spooderrants

[spooderrants]

this is the second time in a month i’ve dreamt about an airplane crash. my mom and younger sister are taking 2 flights tonight to get to where i am. ifeelsick.

[spooderrants]

he tells me of his dreams. i tell him of mine.

[spooderrants]

i didn’t like my dream last night. i don’t like to be reminded of those parts of me. i don’t like to be reminded of how i used to be The Girlfriend. The Girly Girl. The Housewife. the sex object, the comfort object, the mother... another man’s remedy from life. another man’s below, not equal.

i still don’t know what i am, what i want to be. i’m masculine-presenting to some, feminine-presenting to others. i don’t know who i like—i don’t even know if i’m capable of liking anyone. i don’t know anything, anything, anything.

[spooderrants]

here i’ve been living unloosened from sin

upward and outward

begin, begin.

here i’ve been loosened, unliving within

inwardly urgent

i’m sinking again.

[spooderrants]

falling

falling

falling

[spooderrants]

i don’t know if it’s liberating or scary that if i were to kill myself right now, my body wouldn’t be found for another week or two.

(isn’t this what i’ve always wanted? to disappear without a trace? i’ve deleted most of my social media and i don’t have any close friends or family that would check up on me. why now, in this moment, do i feel scared?)

[spooderrants]

the lows were particularly low today. the silence is so deafening. two days ago i was across the earth, couchsurfing at my friends’, exploring on the daily. now i’m back, faced with reality. my phone’s been silent. no notifications. no more walking to the local cafe. i do groceries at the mall, that’s a 20 minute bus ride away. there are no buttons to press when crossing the roads. it rains everyday. instead of old alleys and iron gates, my neighbourhood only has drive-thrus and gas stations. the landscape is so bleak here. i need to leave soon.

[spooderrants]

what am i who am i what am i who am i

what kind of personality have i assumed. this isn’t me, is it. it’s cherry-picked. i’m telling myself that it’s me, but it isn’t. i don’t know what “me” is. i don’t know what this is either.

i wish i could be myself but i don’t even know what that means.

[spooderrants]

00:47

dont want to sleep. i dont want this feeling to pass. i dont know what to do next. and i dont want to face that. id rather stay here, in a constant state of ‘about to do something’, and not actually doing it. i want to be in a limbo. i dont want to move. do things. i want to drift. i dont want to be included. i dont want to be known. i dont want to exist. i want to be a memory. a shadow. im not here. im not here.

[spooderrants]

không biết mình là ai

là gì

muốn ai. muốn gì

trôi nhưng không chìm

rối nhưng không lạc

mình quá nhỏ bé

[spooderrants]

feeling so slumped today. i think i overworked myself last night. nothing is coming out anymore. 7 more pages of writing but i’m not even proud of any of them.

i’m not a writer by any means. neither am i a good artist. i want to make something, but i don’t know how to manifest it. my shit just sounds cringey half the time.

the world is so noisy. it’s perpetual, like snoring. words make me cower. voices make me revolt. i want to turn into myself, like a spiral, a slug, a worm, the vortex is coming back, the vortex of pink and grey, it keeps coming back into my thoughts.

[spooderrants]

DREAM. 091122

there is a blinding whiteness around you, so thick that it's impossible to see what is beyond, like a wall of dense fog. he is standing in front of you. he asks something, but you can't quite make it out. you reply, but the words are all mumbled and incomprehensible. the fog expands, like four walls closing in on the two of you. it swallows him. you panic, unsure what to do, moreso concerned about the ever-expanding whiteness. but it stops just inches away from you. when you reach out your hands, the fog makes way for you. it's completely surrounded everything around you, but is avoiding yourself, forming a silhouette. you want to walk into it - to find him, but the whiteness swiftly moves wherever you do. you hear a faint repetitive noise. the knocking of a wooden instrument that sounds like someone clicking their tongue.

[spooderrants]

writing so i don’t eat eating so i don’t write writing so i don’t eat eating so i don’t write

[spooderrants]

hurricane

spiral spiraling spiral spiraling into the vortex into the whirlpool of pink and grey into the eye of the hurricane the wind picks up picks you up flailing you around like a lifeless ragdoll is it really the wind or is it just you who can’t balance on your own two feet who has no sense of self constantly disoriented bumping into things bumping into people into spikes into freshly opened razor blades getting paper cuts from the packaging before you even got to the real thing you keep spinning or maybe it’s the world around you that’s spinning a carousel but there are no horses or bears or chariots just faces blurry faces and eyes eyes that burn holes through your skin eyes that you can see even when you close yours weightless but in an out of control way and there is so much weight put on you your back is going to snap and crack and twist and fold

[spooderrants]

CALL OF THE SEA

there is a call. an earth-shattering, hair-raising call. a siren wailing, a long, drawn out sound, as if coming from a wind instrument, or perhaps produced by the howling wind itself. it’s low-pitched and high-pitched at the same time. it’s a sad melody, one that makes your stomach turn and your jaws clench. it came from the sea. you hear the call. so does he. and he will answer to it.

you see a young man wandering around the edge of the sea. he is fidgeting and retracing his steps, walking around in circles. he’s been doing that for so long that the steps have become deep feet-shaped holes in the sand, a good 3-4 inches down. the sea is covered by a perpetual blanket of fog, regardless of weather or time of day. you cannot see the horizon - maybe there isn’t any at all. the fog is so heavy that it feels as though gravity itself is twice as strong here. it looks and feels endless; if the man were to walk into the water, he would just keep going, the water wouldn’t rise and there would be no drops in the sand. he would vanish in the fog, but he’d still be walking. he doesn’t need to know where it leads. he is answering the call of the sea. he belongs there. the sea is in his blood - he might not have come from there, but his mother did. and he misses her so dearly. this is her, isn’t it? she’s calling out to him.

he is hesitating. you know he’s leaving something, or *someone*, behind. he had a life before this. he considers giving it all up. the sea has that effect on men.

> approach the young man

he stops walking and gestures to the sea. “you heard it too, right?” is what he would’ve been saying. the two of you stand still, slowly sinking into the sand, engulfed by the vastness of the ocean. you are puny. why not be a part of something so much larger than yourself? you bare no effect on this earth. your existence or even the lack of does not change the course of anything, as much as you’d like it to. you cannot stand out. wouldn’t it be nice to become one with the ocean, your limbs stretching further than your eyes could ever see, your body no longer confined to flesh and bones, moving freely in liquid form, flowing in, out and through any cracks and crevices you desire, or pouring out into the wide nothingness and fill it with nothing but you? you aren’t just alive, you *contain* life. you are life itself. you are a part of a complex ecosystem and you host so many biological forms it’s impossible to count, but each and everyone of them matters to you because they depend on you for survival. they go wherever you go, and in this form you could go *anywhere*. you’ll be so significant they can even see you from outer space. you’ll exist beyond civilization. you’ll be there before it happens and after it collapses.

as your thoughts drift, the call starts to resemble a song more so than a call. an orchestra welcomes you. it’s your coronation. the waves are giving you a standing ovation with every crash. the wet sand makes way for your feet. endorphins make your joints tremble and your genitals tingle. you’ve wanted nothing more.

> you take his hand

your fingers laced with his. you feel all of your thoughts and emotions flowing out from the palm of your hands and into his. you are communicating in the universal language, the one those people in the village used. you’ve learned how to do it and it is all thanks to the ocean. you’re in debt now.

he takes in all of your thoughts and stands in silence. he is letting everything wash over him, he is bathed in your light. he feels everything you’ve felt. he is one with you. 

but you are also one with him. his thoughts and emotions dump themselves onto you, and you feel stricken by an immense weight. the weight of responsibility. that’s right, you had none, but he has plenty. one hundred and one of them, to be exact. you feel unfamiliar emotions.

> guilt

it weighs your head down. your head feels about five times its original size. your neck is about to snap. your upper spine will surely give in. you find it physically impossible to move a muscle. there is a vortex in your skull - your brain is unraveling itself into long strands resembling intestines, then twisting back into the vortex, like a wrinkly whirlpool of pink and grey. the sensation is attributed with faces. they’re blurry because they aren’t your people - they’re his people. one hundred and one blurry faces cloud your vision and you feel obligated to get on your knees and succumb before them. you owe them something, a lot of things. you may only live the rest of your life with your head down.

> longing

you feel it in your chest and in the tips of your fingers and toes. it is spiky. your knuckles ache. you want to be with something, with someone, somewhere so bad, but you don’t know what (because after all, these are his emotions, not yours). something pierces your throat and a rush of air involuntarily breaks its way through your vocal chords. you are moaning. your moaning then turns into dry sobbing. there are no tears because you don’t actually miss anything, he does. a sharp spike has impaled straight through you from the crown of the head to the crotch. you are a piece of meat on a rusted skewer, shaking and flailing about. the spikes spread through you like a nervous system, until you feel individual spikes poking through your skin, coming out of your fingertips, your toes and the follicles of your hair.

[spooderrants]

MOTHER

a woman longs for the return of her husband. she lives alone with her children - far too many, and she needs help. she is abandoned by him. she’s overwhelmed by the responsibility. this is too much. she didn’t expect there to be so many little versions of her own kind, depending on her for their survival. too many mouths to feed. too many limbs crawling around. she is going to go mad. how did this even happen in the first place? how could she possibly lost track of…giving birth? it just kept going, and going, and going, and before she knew it, there are now a hundred of them. she could not remember how it happened. it felt like her instinct - like she was born to do it, like she was fulfilling her one and only destiny. she doesn’t remember the pain, the sweat, the smell of flesh and placenta, the color red plastered all over their house. it just…happened.

she has to find her husband. after all, he’s responsible for half of the “process”. but she can’t go anywhere with these children at the moment. she wails and sobs. she’s desperate.

[spooderrants]

NGƯ TINH

the sea dog is an amalgamation of a fish’s head on a skinny dog’s torso, but without a neck. the head is attached straight onto the rib cage. because of the proportions, the eyes are the size of the dog’s thighs, as if a fish’s soulless, constantly-panicked yellow eyeball isn’t disturbing enough already. its lips are puffy and swollen, looking even bigger than usual with the natural glossiness of the fish’s surface slime. the dog part is agile and as dog-like as a headless dog could be. it’s running around aimlessly on the beach, unsure of its ability to survive either on land or in the water. it loses balance pretty frequently and topples onto its oversized fish-head, only to clumsily flap its way back up and do it all over again.

what are you supposed to do about this? are you supposed to do anything? are you just going to watch it from a distance? pity it? how does this thing exist? why does it exist, only to be so hideous to the eye? it is an embarrassment to dogs and fish alike. it’s defiling the existence of every living animal you know of.