What the fuck do you want me to say? That it’s been two years since I’ve been in academia? I’m so tired of wallowing away, not choosing to be lead astray. Yet still being filed away as trivial. Subliminal. Failing all the trials and tribulations. No. I don’t wish to reconcile. If it were a crime I would be without parole. I whine on that CV and attempt to sell my soul with decree. Only to receive a computed passage, encased with subtle glee. Unfortunately, you didn’t achieve the score required. You just didn’t have the highest falsetto in the choir. And what’s more, we won’t give you a why. Because we the coveted sourdough, you the overpriced rye. We do recommend you apply again next year though. Don’t sigh. We know AI discriminates on applications but it saves us time!
A pine tree in the shade, never shining. Other acres freed of strife. Can you call it failed potential if I’ve never had the chance to be monumental? Maybe I should just settle for retail. But the receipt prints the same story, the same stale breath fogging the glass between me and the monumental. I carry the bag home to a house that knows my inventory by heart. ‘The way you phrase your words is just interesting’. I remember her saying for the third time when I was in the heat of the moment about our cousin. Smiling. She continues to crease my falters. Always something wiring me loose. Always something I can’t do. How can a sister be this selective? Fist to the uvula. Create a ruse so bruise-inducing. No excuse. I swallow the sentence like a recluse.
Maybe I shouldn’t act so John-doe. So and so. It may not seem huge to you. May not represent the permanence of a flashy cruise sinking underneath the blue. She doesn’t know I think about these things like they’re chosen, until sleep seems like a ghost overdose. A diagnosis forbidden from tokenising. Why should I have to catalogue my words before they’re spoken? The same catalogue I recited to a man who’d already decided my index was wrong. Materialistic. Wrong word. Success-oriented would have been sturdier. Interesting. Next day. Different person. An idiom that I mixed up. Interesting! Oh the realisation, oh so forsaken: she has a hobby. You are indeed the hobby. In his own world on a laptop that would’ve won beauty contests in 1976. He was told beforehand. So Mohammed, tell me about yourself, wait what would you like to be called again? Fucked it anyway. The damage is done. All I spoke about were mere accolades. Narcissistic or holistic? Blotchy red raw fingers tapping with timed authority, because they can. My fate determined by a Timpsons. Conscience turning to crimson, the thoughts fully formed of a pole and some flashy heels. Is an autonomy worth my soul? I speak about a chess rating of 2100, an art portfolio that he swipes only 4/16 images through, how I’m self taught in Python and HTML, but I’m just ruled with an array of agreements. An oil painting not varnished. A lime corset feigning a sour hourglass. Pestle with no mortar. One nobody sought after. I guess we’ll let you know by the weekend if you were successful.
And I already know the weekend will arrive like my sister’s smile. Like a computed passage. Like another year of sourdough and rye, of being interested in all the wrong rooms, of swallowing the sentence until the sentence swallows me whole.
Photo: Jon Tyson
Read our “Camouflage” issue in full
RAWGUE.’s 4th issue delved into the grey, moody, and cold atmosphere of winter. Yet it did not sink into the depths of madness or depression. Instead, it embraced this season of hibernation, allowing 31 artists from all over the world to present their timid work beneath a veil of quiet beauty.
I write the held breath before coffee spills, right before I sleep. Words caught mid-gesture, mid-collapse, mid-becoming — mine, my mother’s, strangers I invent and then mourn. Acrylic to watercolour to oil pastel because it smudges and betrays me, while remembering every touch of my hand. When I was small, every light stayed on. Not waste, just certainty. Illumination was infinite, darkness a choice I could refuse. Then eventually: the hallway I stopped walking, the kitchen at 3am where I learned to be alone, the porch light that guided my cat Blink home. Each taught me visibility is conditional, that seeing depends on what I can still afford to power. So I draw faces in partial eclipse. Half-lit, surreal, synaesthetic, reaching toward sources that may not be there. Not sadness. My adaptation. My pupils dilating. Learning to navigate by feel and colour because I had to. I don’t trust writing that makes itself naive, I want the viewer to lean in the way I leaned into doorways as a child, catch themselves inventing stories that might be wrong, feel a validation they have been craving for years. I write because it’s a form of therapy for me, it makes me feel whole.
