Where it is Supposed to Be

Start writing heVoid.

Void.

Void.

Void.

Something.

More somethings.

Cold water, Stygian depths, welted black eyes, muffled snickers, a sharp cutting wind, flickers of floating embers, the coppery scent of blood, a cry beneath a lake of ink, the mountain which rests upon the grave of another mountain, frostbitten zombie hands, the rustle of trashbags, hypodermic needles, pink chalk, frictionless zippers, the steamroller next to raw poultry, my liver, two Caucasus Mountain eagles, immolation, mother in the closet, sixteen feet of rope, gunfire and staples, an empty metrocard, cancer-filled sulfur-eyes, screaming dead children, nail guns, nails inside of gums, flashes of cremation limelight, the stench of ammonia, the gargle of bleach, bleach mixed with ammonia, broken fishbowls, exploding cop cars, Dad avoiding that brick, and one solid wood cube etched with something vague like ‘her name.’

AWAKE.

“Hello.” My torso lifts into a bogged reality, the synovial fluid of wakeful consideration. I blink twice, then twitch. Everything is fuzzy. My stupor feels bruised from the extra melatonin I took to alleviate akathisia and reeks of sweet, well-abandoned sap.

I gaze downward at the outline of the two things attached to me, often called hands, and suddenly, they decide to dig themselves in as if electrocuted. I feel stinging needles beneath my tear ducts, and the nails catch that drifting attention and do so as they please, mostly trembling. They wish to grasp something, but they are afraid they might fall off any second.

I gaze for too long at imaginary red lines, then exhale with a hiss, not realizing that my breath has been held. “Fuck you, you stupid bastard.” I execute this efficiently, with little grease or malicious self-indictment. They are simply the squeaks of my gears, a natural response to the new stimuli that is stimuli.

I am functional. There is success here. “Shut up, you idiot. What are you talking about? Do you think that means something? Do you think there’s anything here right now? Shut up. You need clothes. Get up. I said get up. Hurry.”

MY LEGS shovel forward, sinking below where the ground is, realigning as I topple two soda cans and the pile of wrapper plastic left on a plate I finished the day before yesterday. I don’t pick them up. Everything burns for a moment as I wait for balance to reach me. It takes longer than anticipated, as I walk steadily but then must stop again after noticing the drunkenness of my knees and the unstretched everything in my body. I try to stretch but am not feeling it. I get my shoulders warm but leave my legs, just stretching them left and right once. Reaching for my brush, my pelvis turns a hundred and eighty degrees toward hydration and accessible instantaneous dopamine—oh yes.

I fail at the hydration part and sip on the two-thirds of flat hot Coke I poured into a glass at 9:30 and then stopped drinking at 11:00. “What the fuck is wrong with you there’s two Great Value waters and half a Snapple right there. Fuck you. The creases of your mouth hurt when you open your mouth. Drink the water and take an iron pill. Shit, you were supposed to take that vegetable pill last night. You can’t do it now, it won’t give you the incentive to do it again. You’ll have to try again tonight. What the fuck are you talking about? Do you ever stop? Fuck this, just drink two waters at school, and if you don’t—you definitely won’t—then fuck you.” I don’t mind the taste of the Coke since it reminds me of where I am—where I’m supposed to be because anything else would work and probably make me feel better, but then it would continue working, and I don’t want that. It increases the chance of there being more chances. It makes it harder to exploit. I can’t let my guard down or I’ll lose the opportunity to fuck myself over.

The desk opens onto me, and I crawl into it, probing around but quickly realizing that my cannabis vape pen is still hidden behind the towering Coke boxes, another excuse for my boundless caffeine addiction, or rather my ineffable addiction addiction. I usually hide my pen—not that I need to since it’s a miracle my mother is now just a pot and kratom addict—under my Buddha statue, but the symbol lost its acidity, and now it provides no shelter from the substance, or rather shelter from shelter. God, my mind is an etymological purgatory…

“Why are you still looking through the drawer? Fuck, you forgot. You idiot, you were too busy thinking about getting high and pretending you’re poetic that you forgot something important. Hurry up and get high, you not-high piece of garbage. You’ll never be some sapiosexual air-loving bhikkhu. You really think people here do that? The air smells like meth and undiagnosed borderline disorders. Just stop and use this morning before it fizzles the hell away.” I resist but can’t find the thought I lost. There was a twinkling speck of consideration that flew by, one I assumed would stay lodged in my hippocampus until after the oblivious blazing, but I knew this would not happen, just like I knew I would punish myself as my lips parted for dry speech. You could not trick me into bothering to remember something I would later regret not remembering since I likely do it most of the time anyway. I only have two hours before I have to go to school—it’s 5:00 AM. I must ration my focus attentively. “Stop it,” I try to pause this narration uselessly, but it goes on.

And on.

“Fuck,” I think as the weight of everything seeks me and then strokes me violently without my consent.

I turn around again and jolt towards the spot, grabbing my pen and warming it with my forefinger and thumb along the glass. I try to inhale, but it’s stuck. There’s gunk I must dig out before I can get high, so I use my teeth. It gets stuck to the back of my tooth, and I remove it later with toothpaste, so at least it gave me an excuse to brush my teeth. That’s primarily the reason I continued to smoke, but of course, I still find a million ways to avoid it. Perhaps, unavoidable sensory discomfort could be a good executive decision enforcer.

“And that leads to self-harm, dumbass.” After a couple of seconds, I finally get the pen clean enough, and it pops, leaking a little pure oil, which I make sure to obtain via only my tongue since that stuff sticks to your teeth even if you brush. I hold down the button and take a three-second hit just to check the vapour. It’s warm and flowing but could be denser. I’ll have to charge the device as I smoke. “No, charge your phone first. You forgot to—that’s a lie, you chose not to charge it after watching a reaction to Hacksaw Ridge by some random guys in their thirties on YouTube.” At least it wasn’t people on YouTube reacting to YouTube, something I watch often. “That’s barely better.” They are both terrible.

At least.

“At least.”

At least I’m fucked.

“At least you’re fucked.”

The high hits me. It tastes like green citrus, probably lime and Skittles if I had to describe it. It’s sultry and a little bit sardonic, but it soothes and bubbles in my head. I can feel my thoughts unravelling, the molecules dissolving into stringier, messier ones. My eye twitches. I think about clown cannibals, then how barrel-like my room feels.

“Dammit, you shouldn’t have gotten high.”

I take a six-second hit, breathing it out slowly, underestimating the amount left, and feeling some spiciness before puffing out the excess. It hits me instantly like a bowling ball, one of the blunt and shiny, jet-black ones, perhaps a giant eight-ball. I’m not sure exactly what it feels like since that is the point of the feeling, but whatever it i,s it feels like a giant eight-ball. I take two more seven-second hits, stumbling backwards into my small Japanese Shoji while curiously touching the un-varnished black wood and the off-white paper covered in flower textures. It feels like how it should. Whether that aligns with good is a mystery.

I look around at how dark the room still is. I would have been forced to turn the light on sooner if my cat Berlioz was in the room, but I left him to play outside last night. “You bastard.” I didn’t have a choice, he meows over and over past 9:00 and usually comes back at 10:00, but I fell asleep— “There’s a choice. Wake up and look outside.” Whenever I peek outside in the middle of the night he typically— “Shut the fuck up. You left him, and you didn’t have to. Now he’s cold and outside and wants breakfast, and you’re inside smoking and about to grab a bag of Lay’s. Don’t grab the bag of Lay’s. Eat a banana.” I grab the bag of Lay’s and throw it on my bed. I do really want it, but my hair is way too knotted, and I’m only wearing shorts, which makes it much sadder. I’ll eat it after getting dressed.

A couple of minutes pass. I’m wearing two slowly decomposing sneakers I want to decorate in Sharpie but won’t because I’m scared of being judged and I’m not sure how good they would look realistically, long white socks, ripped black jeans, a black shirt I didn’t check the design of (Hopefully it’s not the one with the two front holes), a white flannel coat that I’ll only realise is inside out later at 8:36 when Emmy points it out to me, my scratched glasses, and a red beanie that I must always wear in face of the other people’s eyes, or a variation of a beanie, that is—as long as only my face, neck, and hands are the only skin that I am showing. No ankles. I must have no hair on my hands or face either, but I always have broken cuticles, so no dice. I bite on them too much, but if my nails can be cut, they must be. If they can’t, check every ten minutes for grime and never permit its residency. Everyone is watching me. “That’s stupid. Very smartly stupid. No one is watching you, and you know tha,t but you’re still thinking it because you’re very smartly stupid. Or maybe that’s just stupid stupid thinking it’s anything besides stu—” Everyone continues to watch me, and I cut myself off on purpose because it is narratively interesting and makes my demise less bitter and uneventful. “Bastard.” Therein lies the success. I am winning.

As long as the story goes on I will believe I am in motion; maintain homeostasis.

I do not have mental issues, I have digestive issues. I can not digest work into progress. This progress thing, I can not retrieve it naturally. I must inject the synthetically produced version directly into my veins like insulin. This is very expensive due to hyperinflation and my inexperience with DIY emotional chemistry.

Mom and dad taught me a lot by proxy, but most of what I learned came from data. I’m a data machine, a patternvore. Patternvores feed through continuous filtration rather than passive reverse osmosis. Words, intent, bias, reasoning, cadence, and charisma are the spices and the observational microcosms of a larger whole upon which I sustain. Right now, the world is very spicy, but not the good kind with a majority of one or two spices and sprinkles of the others, more like three pounds of paprika and a gram of ginger with a glass of salt water on the side AND the utensils shoved down your throat. This is why I keep something minty—code for narcotics, only marijuana right now, but I’m sure I’ll upgrade at some point—on me at all times, to ease the spice in the air. “And people ask you why you lock your door at all times. Do they not see the red mist? I guess they just have better genes.” Regardless of how hot and IRRITATING it is to my skin, eyes, and especially my heart, I have found a system of manufacturing progress. It is lengthy, inefficient, marginally unsustainable, and most of all, un-unionized, but it gives me a big enough time gap where I can stay happy and offload the pain to a specific version of myself I’ve engineered to receive, cool, and process the kerosene without igniting it. There have been a few Fukushima-style breakdowns, but those were largely due to the economics of it all, which I have now designated a department of myself to deal with personally. The good thing is, this one is vague enough that it doesn’t actually matter if the revenue spreadsheets of day-to-day productivity add up, as long as I redefine the concept of failure into the risk of failure, which I’m so unattuned to that no matter where I am, I won’t be able to tell the two apart.

I call it the ‘grey-red’ zone. “No, you don’t.” I am calling it the grey-red zone. “Close enough. You can’t accept loss of control. That’s why I’m here, to make you controlled,” I think and am correct according to me.

I eat the bag of Lay’s, go upstairs to piss, shave while twitching my right eye, come back downstairs (stopping to let Berlioz in), collect fifty percent of the dirty laundry, go back upstairs, offload it into the washer very slowly because it’s loud when opened even though it’s even louder when turned on, turn it on, go back downstairs, and find the batteries for my Walkman.

The Walkman exists, unlike everything else in the universe. The rest of it is fog.

I look through another drawer and find the four mixtapes I’ve recorded so far: rainbow-Sharpied best hits, neon-green Sharpied Vsauce music, red and black-Sharpied Riot Grrrl, and gold and purple-Sharpied classical, but without any Tchaikovsky since I’d prefer to make a cassette purely of Tchaikovsky. It would feel a little strange, though, lugging around the commemoration of the man whom I’m very acutely aware groomed his nephew and—let’s just face it—was definitely racist. All of them were, especially the good ones. I mean, have you seen the guy’s wicked spit beard? I can feel the abuse wafting out of it. It is incredible how the wretched, pandemonious swivel of delirium and calcifying sorrow is the only thing that can fuel such artistic mastery.

When I make a mixtape, I take that fog and, somehow, somewhere, squeeze it into a place it doesn’t fit, label it to make it official, and control it with those satisfying buttons that don’t just click but reallyfuckingclick. They are a singularity of thought, something so far outside the likely path of action that I begin to feel like a story god, capable of adjusting the world into timelines it never even conceptualized.

I take the chaos and make it mine—my bitch—like a biodome constructed on the broiling dust fields of Venus, assuming that’s what Venus has instead of plains: dust fields.

I look down at the Walkman, which had been inside my record player stand, resting on some of the 45-cent, 4-inch vinyls—mostly garbage, but with a few good vocals. Suddenly it has appeared in my right hand. It’s not a Sony, just a silvery, toyish brick of sound with two audio jacks: one a mic port (it came with a simple mic that I lost the foam cover of instantly) and the other a headphone audio jack, along with a bunch of other holes whose locations I’m less certain of than both G-spots.

To be honest, it’s not a very fair comparison. I cringe at myself, thinking, “Gross. Fuck you. You will never get to live in your skin. It is full of maggots, and you like it that way. How can anyone stand it? What are you? I hate you.”

Sony is the dream Walkman. I want to play a dead character, a nonexistent one—the transgender skateboarding violinist in 1987, skitching along the back of a random Honda Civic and not giving even the slightest whiff of a damn, let alone a care. Her name is Isabelle Robinson, and she’s somehow a punk Buddhist with a geology science degree. It can be something else. I wouldn’t mind a physics or a general biology science degree. I just need my intelligence occupied, otherwise, it will thrash and attempt to claim parts of the universe knotted beyond manual control. The character requires reevaluation. I will attempt this next time the feeling overtakes me. “I’m done. Just go. We can’t afford this any longer.” Now I am bored and just want everyone inside me to shut the fuck up.

I place the undersized and yet somehow oversized earbuds into my ears and click that amazing, heavenly play button. The fact that it must be clicked along with the recording button to record anything is quite possibly the best design flaw the world has—or ever will—see. It is my jazz, unlike my two vinyls of jazz. Those are just another dead-as-space collectathon, a light bulb flicking on and off when I realize I have something to hold above the others, whether it be the Le Tigre album or Dookie by Green Day. It’s either that, or something to keep me tethered to the ground when I begin to drift into inebriation, although that sucks because I don’t have a bean bag or anything, so I just end up standing there, wobbling like a Redwood tree while watching the record spin. If Moses had lunch with me, it would end with me drinking the molten black polymer of said idols and/or a very dead Moses. “You don’t care. You don’t care about it enough to care about it.” I stop caring and allow it to simply happen because it is happening.

Floating, I repeat, “You don’t care.” It baffles me in a way I can’t fully recognize because I already know and do not require the reminder. Didn’t I just say I was done, that we don’t have enough time? I can’t comprehend what is happening. Time is in slow motion, and it takes forever for the tape to start. “Or do you know? How much do you know? What is know? What is care? Our point doesn’t matter when our resolve is as dull as a week-old No. 2 pencil. You don’t know how to know something. You can never care. Now, quit this session and drift further. You’ll need it. You’ll be waiting for you on the other side. No, not the fucking B-side… Fuck you.”

The music is heavily bitcrunched at first because the play button isn’t an exact switch, but something else that can be pressed down harder or lighter depending on how much of a bitch physics wants to be on any particular day, influencing the distortion. “Why are you complaining? You enjoy it. It’s painfully annoying. You enjoy it. ” After I fully let go, it clears out smoothly into La Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns, catching me like Leatherface’s meat hook and then dragging me backwards, facing forward, directly into the mortifying jaws of focus, in awe of its great, terrible certainty of satisfaction. This asymptote is unavoidable, and I am successfully stuck but no longer winning. Somehow, this equates to relaxation. The base is a win in motion without a finish line. My closest guess for why we prefer the more mechanical state is that control is only a burden to those who accept it as such. I refuse—as one does—so the music has a lingering sheen of rainbow from oil lining it. It coats my fingers and keeps the machine lubricated but squeaking. I sense myself becoming a reaction of itself, and it would be deafening if not for the violins. Thank nobody that the squeaks can be numbed with the readily available synaptic euphoria in such entrapment.

Music without music, not silence, would be hell on Earth, but most people just call it a job. I’m unemployed, by the way, no surprise. Drinking such a small amount of water in such a big glass is challenging. This type of hell is the worst because success becomes the punishment. “Greedy bastard. You hate everything. Everything good for you you hate. How dare you.”

I pause my Walkman. “Vocational rehabilitation hasn’t texted back. You need to make sure Raquel is coming before it’s too late and you’re off to college with no functionality.” I’m pretty confident that she said it might take a week or two. “You don’t believe that.” I do believe this. “You don’t believe this.” I do believe this. “You want to not believe this.” I want to not believe this. “Hook and sinker.” I don’t believe this. Raquel is not coming, and I’m going to die at age twenty-three, or at least until after I attempt resetting my broken whole with DMT. I have a Google sheet that outlines how to produce DMT with a budget of $230 or $270-ish if you want a respirator instead of a rag to protect you from the powdered Mimosa Hostilis root.

I remember giving Raquel my main number, even though I knew that I have two numbers for some reason, and sometimes the first doesn’t work. “The first never works; it’s just the one you know by heart. You fucked up by trying to get away from the conversation. You put us here. Fuck you,” I think in discontent, not sure where this is going, or if it’s going at all. “She tried to text you, but the number didn’t work, and now you’re gonna miss some important date. There’s unreachable data. You’re an absolute failure. You’ve failed. You’ve destroyed it.” I am not going to email her to check. It is impossible.

This way exclusively, I win. I take hold of definition and mould it to my desire, my desire to flee, to run, and to abandon. The only thing I’m not sure of besides everything is whether or not I want to abandon pridefully or neutrally. Sadly isn’t an option. I’ve faced death, even kissed her a couple of times. Black tears will not drip unless they fit the decorum, of which I theorize they will not. The buildup is more chic than that. When I reach that hysteria, all substance loses substance, and the execution becomes just that, a process leading to its end. A part of me is nostalgic for it. It resembles the preconscious very well. I might be allowed to be a kid again if everything else gets boiled away, if only for a moment. “You would swim in acid for just a moment...” I will not resist the temptation to look into it, even if I am aware of the agony it would strike in others like the phosphorus match. It is new data. I MUST consume to survive my own contrarian disbelief. Simplicity always leads to emergence, but sometimes, emergence can lead to simplicity.

That is the PURE WHITESPACE.

When and if I have entered that place, and how many times, is unknowable. It is categorized by its distinct lack of quality, so there is not much to recall. Meaning in such a vacuum only requires intent, and I have a lot of intent in me.

I intend to. “You will die.”

I intend to intend. “You will repeat.”

I will die. “You will intend.”

I will repeat, and everything will be where it’s supposed to be: no place, whitespace, death race, without my face. I am meant to be put together, only to break into pieces, but it is worth nothing if the pieces are not placed by me, of me.

This is mine. I am winning. I am not even mortal anymore. I’m negative—the unperson.

I take two more hits of my pen and climb my way to the mirror to check the redness of my eyes, which I already know are rat tail pink, crazed, and crusted heavily in rheum along the top eyelids. Looking at myself like this scares me. I’m unrecognizable. Finally, both halves of my brain cackle madly in unison, “I don’t know what you are.” This is followed by an unwavering flow of disgust and ombre-red hatred.

“I should tear your face off, pour lime on the exposed nerves, and throw you in a lake. You’d like that. It would be so pretty and cold. Remember your nightmare? You’re not thinking about tonight’s, are you? I mean that one. The first time you died. Don’t you miss it? Let me take it away. Your blood is too warm—it’s boiling! LET ME GET IT OUT.”

Fear takes over and forces me to the corner, uncomfortably sitting against Berlioz’s catnip-covered cardboard scratchpad. I hyperventilate for just a moment before twitching sporadically and then slapping my head to get the fuzzy rats out that are eating me alive. I click the play button on my Walkman, and Danse Macabre comes back, slowly easing its way up my chittering spine and into my chewed-up cerebrum, where only mould resides.

At 0:05—twelve misty strokes of midnight from the harp; at 0:34—1st Theme by the gorgeous flautist, sounding like a butterfly crossing the Amazon, seeking every mountain crack, underbrush, and stratospheric sheep. It dances very lightly, very cleanly; at 0:42—lead violinist, so utterly accomplished and dignified with his handsome, casual, even devilish stare (I remember the video the song is from by heart), plays the descending scale of the second theme, hitting me like a semi-truck. The enchantment is adamant and denies consideration. I imagine strings blurring across the orange-brown skin of the violin during the closeup that would be happening right about now, and its intentional intimacy almost turns me on; at 1:01—echoed by playful woodwinds. I can see myself playing hopscotch to it. Then there’s a gentle call and response with violins, then wind instruments—timpani and bass thumping the beat. The playful seriousness reflects my transition into adulthood. There is an overall sensation of intense work being done, like an auditory montage. It fills me with sudden responsibility; at 1:34—warm sweeping strings nicely guided by the conductor are so mentally encompassing that I unironically jump up into the air, beginning to pace in a rectangle along the edge of my cassette-shaped rug as my heart rises from my chest and tenses my jaw with every throb; at 1:48—lead violin and the xylophone make an appearance. They seem unnecessary, but I am not complaining. The air is sucked out of me with another call and response; at 2:04—witnessing vigilantly as strings descend scale; at 2:17—Cute little oboes squeak like mice among the instrumental choir; at 2:37—flutes lead in a staccato that makes me yearn for a familial bond. I’m not sure why. The only reason I can come up with involves the inability to picture a scene of two people frolicking with the sound of the flutes. Unfortunately, I simply don’t have enough memories to construct it, so I am removed from it entirely. “Failure.” I attempt to punish myself but am unsuccessful because I’ve decided I want to believe in this moment. I want to pretend like I can feel.

The elevation in the orchestra is inevitable. I begin to find myself on higher and higher mountains despite being located—literally and metaphorically—underground. Wonderful strings are all around; at 2:52—flautist feels the moment; at 2:56—leans into it! Then, horns join in. Oh, the big part is coming! Svetlan Rousev would be seen here in his precision conducting, eyes wide but black from the faint golden lighting.

At 3:05—beautifully sincere passage by the lead violinist. I want to kiss the mental image; at 3:12—Flutes respond with some… Ah, that’s it. Some girl wearing purple lace up front. She looked scarily calm the last time I watched the video. (I listen to it and Gymnopédie No. 1 by Erik Satie every morning on school days, as well as Nuestra Canción by Monsieur Périné and Real Fright by Iron Butterfly on weekends, among other things); at 3:29—graceful strings; at 3:39—cellos build up volcanically. The pace quickens, and I am literally tip-toeing around the chasm in my head; 3:49—all the horns: trombones, French horns, trumpets, and more trombones. It’s so grand and yet whimsical. The greater it gets, the blunter of a weapon it receives; at 4:07—a great dissonance. It is a battle of forces each so blatant and describable that the whole has become a new substance entirely, a pandemonious calm; at 4:27—Timpanis played by who, from just the backside alone, I am sure who was a laughing stock (as if every band kid wasn’t) in highschool; at 4:32—descending strings that make me think I’m falling through a hole to a new sky; at 4:40—lead violin: death fiddles, the plunking of strings which tickles my flesh as if he were using my tendons to play; at 4:55—lead violin plays a sweet interlude. It foreshadows a tremendous struggle, but kindly and without threat. This battle will have commitment, no doubt; at 5:06—strings as if the wind blows. This is the best part. It comes in waves and STRUGGLES to keep up. My anxiety is lush—bugs chirping in my ears while whispering awful things. It builds, and it builds, and oh god. OH GOD! Everything is laid out before me in an incalculable understanding of things too great and terrible to be misheard. I see in ultra-vision every mistake, every insult, every failure, and every urge like bodies toppled on pits of pebbled lead and forgotten dreams. This arrival of gooseflesh is the highest honour a musical work can achieve, unless it’s from cringe, of course. It is a tactile response to an outburst of synesthetic emotion, good or bad. It is the moment the universe leans in. Oh, it actually listens! Everything hears, and I fall layer by layer, eyes wide in shock, into the core of depths older than air, covered and filled with the still-rattling bones of the dead and obviously, the macabre.

At 5:35—timpani introduces the horns descending, with shimmering tutti and timpani punctuation. “How does it keep getting grander?” I cannot think over the brightness of atomic bombs going off in my occipital lobe. The weight of this non-consensual concentration is elephantine in proportions and probably runs on diesel at this point; at 5:58—strings do a breathtaking, sliding-notes descent. There is not much to say about it. It is fucking fantastic, just like everything else in this song; at 6:15—the race to the end. It is the type of thing that would play in your head if you were a racehorse about to win a horse race. The finale builds up, which almost makes me stop listening because I’m way too satisfied; at 6:32—halts suddenly for the oboe, with a background drone twirling out of the cave like a winged ballerina, dancing on the lavender clouds which float gloriously atop my well-lit nightmare; at 6:39—shimmering strings, timpani drum roll. It is one thing and one thing only: truthful. My skin is gasping with anticipation, and my blood is frigid, almost solid; at 6:51—the loveliest melodic lead violin. It has no meaning nor candour. It is absolute and concretely lodged at the end of all things; periods at the end of sentences; the orchestra, so unwept yet somehow crying phantasmagorically along a different plane… quietly ushers the ghosts back to their graves; end. Homeostasis is maintained.

“Homeostasis is maintained, and everything is where it is supposed to be.”

Because broken pieces are already where they’re supposed to be.