmen to gather from.

You see, my condition revoked the possibility of citizenship. I belonged to no land. My sense of patriotism extended only to the women in my family, who placed within me a violent fire of rebellion and rage, then fed me enough ice to freeze it before it ever reached my mouth. Enough restraint to keep me from the place they knew never to go.

And so, at 8:25 a.m., standing in the school assembly line, I sang and saluted to them.

At first it resembled any regular school assembly. Then something beneath the surface shifted. The ground seemed to crack at its seams. For a moment I felt the suggestion of something infernal below us, waiting patiently beneath the tiled floors. Only later did I realise that us, the seedlings, the girls, insufficiently anchored to anything solid, always sensed chaos and collapse.

That morning, I had taken my exercise book into the bathroom with the intention of copying out answers before first period. I remember standing at the sink with my pen uncapped in my hand when I heard the sound from the stall beside me.

It was hard to recognise. The sound, almost mechanical, too raw and immediate to belong within the logic of the school day. Then I understood it was the cry of a newborn child.

There you were behind the locked stall door, bent over the baby you had delivered in secret, your head shaking slightly, your body no longer recognised what it had done. The tiles wet and stained with a strange pink fluid. An irony of your body screaming: it’s a girl.

I have often thought that perhaps it was then I should have fed myself more ice. Perhaps then my hands should have learned to resemble yours, overgrown with ivy and thorns, capable of shielding what was soft beneath them. Perhaps it was then, at seventeen, before Miss Ruwaida’s class, that I should have understood the promise I was making to you.

I compared prices. Turned my face into a small budget. Very me. If there’s a crisis, at least let it be itemised. If I’m spiralling, at least let it be cost-effective.

Then the pain came. Not the tension of TMJ, it was a sting away from my jaw. Something sharper. Two points at the back of my mouth, pulsing.

My wisdom teeth. Both of them. Of course both. Why suffer once when you can bundle it.

It felt like a bell to a door with no handles, no locks or keys. Just went on ringing.

So I turned to what I always do when something in my life goes wrong. I went to Instagram.

Salt water.

Clove oil.

Corsodyl.

And to be fair that did work but it wasn’t enough. It felt like putting a scented candle in a burning house and saying this is fine. This is ambience.

I started preparing for surgery. The practical one and yes, the social one as well. The people around me were almost excited. The videos that would be taken. The aftermath of me post surgery. Chipmunk cheeks. The Ellen DeGeneres Show style comedy. How it would be shared and posted. Made me wonder if the only bit of the magic and excitement was the clownery of it. Video or it didn’t happen.

I used to love losing my teeth. I grew up with funny ones, the kind that a dentist would both sigh and Cha-Ching to. Mine suggested a puzzle, a Picasso piece to put it simply. There was no charm to it.

There used to be a girl in my 2nd grade class who also had massive gaps, how the yearbook committee would ask for her photo and she’d smile, teeth out, eyes squinting. Bunny-like. Adorable. Sweet. I remember trying to enact that and getting told, one more, teeth shut. Mine always hung too low, too heavy. Like they arrived before the rest of me.

But still, there was a sense of magic to it.

The fairies I would picture floating around. My mother as Tinkerbell, slipping money under my pillow. It was an unspoken promise that loss meant growth and growth was to be rewarded. Now, if tooth fairies were put into the White House, that would be a system I could get behind.

Older now, and it seems the tooth fairies replaced pixie dust with ketamine and are too busy in a K-hole to make it up to my third floor flat in North London. Maybe they’re priced out. Maybe they’ve unionised. Maybe they decided I wasn’t worth the climb.

Instead I was left wrapped in the headscarf my grandmother prayed in, fighting the cold that shrilled into me.

Cooking ramen, saving and avoiding being broke for another few hours. Scrolling.

I’ve been doing a lot of that. In the last two weeks, my Instagram hours add up to three full days. Three days I can’t account for. Which feels less like losing time and more like donating it to a corporation that does not know my name. Or worse, knows me too well.

I set a screen limit. Ignored it. Of course I did. Nothing makes me want something more than my phone telling me I’ve had enough. Authority has never worked on me, not even parental, definitely not digital.

I think about how easily time becomes something you give away. How seconds feel like half breaths. Fifteen seconds easily exhaled.

Causes.

Lives.

“Yearning.”

“Living your twenties.”

Versions of a life that feels just out of reach.

Work harder. Become more. Be someone.

It builds, and builds, and builds. The sun slipping into darkness, darkness thinning into that pale 5 a.m. blue. All of it passing without weight. Like it never asked for permission to go. Like it’s not even rude about it.

And still, the tooth ached.

A small, steady ring. Something I couldn’t scroll past. Couldn’t optimise. Or turn into anything else. No filter. No angle. Just pain doing its job. Very committed. I respect it.

I started to feel sick. Bloated. With my dry eyes, my stomach, my mouth. Took myself out, went to watch a play at the National Theatre. Summerfolk.

A Russian play by Maxim Gorky. An elite group of people, crooks, artists, poets, writers lounging around their summer house in Russia. Complaining. Yearning. Speaking on wanting to not live and doing nothing about it. Conforming to their shitty marriages, cushioning themselves in their own privilege. Chatting on world problems, country problems as their servants serve the tea to fuel the conversations, and watchmen clean the mess they leave after they’re done emptying their chests and resting their heavy heads on a bed someone else made.

The play was 2 hours and 45 minutes long. During the interval I couldn’t help but overhear the girls sat right in front of me. Intellectualizing. Speaking on the now empty seats. “Russian plays are not for everyone.” And what that sounded like was “Russian plays are not for anyone.” Which is a sentence that manages to be both ironic and unbearable and somehow still repeated.

I held that comment in my throat for the rest of the play, watching the people around me. Their cued laughter. Their sync scoffs. Their cheers. Perfectly timed. Like we’d all rehearsed being human.

And something acidic and guttural sunk in.

We are the Summerfolk.

We chopped a forest and made a home. A comfortable home to yearn, to complain, to scroll, to order, while someone else cleans up our mess. To go back to our overpriced accommodations and tie ourselves to causes, to scream, with empty actions and fifteen second drives until it’s forgotten. A performance of care. A dress rehearsal for a life we keep postponing. Tickets available now.

And I, similar to Varvara, felt repulsed. By the room. By the city. By my phone. By our loud voices and wants. By our overeating and waste. By our fire that burns. By our lack of action and chat for a better world. A better place to rest. I think we rest alright. I think people find comfort in how they rest. Find comfort in seeing a homeless woman walking barefoot into a stream of piss from a finance man laying off the edge, deciding that is not their problem. I think people are okay with silence dressed up as awareness. Doomscrolling through an algorithm curated by the very same right wing medias they’re protesting. I think it’s an illness.

And I think I’m sick too. Not terminal. Just… embarrassingly symptomatic. Manageable if ignored, which is unfortunately my specialty.

I had my consultation. £60. My wisdom teeth only needed cleaning. Said I might’ve been picking at it to cause the inflammation. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. They did the cleaning, sent me on my way with some more mouthwash.

And here I am. Instagramless. Standing at the sink, my confession booth, my Corsodyl. Trying to gurgle the rot out of my mouth.

Waiting to see what remains when the ringing stops, when the room is cleared and I’m still in it, comfortable.

Snooze Quest, Dir. Victoria Vincent (2025)

Gone is the chill after the season’s last warm shower, flesh struck to cold tiles, where my body soils and flowers.

Gone, the sack of skin, where my bones relapse, a chirrup, a cling: my pennies fall, spilling loose into scattered cash.

A swallow of seeds, whole, and turn to the sun, will it split me open, or beat like a drum?

I am the mime, I am the soldier, the king’s choir; I let it rot, a spark adrift in oil and water.

Pacing, racing, the kindergarten scent, baked goods, chalk dust, playground repent. when the flame licks the surface, I’ll climb to the bough, treehouse swaying, saving the village from a woman’s vow.

I’ll cradle the coal, lay my hands to the stake, aged and of wheat, soft and easy to break. At the table, a seat, with flowers laid bare; ash beneath children’s laughter

Oh, she was just a sweet fare. 🎭

Feel the tremor rip through the ground, I linger still, pushing our ghosts to march the square, uphill. when the bells toll, my pulse will ring loud, leaping from trees, from chimneys, from doors, to the place where my last petal bows.