life in oblique angles

an ode to the off-centre

I have always distrusted symmetry. The way it lays things out so neatly, as if clarity were ever-so-simple. As if the existence of one thing is entirely, glaringly obviously, emblematic of its mirror. There are shapes I therefore understand better than others. Not the clean arc of cause and effect, not the perfect circle of closure, but the fragment, the sidelong, the interrupted. A notebook packed with beginnings.

A childhood photo of mine - eight or nine years old, green t-shirt, holding a bow and arrow with all the grace and intention expected of one at that age (which is to say, minimal) - has been in my memory drawer for years, the colour beginning to rub off at the edge where it has been folded between birthday cards and notebooks. I’ve never taken the time to preserve it better. The damage feels like punctuation, the kind of mark that life insists on leaving. Evidence that something happened and kept on happening.

There are days when I believe I move diagonally through the world. As if I were cut at an angle and walk slightly tilted, always brushing against moments in defiance of moving through them cleanly. Some people grow in straight lines. They go from childhood to adolescence to love to career as if ticking off a checklist. Their stories are built on scaffolding and deep foundations. Yet mine has always felt more like a collage - scraps, margins, happenings noticed from the corner of an eye. Which might be why I don’t believe in narrative arcs anymore. Or rather, I no longer believe that all stories must resolve. We crave catharsis as children crave lullabies - to know it will all be okay. I wonder if understanding has ever really saved us, or if we are all simply trying to force shapes out of smoke.

I write notes I never reread. I tell myself this is art. In them: the sound of shoes on a wet pavement, the humming silence between two people who no longer know what to say, the smell of old theatre curtains. I trust this in-between, this almost. The world keeps demanding clarity, yet I can only offer back mood. This is not intentional; it is simply the way things arrive. I wake with phrases in my head and no idea where they came from: I write them down. They mean nothing and everything.

Time doesn’t feel linear from here. It drifts. Some moments stretch like chewing gum between teeth, others vanish before they form. I remember certain afternoons more vividly than entire years. Laughing in the kitchen, a phone ringing just once, the smell of citrus and dawn. There are people I haven’t spoken to in years whose names still live somewhere deep in my throat. I carry them like out-of-circulation coins - no longer of any practical use, but too strange to take the time to consciously get rid of. We never really lose people, I think. We just stop saying their names out loud. This is part of the way our bodies remember things we don’t. The salt of the ocean is the salt of tears, after all; sorrow speaks the ancient language of the ocean from where we came. When I cry, I wonder if some part of me is trying to return to the sea. To be softened, worn smooth by movement and time, the way driftwood is. Like the body knows it came from water, and grieves in the same shape. Perhaps that’s why sorrow sometimes feels endless - it’s tidal.

I sit at my desk and stare at the dust caught in the rays of sunlight. The world outside is too bright, too linear. The news marches forward in bullets and headlines, in BREAKING NEWS. A friend texts me: “Are you free later today?” I say yes, but time feels slippery these days. What I really mean is that I am perpetually living in the space between memory and anticipation, never quite arriving in the present. I try to explain this feeling sometimes: the sense that I’m looking at my own life through glass. Not watching it, exactly. Not detached in the clinical manner. More like watching a version of myself who missed a turn but charged onwards. I see her on train platforms and in shop windows, her hands buried in a coat she used to love, her face soft with sleep or comfort or something inbetween.

To live in oblique angles is to make peace with the detour. It’s hard to believe that truth will uncover itself if only you stare it in the face long enough. Sometimes it is found in reflection - a mirror warping light, the inevitable bias of memory. I awoke with the thought in my head today that prompted me to write this: there are no straight lines in nature. Maybe I read it in a book. Maybe it came in a dream. Either way, it sounds true enough. I started looking for crookedness everywhere after that. In the way my pea-flower plant refuses to grow straight up against the stake I planted beside it, in the meander of a river, in the natural curve of a spine.

What I know now: beginnings are rarely dramatic. They slip in, a breeze curling into your room before you’ve had a chance to shut the door. I live more attentively now, in some ways. I watch the way people fidget when building the resolve to leave. I look for shapes in the pavement (so far, I’ve found and documented multiple trodden-gum hearts), I trace the lines of lives that intersect mine for only seconds.

There is no grand conclusion here - after all, this is not a manifesto, but a confession. There is just the sense that we are all slightly tilted, and there may be peace in that. Every day is aiming a bow and arrow gracelessly and wonkily into the distance and hoping it’ll take.

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this is my first post since hitting 10K followers/subscribers, and therefore my first opportunity to thank you all, but already there’s grown to be 12,000 of you!! we could fill a stadium or something, it’s blowing my mind. i can’t thank you enough for the consistent support i’ve received on this platform. i am so grateful that you all want to read my work <3

i will try to write more often, but exam season is encroaching, so pls forgive me if this is a broken promise.