slightly unhinged things i wrote in 2025

bidding farewell to a year of creative writing

On the rare day, a sentence will force itself into my head and hold me at gunpoint until I craft an entire essay around it. Here are some of the most unhinged things I have written in 2025, and here’s to hoping more will manifest in the next year:

1. “Disappointingly, god is not a woman. Even more disappointingly, god comes in the form of an ex-boyfriend.” — i met god at a friend’s wedding

   

2. “You tell me you are exhausted from the wound I had inflicted, as if the act of stabbing did not also demand effort. On the knife sits both our fingerprints. In the river sits both our bloods.” — face up

   

3. “Daughter of the island. Daughter of my father. Never the daughter of an answering god.” — island daughter

   

4. “Your greatest achievement in life will be becoming a chartered accountant, chartered engineer, or Michelin-starred chef and marrying a girl with a great pedigree. Mine will be manipulating the paper until there is no trace of writing that ever existed on it.” — selective erasure

   

5. “You smoke in front of me and I give you the kind of look that says, If you love me, you’d put it down. Or maybe it is the kind of look that says, If you want me to keep loving you, you’d put it down. Whichever look I shot and whichever you interpreted, you looked me in the eye and took a long drag.” — put down the cigarette

   

6. “the desk is altar and hearth / I am a religious cynic / I am still made of something that wants to be heard” — lonely labor

   

7. “And in service of what do I live these years? In service of science? Philosophy? Poetry? I doubt it is anything so grand. I live in service of waking up with my body intact and my words filtered.” — 24.

   

8. “I can surrender my dreams but not my words / my happiness but not my peace / is the color orange something one can surrender / and is surrendering the same as sacrificing” — orange

   

9. “I am not a lover, I don’t need closure, but I am a writer, which means I need to get my story straight. Not the story, my story.” — playing fetch & victim

   

10. “There’s such a femininity to sadness. I wonder if it’s because of the multiple ‘s’s in the word, each one going out of its way to curve, just like how women go out of their way to make others feel better despite their own emotions.” — one-woman fountain show

    

If you’re interested in reading the full essays:

1. i met god at a friend’s wedding

2. face up

3. island daughter

4. selective erasure

5. put down the cigarette

6. lonely labor

7. 24.

8. orange

9. playing fetch & victim

10. one-woman fountain show