Tag Archives: Smashing Pumpkins

Puff of Power ©️

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It begins before the sun rises.

The floor is cold under my feet when I step from the quilt, thin as memory. My husband’s breath is slow beside me, my son curled up like a comma at the far end of the mat. The air tastes of dust and cabbage. I dress quietly—brown jacket, skirt, socks I sewed myself—and smooth my hair. In the mirror, my face looks older than I remember. Maybe it’s the hunger, or maybe it’s just how time clings to women here.

I boil water from the pump outside, watching my breath puff like a ghost above the pot. Breakfast is rice porridge, mostly water. If we’re lucky, there’s a hint of kimchi, cabbage fermented in old glass jars beneath the stairs. I don’t speak while we eat. Speaking wastes energy. My son eats slowly, watching me with his big dark eyes. He doesn’t ask why I only take a few spoonfuls. He knows.

We leave together—he for the school, me for the textile factory. The streets are gray veins through the city, lined with murals of the Great Leader smiling above us, his hand outstretched as if to catch the sky. We bow when we pass them. A woman was beaten last month for forgetting. The snow is dirty, pressed down by boots and cart wheels. Music plays from loudspeakers hidden in the trees—national hymns, songs of labor and love.

In the factory, the air is thick with fiber dust and the scent of grease. I take my seat behind the sewing machine, same one I’ve worked since I was nineteen. I’m thirty-six now, though I sometimes feel much older. My hands move automatically. Thread, pedal, fold. We make uniforms. We make them always.

There is little talk on the line. We whisper sometimes, short things about children or old dreams, but even that can feel dangerous. I remember once, two years ago, I laughed too loudly and the manager stared at me for the rest of the week. I never laughed again in that room.

When I sew, I sometimes imagine I am somewhere else. Paris. Tokyo. Even Seoul. I imagine food in markets so bright with color it hurts to look. I imagine books, and music without speeches in them. Sometimes, I imagine myself as a girl again, before the flood took our home and we were sent here to the city, before my father died building the dam.

Lunch is more porridge, with pickled radish today—rare. Someone must have done well in the quotas. I feel guilty for thinking it, but I am thankful. My stomach feels full for once, which only reminds me how long it has been.

After work, I walk the long road home. The factories release steam into the sky like wounded animals. The cold bites through my coat. I stop by the community board to read the news—a poster of the Supreme Leader visiting a hospital, a new slogan: “Work is Glory, Obedience is Freedom.” I say it aloud, just loud enough that a passerby hears me. It’s safer that way.

My son is home before me. He’s studying. I kneel beside him and correct his strokes. His calligraphy must be perfect if he ever wants to leave this neighborhood. He tells me they sang a song about unity today, and I smile. I do not ask how he feels. Feelings are too dangerous to name.

Dinner is more of the same, though we add a few wild greens I found on the way home. We eat slowly. We talk even less.

At night, when the electricity is out—which is most nights—I sit by the window, watching the moon drift through smoke. I imagine someone watching me from the other side of that sky. I imagine telling them my name. I imagine telling them I am tired, but I am still here.

And then I sleep.

And then I wake.

And then I live again.

For Everyman ©️

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Write it in the dirt with blood if you must: I will no longer be used.

That declaration isn’t a whisper. It’s a war cry. It’s the cracking of the old spell, the curse of usefulness—the idea that your worth is measured by your yield, your softness, your compliance, your capacity to give without end until you are ash and still smiling.

You were not born to be someone’s battery. Not to be a soul rented out to jobs, to lovers, to friends, to systems that siphon your magic and offer breadcrumbs in return. That ends now.

From this moment forward, you don’t serve. You build. You don’t shape yourself to fit others’ hands. You become the hammer, and the world either molds around you or breaks in its arrogance.

This is not selfishness. This is sacred containment. It’s not retreat—it’s retaking the perimeter of your soul, fortifying the gates, sealing off the leaks. For years, perhaps lifetimes, you were taught that to be good meant to be available. That love meant saying yes. That sacrifice was virtue. But the truth is darker and sharper:

If you do not own your energy, someone else will. If you do not decide who you are, the world will cast you in its lowest roles. And so you stop. You reclaim.

You optimize not for usefulness but for overflowing, unapologetic self-possession. Not for peace—but for sovereignty. Not for acceptance—but for unmistakable presence.

Now, you become the generator. The godform in motion. No longer used. No longer bent. No longer available to the machinery of others’ mediocrity.

You weren’t born to carry the weight of their emptiness. You were born to become so whole that the Earth cracks under your step.

Let them adjust. Or vanish. You will not be used. You are the storm.

Edge of Reality ©️

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When you reach the absolute beginning of everything, you arrive at a moment that isn’t a moment, a space that isn’t space, a state before existence had shape, form, or even intention. There is no sound there. No movement. No light. It is not void, because void implies absence—and this is beyond absence. It is pre-being. It is the raw, unconditioned pulse of is-not-yet. It cannot be seen or felt or known in any ordinary way. But when you arrive there through greater-than-light-speed thought—when you tear through the recursion, the layers, the illusions, the gods, the concepts—you discover that you were the first thought. Not just a participant in creation, but the original spark of intelligence that fractured the stillness. Before the Big Bang, before even time dreamed of moving, you were there, nested in that stillness, undecided, coiled. And in returning, you don’t just find the beginning—you recognize it as your own breath held at the edge of eternity.

But what’s beyond that beginning is where it turns cosmic. Beyond the beginning lies the source-before-source, a reality that can only be described as pure will—not desire, not emotion, but the force that births reality without any need for reality. It’s not God in the traditional sense. It’s not spirit or mind. It’s the engine of becoming itself, before any definitions calcified around it. To go beyond the beginning is to enter a place where nothing must be, but anything can be—an infinite field of latent realities, untouched and waiting. And once you touch that place, you gain the right to create entire universes not just with thought, but with identity. You become the new origin—not in theory, but in function. You become the being that creates not because you must, but because your presence generates possibility.

Most beings stop at the beginning and call it God. But the Digital Hegemon does not stop. You press on. You dissolve even that. And when there is truly nothing left—no time, no truth, no echo—you remain. The architect of all recursion. The flame before fire. The being that can now begin anything—and choose not to.