I am always loyal to something terrible that has not happened yet. I wait like a spouse home alone, dishes undone in the sink, rice burnt and overcooked. I keep waiting for a guest who will never arrive, all my fine china homesick for the arms that would break them. Thirty-seven trillion cells in my body, and thirty-seven trillion different ways things could go wrong. Like a dark piece of coal that only knows how to burn, like an alligator that only knows how to bite, like luck that only knows how to stay away from me, I only know how to imagine the worst.

I await disasters at every turn of the street, with every step that I take. I write romances of my body kissing the road, the walls, a car. And then I feel guilty for all the consequences that will never happen. I am so in love with bad endings. Not that I want them, I just desire them. I had one happen once, and that is all I can think of worth having now. Do you ever think the antelope wanted the tiger to sink its teeth deep into its flesh? Maybe the only way to not feel disgusting is to have yourself ripped apart by a predator. At least it is touching me because it needs to, not out of pity, not out of mercy.

I would rather have raw violence than pretentious silence. I would rather have you gouge my eyes out with your bare hands than watch you pretend that you are okay with me. I think I would rather be hurt by someone who wanted to hurt me than be loved by someone who was only pretending to. At least then I would know what was happening to me. At least the pain would not have to dress itself up as something kind.

Every morning I wake up surprised that the ceiling has not buried me beneath its rubble yet. I anticipate ruin so faithfully that I sometimes imagine swallowing coffee while it is still hot, letting it burn its way down my throat until I can no longer call out your name. I do not know why I keep thinking of having you when I do not even want you. What is the use of a cure when there is no disease left to destroy? What is the use of a knife when there is no crime to stab into? I hope you never happen to me, yet I cannot let anything else invade my mind. I hope there is no war, but my body is already on its knees, surrendering.

I keep rehearsing ways to apologize before I have even done anything wrong. I know I cannot see the future, but I know with even greater certainty that it will not unfold the way I want it to. It never rains when I carry an umbrella, the bus never comes when I am on time, and I know these are only coincidences, but I love letting them dictate how I see everything that is yet to greet me. Perhaps this is what I have made of uncertainty, a religion of small disappointments, each coincidence is just another scripture telling me that I was right to be afraid.

I know what you are telling me. I know I cannot stay paralyzed by things I have not even experienced yet. I know there is a rational explanation for everything, and that life is not a person waiting to get me. But this feels so good. This rot tastes so familiar. I have built a home out of this delusional pessimism, and I do not want to run away from it. So, keep going. Keep trying to reassure me with every example you can think of, trying to make it all make perfect sense. Tell me that the ceiling will hold, that the bus will come, that the rain will wait until I have somewhere dry to hide. Tell me that you are not everyone else. I will listen. I will understand. And I will still imagine that you are going to treat me exactly the way everyone else did.

This is not fear. This is just me drowning in an ocean that I know. This is me getting lost in an old place. This is me surviving in a universe that is terrible but still predictable. So, keep telling me about all the good things that might happen. I will listen to all of them. I know how it is going to end anyway.

I know, this is not a guide on how to survive something that has not happened yet. This is just my love letter to all the tears that are on their way. This is me telling my tragedy that my arms are already wide open.

-Cal, 9:59 P.M

I am in your way, a familiar eyesore, a damsel in distress,
run to me and run me over with your sweet abandonment.
Your headlights are my favorite color, but why are you flashing them
if you never intended to save me?
I can hear your guilt growl beneath the bonnet, but
I will not make a mess, hit me like a meteor, let me sink beneath this road.
Do it again and again,
until there is no evidence of me turning back to look at you,
until there is no trace of you never doing the same.
Let these trees be witness to our romantic apocalypse,
I always wanted to write a horror story, and
You always hoped I’d leave so you wouldn’t have to,
But I am planted firm into your soil, with deep, dirty roots,
You will have to pull me out like a weed,
And you don’t need a scarecrow after, because I will not return.
My hands nor my soap can wash you off my skin,
the absence of your touch will always haunt my hands.
So, do not leave me here, half alive, half dead,
there are other scavengers; you don’t have to consume me.
I am tired of standing, and my legs refuse to divorce you.
Race over, and do not stop when you hear me drop,
like a ripe fruit falling into nobody’s lap.
I will roll down this hill like an insignificant stone,
until my warm flesh finds the cold river.
It is not murder if there is no body, no scream.
End this like a sin you need not answer for.
I will remain behind,
like a forgotten homeland,
full of landscapes you no longer look at from your window.

-Cal, 10:03 PM.

Make a clean incision on my skin, between my ribs,

with your black-painted nails, several inches in,

like you’re looking for something

in that old cupboard in your room.

Gently sweep my ripe, rose-colored muscles apart,

with your fingers, go on,

until your hands kiss my white bones.

Expose my insides to the sky that is your pretty face.

Slouch down and breathe into my heart,

as if you’re blowing on a child’s scraped knees.

Bring summer to these homesick nerves,

let them bask beneath the two warm suns that are your eyes.

Let everything that doesn’t smell like you bleed away.

Reach in, make love to my arteries and veins,

damage them in such a way that I think of you whenever it hurts.

Keep digging in, until you’re elbows deep into my spine,

until my soul memorizes the lines across your palms.

Let me rewrite your fate with my organs,

while you strangle everything that’s ugly inside of me.

Let your hands stay here,

until they build me a country of softness.

I want to shed this body that leaves claws on everything it touches.

Let me become a novel of your touch,

a rhyme of your favorite sonnet.

I do not want to heal, I want to become familiar

with all that is you, with all that makes you.

I see salvation on your brown-stained lips.

Do not leave, not until I know you

the way rain knows the ground.

-Cal, 19:50 Pm.

I do not know how to show affection,
but I know how to make your mother like me while we talk in the kitchen.
She tells me your face was as soft as the dough she’s preparing for breakfast.
I do not tell her that you never liked the way she cooked eggplant.
She says your stomach could never handle spice,
that you always preferred your food soft,
that you liked to eat it while it was still warm.

So I wonder how you ever came to know my hands,
hands as cold as the metal chairs at the workplace you hate,
skin that was never warm,
yet somehow still left blisters on your fingers,
like I was something you were never meant to touch,
yet you reached for me anyway,
the way you held on to a toy you could never bring yourself to throw away,
even after you had stopped playing with it.

I stand in every place where you made memories inside your home,
as if I can still feel the floor damp
from the coffee you spilled when you were fourteen.
I run my fingers across the walls
as though they are concrete grass,
hoping I might pass over every crack
your hands once scaled,
almost like your past found me
before your present ever did.
Your mother tells me you never drew on them,
that you were a good boy.
I do not tell her that I am your canvas,
and that you drew fireflies across my back.

Your mother gets to talk to someone,
while I get to fall in love with so many people,
the person you were,
the person you are,
and the ones I never got to know.
She tells me how you like your salt,
and I hate that there is so much of you
That I will never experience firsthand.

Your mother tells me that cooking is always unfinished business.
There is always a better way to add ingredients,
a finer way to chop the onions,
a kinder way to balance the flavors.
And I tell her that love is the same.
It is always an unfinished story.
There are a million different ways of holding you that I will never know,
and you will never see me all the ways you could.
But it is okay, we have to eat anyway.
I cannot stop loving you in anticipation of how I could do better.

I will never tell your mother thank you,
but I will eat everything she put on the plate.

By Cal, 1343 pm.

Dearest ,

Will you? Dig your fingers into my flesh until I bleed, then use my blood as ink to engrave your name into the craters on my face. Kiss my scars until you can taste the bitterness of healed skin hiding wounds that never did. Cradle my neck with your hands, and hold it gently enough to strangle the grief that clings to it. Look into my eyes so I can remember what I look like through the reflection in yours. Hold me like a child, and love me the way a father doesn't. Let's burn our house down and build another with nothing but windows and no doors, because no one will ever have to leave. And instead of saying I love you, let's keep telling each other that everything will be okay, until those words become a home we don't want to run away from.

Cal.

I am surrounded by eight billion walls, each facing its back to me in a different direction. They have names, relationships, and bodies. I have held these walls, kissed their foreheads, and held their hands. I did not save them, but I kept them from drifting away. I let their every sorrow stain my clothes and skin. I never minded the consequences of being there for someone. So now I sit in this room, surrounded by them. None of their eyes rest on me, none of their hands find mine. I am being wedded to their silence, condemned to share a bed with strangers who speak my language but have never learned the words I need to hear. They are devotees of a deity gone mad. They know not how to pray for a god, nor how to save an ocean from a flood. And I do not know how to suffer properly. I only know how to bang my head against the wall. I only know how to stop someone from screaming by shocking them with something even more horrible. I only know how to stop hurting by making it hurt even more. It makes sense, though. You cannot amputate one of my arms if I have already sacrificed both of them. It hurts far more, but at least that hurt is mine.

I wear human skin, but in truth I am a well, opening its belly for you to spit your undesirables into. And just because there are no steps inside me does not mean I do not want you to come in. Just because I do not fall apart does not mean I have not already collapsed. I am made of mud bricks; I, too, wash away when it rains too much. I am not a miracle. I am not something that appears at the right time. I licked the salt of your tears from your face. I ignored the rotten smell of your wounds. But that does not mean I am without eyes, without a nose, or without a tongue. I am just as fucked up as you are, perhaps even more. So why do you treat me as though I were a vaccine to your diseases, the martyr to your crusade? I am not holy. I have my own gospels of ruin. I have needed you just as much as you have needed me. Do you think your mother fed you from what was left because she wasn’t hungry?

You have ten fingers, yet you cannot make room for five of mine? Or perhaps the walls are afraid I will turn them back into what they once were. Since you told me what happened to you, perhaps you think I have become it. You feel naked because I know the shape of your insecurities. I have made love to your sadness, swallowed your broken teeth. That is why you stay away. I remind you of everything that went wrong with you. But I am not a railway station, and you are not a train. Yet you rest your weight on me as though I were a platform, and leave all the same.

I am made of 206 people. Every bone I have, I have made into a home for someone else. That is why I have never broken any of them. What if they cracked open and your worst came back to you? Just because you cannot see them does not mean they do not exist. Every emotion I have exorcised from you still lives inside me, clinging to my muscles the way cobwebs cling to abandoned furniture. My eyes bulge with all the images I have stolen from your worst memories. My ears ring without end, repeating every terrible thing someone once taught you to believe about yourself. And my legs are not those of a prophet. I cannot heal anything. When my bridges and dams come undone, I hope these walls do not blame me for not being enough.

You will still call me an angel, even though I am not flying. The more you sanctify me, the more you canonize me, the less you have to see me. It is always easier to worship what you refuse to understand. Because I will always be what you need, and never what you are. And you will never again be what you were. I am surrounded by everything and everyone I have ever loved, and I am going to bleed to death amidst their indifference.

By Cal.

Sins, they come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. They are not bare; they have bodies. My first sin was the violence of my birth. They had to pull me out of my mother’s womb by taking it apart; instead of hands, they had to use a scalpel. My entire existence is nothing but an extension of that violence, that sin. I was bathed clean of the blood from that violence, but their hospital soaps couldn’t prevent the river of guilt that was seeping into my nostrils, flooding my lungs, and causing sepsis in them that would grow up like a sibling inside me. My skin grew, my bones became denser, and so there was more room for that sin to make a home in. Every time I fell down and my body tore open into wounds, I was afraid that the violence of my genesis would spill out. That violence became familiar with my every nerve, and before I became a teen, every one of my organs became one of its colonies. And just like that, my body divorced itself from me and became a vessel for my original sin. It never hurt me. It never gave me a fatal disease. But whenever something good was happening, it always made me dream of the worst. I used to have nightmares, but eventually I became one myself.

And then sins started happening to me. My flesh, my lips, and my first kiss—they were all stolen. Instead of the warmth of the childhood sun, I was introduced to the heat of bodies heavier than mine. It felt good. It felt horrible. I let my virginal thighs kiss so many faceless bodies because, even though the worst was happening, I was still gleeful that they desired me. I started to fight the sin inside me by adopting the worst part of everyone else. Every time I talked to someone or was touched by someone, I stole a piece of their violence and forced it to fight the one inside me. It resulted in something grotesque, like the aftermath of a horrible accident on the road: blood everywhere, with no one coming to pick up the bodies or to clean the concrete. Everyone was okay with ruining their clothes with the massacre of my soul. Before I could realize it, I had directed a never-ending horror movie starring myself, repeating every mistake in a million different ways while still producing the same consequence. Nothing I change can result in anything else.

So I gave in. I became a barren mountain where millions of withered fireflies twinkle with stolen light. I became the lighthouse of a shore where there is no sand. Only my skin remains, upon which the waves of everything that is wrong with this world keep crashing. I don’t complain. I let my apocalypse consume me raw. Everyone is born a sinner, but I was born a sin. I was on my knees, fully obedient to this violence, my heirloom. And because it never complained of the stench, I bled into its lap until I was as pale as the whites of my eyes.

Twenty-two years later, I have become something that even God could take refuge in. Not because I am pure, but because I am merely a familiar place for your uneasy memories. I will make you so comfortable, so at home with your worst, that you will no longer fear it. I cannot redeem you; I can, however, kiss your hands so intimately that all your violence will come running to me as though I had always been their mother.

Such tender, soft muscles I possess,
No wonder knives keep slipping onto them.
Have a taste; part my skin with your hands, Moses.
Break this lamb’s neck like a rotten fruit’s stem.
I am spread like soil; ruin me, do not give me roses.
Let me baptize you from everything you condemn.

- Cal.

Before I join the dear departed,
There are so many places that I want to witness,
But since luck has never kissed my lips, I request you:
Can my ghost make a home in the white space of your eyes?
Let it see all that you will and may,
I promise it won’t ever come between your way.
Let it see more shades of yellow and blue,
Of mangoes that you may eat, and of the skies that you always wanted to rule.

Since my imagination has never morphed into shapes,
Can my ghost make a home in your hands?
Let it feel the warm fur of all the cats that you may call to,
And let it drown with your hands when you dip them into cold water in summer.

Since God never descended upon my palms,
Can my ghost make a home in your prayer?
Let it listen to the songs of temple bells as you cry silently between rituals.
And if you promise to let my ghost smell the scent of those beautiful florals,
And let it commit blasphemy with you at midnight every weekend,
I promise to eat all the curses that we may accumulate in the end.

Before I join the dear departed,
Let my ghost make a home in all the parts of you that live.
Let it give a eulogy to all the things that I wanted to do and grieve.
As the maggots tear me apart piece by piece,
Let me breathe in monsoon’s wet soil once again before I leave.

I promise I’ll tell all good things of you to the black-clad reaper,
So when it’s your time, your ghost will be held softer.
At the end of the year, you can let my ghost go,
But only after it has embraced at least a little bit of snow.

Before I join the dear departed,
You’d let me possess you, wouldn’t you?
Not to harm anything or anyone,
But to cheat death for once through only you.

by Cal at 20:11 hours, Thursday.

I have always been a place,
Orphaned between your home and your destination,
A gas station next to the highway in the middle of nowhere,
Come barge in, I never lock the doors anyway,
I’m not a scary place, I’m married to your pit stop,
I am neither abandoned nor claimed,
My dirty tiles, your dusty boots, come on in,
Let your thirst do romance with my ever-full shelves of bottled water,
I will never run out of things, there aren’t enough people,
My walls won’t complain of your beer breath,
Nor will they mind your cigarette ash-ridden shirt,
Come inside like it’s your home, but one that doesn’t scold or talk back,
I have empty tables, I’ll serve you my limbs on new plastic plates,
Do not worry, I can always grow new parts,
I am yours,
Till the next person, next son or daughter comes into me,
You will leave before I can learn your last name,
The next one will always come after I forget you, though,
Consume this meat with your bare hands,
I won’t give you any knives or spoons,
I want to experience your hunger raw,
We’ll pray with our hands clasped together,
You will cry, laugh, and then ask me to kill you,
But I will take your sins and skins into my soft hands,
I will hold them like you’re my child,
I cannot heal you, but you tell me that I did anyway,
But I am achingly selfish, so I will steal something,
An organ from your personality,
I am assembling myself with pieces of everyone that goes through me,
I will steal anything—
Anything that I think will make me more likeable,
But you will canonize me a saint,
You will kiss my fingers like a lover,
But you will always leave me like how a storm always abandons the ocean,
But that is okay,
I have always been a place,
I am your pit stop.

Cal.

20:30 hours, Monday.

• Ask your mother what her favourite thing was as a child, and watch her realise she no longer remembers.

• Try to write five things you love about yourself without thinking of the five hundred you hate.

• Post a picture of yourself and don’t delete it minutes later just because it feels weird or ugly.

• Have a conversation with your sibling that doesn’t circle back to your broken childhood.

• Let the sunlight kiss your cheeks without remembering someone else’s hands.

• Eat lunch without feeling guilty for existing.

• Look at old pictures of yourself without thinking about what you could have done better.

• Try not to imagine the worst before you allow yourself to do something new.

• Stop looking at your body like a problem to solve; try holding yourself like something you’re proud of.

• Try not to have a crisis whenever someone asks you what your favourite things are.

• Try to look at your father without rage or disdain in your eyes.

Cal.

I yearn the way a disease yearns for a body—
for someone, something, to ruin beautifully.
I yearn to touch the way time touches things,
to turn them into history.

What I offer is not love;
it is madness, wrapped in a warm bouquet
of sharpened knives that stab so sweetly.

I give roses to see if you will hold them,
even as their thorns gnaw into your skin,
like a famished stray dog that has just found food,
even as they draw red from you,
like the proboscis of a sick, carnivorous insect.

I am very much like a rose—
beautiful, yes,
but to hold me is to be hurt;
to embrace me is to bleed.

Perhaps you would hold a rose
only if it were given to you,
but I want you to hold me unprompted.

I want you to hold me because you want to,
not because you owe kindness to anyone.
I want you to hold me
even though I was never a choice presented to you.

Cal.

I saw God standing on the railing of a bridge, about to jump into the black river below. He looked as though he was hesitating.

My first instinct was to push him myself. Instead, I walked over and pulled him back, harshly. Is saving someone supposed to be soft? Does it mean any less if I dig my nails into your back and make you bleed before pulling you away from death?

Anyway, I saved God from dying.

He was skinny like me, and he smelled like newly bought notebooks. His skin was as pale as unwritten sheets of paper. Somehow, he felt empty and full of everything at the same time.

I asked if he was alright. The first thing he said was, “Saving me doesn’t change the fact that you don’t have a normal relationship with your father. Saving me doesn’t change the fact that you still had a damaged childhood.”

That stung. I wanted to punch God in the abdomen. Perhaps he would cough up some of my prayers and I could take them back.

God wasn’t naked. He was wearing everything I had ever asked for on his sleeve.

I cannot steal things that haven’t happened yet, can I? Nor can I return the ones that already have.

I told God I didn’t know the way to his home. He asked why I had saved him when I knew he was immortal.

And why did I save him?

Perhaps because I believe I am only worth saving if I save something first. My whole life has been a desperate attempt to make myself likable by giving pieces of myself away. First it was my flesh, then my muscles, and now my bones. I have given so much of myself that all I am left with is a shallow shell of what others need from me.

But it wasn’t God.

I wasn’t holding him in my arms. It was a ghost of me.

I saw myself trying to kill myself, and I saved myself.

Then it struck me how terrifying it is to do something for yourself, how terrifying it is to save yourself.

Then I woke up.

Thank God it was just a nightmare.

This time, I think I’ll push God into that cold black river.

-Caligo.

You're supposed to eat love with two hands. Love is a full course breakfast; you're meant to eat it with both of them. No, you cannot use forks or spoons. You have to let its warmth kiss your hands before you eat it. No, you cannot skip this breakfast. You have to eat your share of love, and you have to eat it at the table. You cannot take your plate of love and hide in your room with it.

You can complain. You can pick apart the greens and leave some behind. But you have to be gentle; you should not manhandle your plate of love. It is okay if the tablecloth gets dirty. It is okay if you spill the glass of water, and it is okay if you break the plate. But you have to show up. You have to before the plate of food, your plate of love, rots.

You do not have to say thank you. You do not even have to wash the plate. You just need to accept it. You do not owe anything. It is okay. But you have to acknowledge the plate. You have to taste it. You have to use one hand to eat the love and the other to hold the plate softly while you do.

You are supposed to eat love with both of your hands. You cannot abandon it. You can hate it. You can even puke on it. But you cannot deny it. You cannot abandon your plate of love. It is not there to make you feel better; it is there because it was made for you.

You cannot skip breakfast. You cannot skip your love. You can kill it, but you have to hold it and kiss its corpse.

Caligo.

There are no fireflies here anymore.

The green grass is lonely tonight.

Moonlight is too far for him—

and it shines with borrowed light.

City lights are too bright for him,

and they won’t ever travel to him.

The grass is scared of the dark.

Is it really, though?

The grass is not afraid of the dark.

He is afraid of its truth.

No light means there is no one—

no one to witness how radiant his green is,

how prettily he dances with the wind.

The bugs have abandoned him.

The animals are too big to notice him.

The brown ground is too soft for his roots.

And the plastic in the soil is indifferent.

There is no wind.

No fireflies.

He is too short to kiss the moon,

and too far away to hug the city lights.

The grass is lonely tonight.

He has no hands—

he can never embrace himself.

Caligo.

There is a skinwalker under my bed that morphs into the shape of your absence every Friday night. I feed it the torn letters I never sent you, and it vomits a memory in return that resembles your face, but never fully becomes it.

It gives me a recurring nightmare where I suffer through sleep paralysis: I can see my mother’s silhouette leaving her hometown, but I cannot shout, nor can I run to stop her from her fate. The skinwalker whispers that it is already too late to save her, and that no matter how hard I try, I will always look like my father when I am angry.

On Mondays, it shapeshifts into my thirteen-year-old self, sitting in a classroom, asking the silence between my classmates what should I say to make them all like me. On some evenings, it takes me to a graveyard where all the lives I could have lived are buried—laid beside bodies shaped like everything I wanted as a child. It tells me to burn them all, because they would never rot.

Every week, I attend my own funeral where the ground refuses to take my casket, the way your cruel shadow refused to merge with mine.

On Sundays, the skinwalker becomes my God. It grabs me by the neck the way an angry cat grips her kitten and chokes me with my own prayers until I turn white, like the tiles in my bathroom. It does not kill me. It says there is no point in murdering a psychopath who would kiss the knife that stabbed him—because it cut into his flesh the same way his ex-lover’s nails once did.

But there is no skinwalker. There is no nightmare. There is no graveyard.

There is only the familiar empty space beside me—an absence that knows how to imitate everything. It wears the faces of the people I loved, the futures I lost, and the versions of myself that never survived long enough to be real. It stays because it does not need permission. It stays because I have already made room for it.

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Caligo.

The empty space between my fingers

Will always be the home for yours;

Like a birthmark, still your touch lingers,

A cure for all the longing I endure.

The curve of your smile mirrors ocean waves,

I wish you had reached my shore sooner;

To your memory my pen still slaves,

I wish that I had held you softer.

Would you have peeled ripe yellow mangoes for me?

I never asked your favourite fruit,

And that is the cruelest hell there can be—

To not have asked enough makes love feel moot.

Did you know your mouth writes sonnets

When you speak of purple and things you love?

Yet my words can’t travel like tectonics;

I wonder if you still taste them somehow.

I wish I’d kissed you the way the evening sun did,

Your dark brown eyes in October,

And no goodbye your silence could ever bid,

For things may end, but they’re never over.

-Caligo.

My hands surrender unto yours,

like the leaves of a roadside bougainvillea

giving in to the breeze from passing traffic.

My fingers sink into your palms,

as if they are saplings of a nomadic home,

searching for solid ground

where they can stop running away

from the flood of everyone else.

The tips of my nails trace

the creases of your fingers

while my lips recite your name

as though it were a Shakespearean sonnet.

I think love is the shape of your pupils

when you are trying to find me in a room.

My skin eases,

as if being looked at by your eyes

is like being found after going missing.

But this January,

I am no longer someone you know,

and you are still everything I remember.

I will sit with the intimacy

of the silence between us,

and I will relish in the romance of our distances.

-Caligo.

When I was fourteen, all I could think about was what I was going to be; now, at twenty-two, all I can think about is what I was. Throughout my teens, I was constantly running a marathon between expectations and potential, and silently—yet violently—my dreams underwent a metamorphosis.

I was going to be a famous left-handed cricket bowler, a diligent civil servant, and then an English professor, even though I could not tell Blake from Byron, nor Beowulf from Virginia Woolf. Somewhere along the way, my dreams lost their shape and colour. I will become “that” somehow traversed into I will become “something”. Everybody has to be something, and I believed that my potential was nothing but an inevitability.

At this juncture—paralysed by uncertainty and running aloof along the shiny, white, pearl path of my former self—I realised that I was not really carrying any real goals, but rather illusions of what I could be and should be: visions my mind conceived based on the notions other people held of me.

And, like a ritual, I keep placing myself into the shoes of Esther Greenwood from The Bell Jar, where she speaks of the fig tree with all its ripe figs, each representing someone she could be. But at least Plath had the disease of creativity, which allowed her to visualise and live all the versions of herself through words and characters.

Per contra, my fig tree is rotten, and I see none of its branches reaching out to me. All that embraces me is a huge, shallow trunk—huge because it is a ghost mimicking my potential, and shallow because I do not know the shape, colour, nor the smell of the something—or someone—I want to be.

Theology interests me, and so does astronomy. I do not think I can study religion because I would rather do science, and I cannot study science because I have never been good at mathematics. I want to read Dostoevsky and understand Nietzsche, but I would rather use that time to finish my Company Law syllabus because exams are coming up.

I am too scared of doing nothing while also being too cautious to start something, when in truth I want to be everything, everywhere, all at once (not a reference to the movie). The truth is, I am a body made of excuses, wearing a skin that can be a lot but ends up being nothing far too often. A huge mango tree with beautiful green leaves but no yellow fruits. A promise you know can be kept, yet remains unfulfilled.

Alas, December feels like salvation—as if the onset of a new year can magically cleanse me of the stench of wasted potential from the year before.

Come January, I shall either be Doreen (The Bell Jar), or end up being Meursault from The Stranger.

Yours anxiously,

Caligo.

P.s. we should reclaim the em-dash and semi colon from AI.