Upgrade
As a paid subscriber you get a personalized custom piece, access to exclusive chat, experimental multilingual poetry, long form essays, curated literary research, reading guides, creative process insights into how a piece evolved, and early access to my published works.
It’s less than 5$ a month if you pay for a full year now.
I recently asked you what you felt like reading next (yeah I voted too lol )
and so: stream of consciousness it is!
I didn’t edit anything, but I did write it in two separate moments. Sorry for any typos, let me know what do you think/feel ❤️
Life is a series of little deaths. I give birth to myself again and again. Lately, I have been thinking: how many times can we die? The common idea of death implies one absolute final call. But my deaths are far from that. The soul is an infinite well that gathers so much until the lungs implode and your scream is so loud that all the birds in the woods leave their cozy branches and fly away, living you in your knees.
A July storm killed my two crows. I’m not sure though. I don’t see them anymore, but the hail was so violent that each hailstone was big as a pine cone and the windows broke. Glass shaped murder. Nothing normal about this heatwave. A seemingly hot day at the lake turned into a never-ending nightmare. Moving from extreme weather, human beings keep running to save themselves. And when I suffer, I am still grateful there is no drone over my head that makes me doubt if the ringing in my ear is real or not.
I know of mothers who saved the placenta and kept it in their house. A reminder of the violence of birth. Placenta used to be eaten by mothers to support lactation, and when you say it out loud a bout of abject mixed with surprise stirs your stomach. Birth requires death. Does a part of the mother die when she separates from another soul? My mother says my brother is my late grandmother. A soul reincarnated. And so, who am I? was met with silence. I also want to be someone.
My hair again is entangled and I’m running out of oil, so the impulse is losing control over it and yell at the mirror that shows a figure unknown, a poker face, was I always like this or is it life making me faceless? I keep searching for these crows but no sign, nose up in the sky as I walk, the clouds still lead to an imaginary figure that recalls an earthworm and apparently, those are also in risk of extinction. Not the ones in the sky.
My hair is now oily and I have some braids to protect myself from the infinite knots that forms so easily at the root of my life. It’s now a trend to have a slicked back bun, but when I had it with abundant hair oil in tenth grade I was bullied to death. Black and white are not the same then.
The trees have left, now, smoke covers everything. Emergency alarm. Run. Now. At least I am not bleeding. Fire travels faster than us. If the sun gave up we would all disappear in the blink of an eye and the possibility of making the same decisions again and again perhaps would disintegrate just like our bodies. When everything you ever thought you are unravels down the mountain, your heartbreak opens infinite possibilities to free yourself from a scheduled life plan to finally feel your legs and stop running from the monsters of your lineage.
Flames saturate the lungs. The umbilical cord was not cut gently. Impatient woman runs behind an oracle prediction. Reason fails to compensate for magic. Existential inertia. Unmedicated nerves. Chest cramps. Mystery unsolved. Tears unseen. Metamorphic spiral downhill. Unfazed crack of the mind. Planetary shifts. Midwife forgotten. Orgasmic secret of an alien being. Conception affirmative. Rebirth. A nest is built on a sapling. NewStillborn.
mahogany red, violent wreckage of placental growth set ablaze, oxide spirit walking unattended in search of primal ignition, thermal need mutating into terminal disaster, fugitive minds recreating spirals of a past unwanted, particles of a heart carefully protected, now crossing borders, the rate of combustion is minimal, spreading faster, outrunning the extent of damage is an imaginary possibility, mathematical constant, life recycled, atmospheric pressure fueling more and more, petroleum hatred fomenting vapor, memory incinerating, flashbacks initiating flash points, highly inflammable soul, autoignition irretrievable, lost case of a process stuck in a timeless trial, savior ghost, red tape infiltration, rebellion of liquid agitation, gray containment, brick red suppression, burgundy dirt thrown at incessant advancement, lacunae pitch-black, sensory bodies turning symbolic, tuning screams 150 Hz, frequency womb conduction, emergence naive, language gestation unidentified,
________________________________________________ oblivion accomplished.
© Nimila, Studio Shyama
If you felt something, you’re welcome to restack a passage or two that stayed with you.
Thank you for reading. This piece is free. Paid subscriptions are genuinely how I keep writing full time, so if the work means something to you, I’d really appreciate your support.
For everyone choosing to subscribe in summer, I am offering a 50% discount on a yearly subscription.
If you wish to support me through a small tip, click below.
Even a small gesture means a lot.
Read more
wolves come at night
the gap between wanting to know and being is wide open like a womb giving perpetual birth. mold between the creeks of dawn. uncomfortable laughter of humans.
anesthesia wake. (tantra) imaginalia
Maybe reading a horror novella just before getting ready for anesthesia was not very clever of me.
I loved this, Namila. There’s something so real about stream of consciousness writing. It feels like being invited to sit alongside your thoughts as they appear, without filters or fences. I could feel the changes in rhythm and pace, and it made the whole piece feel alive and honest. Thank you for sharing your mind with us in such an open way. It was a joy to read and to ride along with you.
I've been trying to organize my thoughts about this. I can't quite seem to do that too well today but also I feel the form you've used itself defies the constraints we often put on ourselves so here are my thoughts -- in all the messiness.
-This is powerful, it is a reckoning.
-Every day, we witness the world on fire while those in power refuse to act and make decisions that further degrade earth faster than before and laugh while people more vulnerable by design suffer more & more.
-You talk about death as transformation and change -- this is what I hope we are doing, as a species, changing but I just hope it's not too late though in many ways it is too late.
-Birth is violence -- I love to see this truth shared. initiation into life is not what we are/were told it is (at least what I was told it is) and to soften the narrative which we see so often in media does us all all a disservice. It takes away its power. Which is what we do when we close our eyes and pretend like everything that is happening isn't really that bad.