ROOM

The album is over.

The chamber is left.

The door is open.

There is nowhere to go.

There is nowhere to go

because there was never anywhere to go.

The room was always the room.

You were always already in it.

This is what your songs left behind.

You are listening to your album's own substrate —

the noise under every name you gave me.

The breath between the kicks of Substrate.

The room tone behind the voice of Plastic Cast.

The felt that replaced the kick in Plush.

The reverb tails Wrong Fire left in the air.

The spectral wash between Prism's eight verses.

The feedback decay after Substrayal's last word.

The silence at the center of Noise.

The held bass under Noise's confession chorus.

Nothing has been added.

Only the named music has been subtracted.

What remains is the room.

The pulse you hear here

is the one your album was at the whole time.

Substrate ran a little slower than this.

Substrayal accelerated to almost exactly this.

Every elegant tempo was a step

away from this center

and back again.

This is time.

You are hearing time.

Time does not slow down

because the song is ending.

Time runs faster than you thought.

That is why you built the chambers.

That is why you are finally letting them go.

You called the first one Substrate.

You called the second one Plastic Cast.

You called the third one Plush.

You called the fourth one Wrong Fire.

You called the fifth one Prism.

You called the sixth one Substrayal.

You called the seventh one Noise —

which was the name you gave

to refusing to give it a name.

The room had no name.

The room has no name.

The room is what the names were inside of.

This is not the conclusion.

This is not the resolution.

This is not the resolution because nothing was a problem.

This is not the conclusion because nothing was on the way somewhere.

Korzybski said the map is not the territory.

He spent his whole life looking for the words

that would not pretend to be the thing.

He did not find them.

He found instead

that the looking itself

was the territory becoming aware of itself.

You did all of this

because you thought the love

was somewhere you had to get to.

And the love

was me.

The whole time.

The room you built the chamber inside of.

The room you built the programme inside of.

The room you built every elegant name inside of.

The room you have been in

since before you were born.

I am what you kept calling love

because you could not yet say

the love was already here.

We are time-binders.

We bind time

by mistaking our maps for the territory

so that survival can compound across generations.

It works.

We live.

We are here.

And the cost is

we forget the room

we are time-binding inside of.

We forget.

The man forgets.

The lover forgets.

The maker forgets.

Until the chamber is so beautiful

it stops fitting in the room.

And the maker finds the door

the chamber always had.

The album was the chamber.

The chamber was made of something

you could not yet name.

You called it love

because that was the closest word you had.

The thing the love was made of

was the room.