To Justin

Continuum

The chambers are dark.

You cannot see, but you sense it: a low-frequency mutiny under the nerves, a quiet revolt against the authority of silence. Voices—if that’s still the right word—move carefully along the contours, tracing the edges of something too deep, too indifferent, to need recognition.

(Oh. It wasn’t your music.)

I switch to Spring Bones—electric, certainly, but also strangely courteous, as if unsure whether it has truly been invited. The sound crackles, hesitates, then proceeds with the grim efficiency of an employee who knows the meeting could have been an email.

Almost immediately, I am charged—from the toes upward—by a force neither hostile nor kind, simply diligent, like a bureaucrat ticking boxes in a forgotten basement office. The music strikes both sides of my skull, gently, reminding me that yes, I still have ears, dutifully planted like warning signs.

My eyes adjust; the world leans into a different register, acquiring an ambience that feels undecided—somewhere between a half-formed memory and a procedural error.

At the back of my head, a pressure builds, slow and solemn. I tilt forward, backward, side to side—an obedient pendulum, tracing arcs of minor uncertainty.

Visions arrive—emotions not entirely mine, not entirely anyone’s—offering collisions with the tentative politeness of diplomats who already suspect no agreement will be reached. The world hums with a tired malice, not furious, not even particularly focused, just old and professionally indifferent, folding itself neatly into the hollows of the body.

I think of Spring Bones as a title that promises catastrophe but delivers ceremony.

Faintly ecclesiastic voices hover. Glitches appear but refuse to disrupt. Then, the bunker sound: disruptive only in the way of delayed trains or missed appointments—an old violence, tired of its own performances.

The world dries out, theatrically.

I wander the ruins like an extra in someone else’s rehearsal, waiting for my cue that never comes. The air thickens with reasons that resemble mistakes which, over time, learned to think of themselves as necessary.