2025-11-01

Century a Day: November (2025)

Welcome back to Century a Day: November, my loves. We're back to 100 words after last year. I'll link to my co-conspirators, if you'd like. Enjoy yourself.

Co-conspirators

Real Life

Breathe in, sharply. Your attendance is mandatory, but your attention is not. Here, now, where are you? The only meaning is that which you create, an exercise in self-responsibility. This year has been terrible. This year has been wonderful. I feel the passage of time in discrete painful pricks in the back of my mind, driven deeper with the ticking of the watch. I feel like I'm still learning to define my existence, to ground it in the good work and those that I love. I'm terrified of feeling fulfilled and it's the only thing I crave in my life.

2025-11-02

On moving, as a concept.

Can you take it slowly, with me? I'm not ready to change, to fledge this comfortable nest that has moulded me anew. If I dance slowly, if we kiss and make up, can we make it work? (no.) I'm scared of change, to the point of irrationality. It's the devil's whisper of "this is the best it gets," that nothing could change for the better by sacrificing the ease of the present. Maybe this banality has bred complacency and change could grease the hinges. Auckland was terrible, but the memories I've retained define me. Could I do it again?

2025-11-03

title omitted

I feel it in my fingers, first. The pain needling the joints. As they go numb, the rest of the body picks up its chorus: the tug of a texture binding your thighs, the nails attacking your ankles, ice stabbing the nape of your neck. None of it compares to the cold, though, as the wind weaves through newfound gaps to deliver a killing blow to my furnace heart. I grit my teeth, a masochist at my core, and push harder. There is no relent. The end is near. I stow my stead and bear myself to the warmth internal.

2025-11-04

Headache

The dull thud in your head never goes away. Wake up. Coffee. Glass of water. Bagel. Out the door, flying through the cold air of the world. Work. Second coffee. You notice the headache again. Water. Breathe, slowly. Piece of bread. Diet coke. Back into the crisp air, the wind pulling your senses awake from your earlobes. Your head is louder, now. It's an aching, a bruise that never goes away, ibuprofen a minor aide in this horror. Dinner. Computer. Read a little. It moves into the front of your skull. Lay down and let sleep take you, remake you.

2025-11-05

On cooking, as a practice.

Everyone has a couple of dishes they default to. Laura loves her soup and pan-fried tofu, Ada her gochujang chicken and katsu curry, Cat her fried rice and curry (recipe taught by Snow). Me, I'm a stone-cold pasta-head¹, but I try to be adventurous when I can. Doing cooking as profession has changed my relationship with it; cooking used to be one of my primary creative outputs for a few years. Now, it has a tinge of professionalism and practice that leaves a sour taste in its wake. It tastes good, absolutely, but it doesn't make me happy. Just proud.

¹Yeah sure, that's a series of words you can make. Good control of language, alice,

2025-11-06

Childhood

When I was younger, I dreamed of all the people I loved and cared for living in a massive factory that had been converted into apartments of all kinds of sizes. A trolley ran down the centre lane between us, and pneumatic pipes delivered post and messages between us. Now, I dream of a simpler version, of my people near me and connected through janky cobbled-together technology, of telephone lines illegally run between us, of mesh networks and shared media servers. I want to have those I love come 'round for dinner, to share love and be loved, all together.

Based on an empty auto factory I saw on the drive to Six Flags as a kid, somewhere around 38.5455, -90.4478.

2025-11-07

Belittlement

Captivate me. Please, I am here, I am all yours. Do you think I am worth your attention? Your time? Or do you require something more than a willing participant? I can be more than willing, I'm sure...

What is it you want, anyways? You've been here for so long, monkey in my circus, that I've never given you a second thought. Does it hurt you, to be taken for granted like this? Or do you find a kind of affection in the guarantee of your presence, you sick freak?

And if you knew you were wanted, desired, needed? Would it get to you? Or would you act on it?

2025-11-08

Weekly

It is Monday. The week is ending, and you can finally feel free. You go home, sleep, anxious to experience something on your own terms.

It is Thursday. You feel unchanged, unmoved, and any freedom obliterated in the face of your responsibilities. You put your head down and keep on moving.

It is Saturday. You are tired, ready for it to be over, and know you still have so much to go. Have you ever had agency?

It is Monday. Maybe this time will be different, with a little forethought and a plan. Just like all the others before it.

Century on the first draft (and didn't have any glaring editing requirements).

2025-11-09

Aftercare

Breathe. I need you to breathe. Oh god, I don't know what I'm going to do if you don't breathe. Your face is growing pallid, lips blue, fuck, do I need to start CPR? What is your mom going to say about this? Fuck, okay, uh, hands locked above your sternum and twice a second, "Stayin' Alive," amiright? Doing this while your cock flops about is slapstick; it is completely beyond irony to be pinching your nose and filling your lungs until you suddenly gasp and return to this world. Do I need to call 911 now? ... Was that hot?

2025-11-10

Landlines

I think more people should have a landline. I hear your "retvrn to flip-phone" cultural riptide and raise you the humble 'home phone', a form of connection and communication fully tied to a single place in your life. A landline was a bit more patient of a time—if you're call isn't answered, it's okay! They'll call you back when they can, and you can continue with your life without a reply. It's a way to contain the nagging urge to be connected with a well-established technology that's cheap as Fuck to use. A little voip.ms and baby you're in business.

2025-11-11

Snowfall

True silence can be found in the snowfall. Walk in to the centre of a field, at the corner, by the railway crossing, and stand. As you breathe, listen as you quiet your exhale. Notice the smallest shift in your weight, and grow truly still. Here, in this place of noise, it is so graciously quiet. The only sound is the gentle patter of snowflakes settling, nearly the sound of two pieces of paper sliding against each other for the length of a raindrop's impact. Inhale the frozen air. Warm it, fill it with your reminder of life, and exhale.

2025-11-12

Listen

Where is humanity in a city? Is it in the constant traffic that chokes its arteries? In the constant din of "life", the tireless noise wearing its hearing thin? If this is humanity, it is poison.

Is there humanity in the stillness? The pockets of "natural", curated landscapes, all of them nothing more than a facsimile of their precolonial forms? How do we move forward like this?

Listen. Be still. Allow yourself to breathe, and witness it. This is the world we find ourselves in. Life is everywhere, here, even in the winter. If you look, you'll find it too.

2025-11-13

Listen.webm

~~100 seconds, a century.~~ girl that's totally 80 seconds idk what u were thinking

2025-11-15

Good try,

There's a creeping sensation when you look in the mirror that you're the replacement. The clone. The fae-snatched changeling that has come to devour the family. Your hair is longer now, at your shoulders, and has stopped curling. Her hair always curled into gentle waves, short or long. Can you remember anything before the terrible choice you forced on your loved ones? Your existence began with that gunshot, sharp, crisp, deafening. Your ears have never stopped ringing. You remember the fear in her eyes as she crumpled, the way the blood dribbled down her face. And that they were wrong.

2025-11-16

How to reconcile a year

Make sure to record your favourite moments, the little treasures, and find a way to account for everything that has been forgotten. If a month feels empty, check the playlist, listen to a song of two, and then decide if it will be discarded. January's scare dominated the month, can you remember all the joy that was present then too? In the monotony of a 9–5 (or something close enough), you need to nourish your passions. Travel, allow small doses of impulsiveness creep in, show up at a friend's Halloween party because you can. Exercise your free will and live.

2025-11-17

Sugar by Sasha Cay

It's nearly the end of university. I am sitting upside down on my coffee table with the living room lights dimmed as the gentle chords start to wash over me. It's my first trip. I feel connection and love: of this apartment, of my friends around me, of my partner, of so many people I call myself close to but live far from. I can see our root network, deep and intertwined, spreading out of my back and through the floorboards. I feel that I am loved, completely and wholly, and I mourn the loneliness I've felt for so long.

2025-11-18

Breathe

I'm choking. My reaction is basal. I start thrashing, my diaphragm desperately trying to contract, eject, clear the way. My head is pounding. I am dying. My blood is teeming with CO₂, aerobic respiration is failing, death is soon to follow. How did it come to this? Like this? How could I live my life like this?

...

Finally. Sweet release. The gasp and rush of oxygen is a reward better than any orgasm, a flow of pure unadulterated endorphins as the primordial creature rewards a death thwarted. I fall into my lover's gentle embrace, assuaging me of this brush with death.

2025-11-19

Tumble Dry, Low

It starts with a dumb idea. After a couple of hours at home left to my own devices, I start to think this can work. It's a bad idea. It's a terrible idea. But there is nobody home to stop me. Armed with a mangled clothes hanger and some gorilla tape to hold down the safety latches, I crawl my way into my metal cocoon. It only takes a little fumbling around like a first time DEFCON attendee trying to open their hotel door from the outside. I take a deep breath. I find the button, and my ride begins.

2025-11-20

Train ride

I write this out of the train window, my view spiralling deep into the darkness before us. I want so badly to be happy. It's frankly a terrible objective, to get faux-philosophical about it. Why have I failed to reach out to those around me? To gently pull on those strands in the web of social connection? The REM smoothly zips along its above-ground ways, defining the geographic centre of these communities. I press my forehead against the glass for a better view. I ride to the terminus to watch the train's reversing dance and run to catch it again.