oh, another collective nightmare? nice.

did I just experience the opposite of bi-panic because even my dreams have political undertones now? (I'd rather pass?)

welcome to a nightmare: in my dream, I sign an apartment lease with a man while my girlfriend sleeps soundly next to me. the apartment has no front door, just lots of open spaces and when I walk down the stairs, I greet all the unfamiliar faces of new neighbours. do I know the man? no. do I want to live here? I don’t think so. I’d just like to know who traded my barbie dream house for a mojo dojo casa house I didn’t sign up for?

I wake up with a headache, take one painkiller, fall asleep again, take another, then dream about all the reasons why two painkillers aren’t enough this time to kill the pounding in my head. the internet says tension headaches, my brain says early death in some variation of I told you so’s, which is a little too comforting to be joked about, but then again, who has the capacity to imagine a future when your head is waging a silent war on you, when every heartbeat sends a new wave of pain through your body, screaming that you’re alive while you’re begging for it to please, please, just stop? I get Billie Eilish now, this is what a year-long headache does to you, but I have a cinnamon crunch cookie next to my bed and there’s a stardew valley update and I have a new prescription for my contact lenses and suddenly I can read signs from very far away but can’t read the ones right in front of me, and there’s an enlightening metaphor buried somewhere between the irony, but I’m too distracted to search for the right words when I am dazzled by the stars above me and I can see the leaves on the dying autumn trees again. the world used to let me drift around in soft-focus, blurring its flaws like an old photograph, my dreamy blur cushioning the sharpness of the world — now everything is in HD, a reminder that brutal clarity demands its price, that seeing is sometimes just another way to bleed. is it worth seeing more when you just death-by-a-1000-cut your fingers on a relentless reality?

we had a cinema date last night, sweet popcorn, bloody movie, warm hand in mine — you definitely get the genre body horror when you watch The Substance, and my girlfriend texts me after she left this morning to say that I’m her favourite cinema partner-in-crime because I didn’t even flinch when the camera didn’t turn away from the most uncomfortable scenes — they were all exaggerated, the sexualization of womens bodies a little too long to not want to roll your eyes, like we get it, ass and boobs and a hinted fantasy of soft porn gestures. the women next to us in the cinema giggle, but I think that that’s the whole point. laugh about it all you want, but the spotlights’ still on, now you’re the audience, so watch the damn movie, all the ways we would pay for a younger, better version of ourselves, and then it ends in an over-the-top Carrie-esque scene on stage (of course it’s a stage), and it’s one minute and two minutes and five minutes of Frankenstein meets modern stereotypes meets a lot of variations of the color red, until a dream and a woman and all of her versions are dead. classic, right?

I see a tweet of a man with almost half a million followers saying your body, my choice, forever, and five of my goodread-friends have liked that I started reading Men who Hate Women — when I first bought it, the man I was seeing at the time smiled and said that that’s bullshit, clickbait feminist title to condemn men who don’t have it easy as well, you know, and I smiled back, the reflex of accommodation tightening in my chest, red flags camouflaged as reasonable objections, as if I could ignore the barbed wire he so casually wrapped around my instinct, my silence, by telling me there’s nothing to worry, darling, I’m building you a big house if you pretend to never question the white trad-wife picket fences.

James Baldwins’ Dark Days-speech lays in front of me now, and I’m scared to open the news but I do it anyway because if I’m a masochist, then at least I want to know when a woman turns into a victim, when pain is a weapon or a wound self-inflicted. US election results, red again, I think of the color of the endless corridors in the movie, my own countries’ politics imploding on the same day too, that’s a joke right? but then it isn’t and I see a Tiktok-video of two women wondering whether they should get married before January just in case, just in case. will a third pain killer help? I decide to suffer through it with a kind of self-righteous resignation, stoically swallow my vitamins with seven up free because I can’t get up to get a glass of water, but maybe a few vitamin cs will temporarily save me. we joke about marriage sometimes, too, when we send each other memes with cheese emojis as disclaimers to say that we know how much of a cliche this is but when you’re in love, everything reminds you of them, doesn’t it? (otters, proposal videos gone wrong because the other was too focused on finding pretty stones, reminders to drink enough water — sorry, baby, i’d do almost anything for you).

It’s 3pm and so gloomy in my room, dark days indeed, winter is coming, a prelude to its slow invasion on my doorstep. I buried my ghosts in October but November caught up with two definitions of (a) cold, so I string up more fairy lights in some quiet act of defiance, hoping their glow can ward off the darkness settling in, and what else is there but to hope for the best.

hope, I read yesterday, isn’t some delicate, fluttering thing — it’s raw, with scraped elbows and bruised knuckles, the kind that keeps getting up, bleeding, aching, because something deep within it believes it’s worth the pain. I want to believe all of this is worth it; a day without a headache, a world where stability isn’t a luxury but a birthright, a life without the fear that the fragile freedom we have now isn’t just a phase, a passing kindness, but a foundation I can safely build my dreams on. the wild ones, the kind ones, the ones that overshadow nightmares with light in a living room in an apartment where the only person smiling back at me is the woman sleepily breathing love songs into my neck when she holds me back from wandering too far into the wrong versions of a scary reality.