CW: mentions of rape culture & masturbation
Hungry Eyes By Mickhaella Ermita | Graphics by Geegee Abernethy Behold the ruins of a millennial entombed! Clothing is strewn in collapsed heaps across her floor – invariably clean, because for what reason would she go outside to dirty them? – adding another layer of carpet to carpet. Blood can be found spattered across soiled bedsheets; the violent aftermath of open eczema wounds and illexecuted damage control over her menstruation. Surveying this devastation are her keepers: three stuffed toy animals perched atop her dressing mirror, whose plush bodies are grotesquely squished together to circumvent toppling-down into dusty oblivion. Together, they are patchwork chimera. Their six eyes collectively watch her as she watches herself in the dirty glass. She squats, shrugging off ladylike propriety in the presupposed privacy of her own room, and examines the unflattering creases that line the sides of her belly. She can hardly make out her face through the grime – she leans in closer. The Big Three tower overhead, looking down upon her. She resists the urge to knock them off. Her younger sister had placed them there as a comfort. They are relics of their shared girlhoods, unearthed from the cardboard boxes that had neatly packaged and transported their lives across the Tasman Sea a decade ago. Then, high-pitched voices were used to animate and anthropomorphise them into familiar companions. Now, they are silent. Their vantage point enables surveillance of everything within the room, vanquishing prospective nightmares when she is at her most vulnerable – with her eyes closed. In childhood, there is safety in being watched. The pandemic has hurtled me across spacetime. The blank white walls of my bedroom – effaced from any temporal markers aside from the constant shifting of light outside, weakly streaming in through a glazed window – do nothing to moor me to the present. I am atemporal, tenseless. To rectify this, I subconsciously gravitate towards the past; safety can be found in regression and repetition. There’s a familiar antidote to stress in the 21st century – the compulsive consumption of ‘comfort’ media, preferably from the 90s and early 00s. 76
