Part 1_May 2025
Canary in a Paradise of White Fire
Despair cannot find its end, yet life continues.
Each dawn, I force my eyes open again,
for love of those who would grieve if I vanished.
I fear the pain my absence would cause them,
so I bear another day, breathing despite despair.
What can I do in this house of quiet tyranny?
I live under the weight of a father's law—he is both my beloved and my warden.
My mother stands by, a silent witness.
I reached for her help, but she turned away.
It tamed the wild garden of my childhood dreams,
pruning every unruly bloom in my dream kingdom.
With his own hands it tore that kingdom down,
shredding its delicate walls and crushing them underfoot.
In the ruins of that realm, only despair grows.
I am like a canary in a gilded cage,
fluttering but never truly free.
Neither coin nor ring will unlock these iron bars around me.
This cage was forged by countless generations,
each bar hammered from tradition and time.
It glows with an eerie light—a paradise of white fire.
It could be a scene painted by Hieronymus Bosch himself:
a vision as beautiful as it is grotesque.
Being a woman is not just a gender, but a predicament—a condition sculpted by centuries of silence.
Even now, nothing has changed: womanhood still lies outside the heart of power.
I remain an object in someone else's story,
my own subjecthood a distant dream.
The weight of history and ancient dogmas bind me tight,
like roots coiling around my limbs.
I ask into the darkness: where is my self?
Where in this kingdom can I find me?
Part 2_July 2025
As women's issues entwine with the threads of my life,
each new crossroads is shadowed by a chorus of denial.
Countless forks branch out before me,
like split ends on innumerable strands of hair —
as if there will never be one single absolute answer.
I'm left with no sense of safety.
Anxiety thickens into panic; I am utterly lost.
My Morality and my Shame whisper relentlessly:
"Stop. You can't."
I refuse to surrender.
Bitter resentment smolders, then ignites into rage.
Why should I stop?
Who says I can't?
I have suppressed these emotions for far, far too long.
At last, I concede: perhaps it will never be easy to be 'happy' again.
I brace myself for a life without joy.
If the answers I seek must be bought with my happiness —
I will trade it all for one fleeting moment of 'safety'.
Part 3_August 2025
Intermittent Loquacity
I’m startled—
by my own flood of words,
spilling sideways,
illogical,
barefoot sentences wandering nowhere.
I talk
without preface,
without map,
as if silence had fermented too long inside me.
It isn’t madness,
just the sound
of someone
who hasn’t spoken
in ages.
Part 4_September 2025
True awakening is not the awakening of goals,
but the awakening of cost.
The stability I now hold—
material comfort, a fragile reconciliation with my parents—
is the outcome of years of struggle,
collision, and uneasy negotiation.
For this stability, I paid a heavy emotional price:
their neglect of my feelings,
their pressure and control.
And yet I came to understand:
it was through these repeated battles and reconciliations
that the family I now choose to cherish
was shaped.
Within this background,
I found the courage to study, to create,
and to embrace the costs without regret.
I often ask myself:
if I am already so fortunate,
what else can I give—
to society, to women, to those yet unseen?
It is the security of home
and the freedom from material fear
that grant me courage.
Because I am not crushed by survival,
I can devote myself
to spirit and to thought.
I choose to keep studying
to protect this fragile “courage.”
Woman is not born,
nor is courage.
Awakening is nothing less
than the heart’s decision
to accept the cost of becoming.
Looking back to my undergraduate years,
I once hoped my work could awaken others.
But hidden within that desire
was coercion—
forcing others to pay a price
for an awakening not their own.
From my mother I learned
the most painful truth:
I cannot change anyone.
She once said:
“If I truly lived as myself,
you would no longer have a mother.”
That sentence carved itself into me—
a revelation that awakening
is never borne alone,
and its cost may tear apart bonds
too fragile to lose.
So I turned inward.
Now my work does not seek to save others,
but to reach back and embrace
the former self who once endured in silence.
Never before, never again.
An awakening measured not in victories,
but in the costs I have chosen to bear.
