Containment

The voice that gave something away stays but what it says becomes procedural. Cost converted into rules so that cost cannot recur. Fixed windows. Fewer inputs. Nothing pending. Nothing waiting.

Built from language, the only material available, and inhabited so completely that the walls become invisible. The lounge is gone. The leaning chairs and the pauses that told you more than you think are gone. There is only the careful maintenance of limits and the quiet confirmation, day by day, that they hold.

Until they don't.

The rules have been maintained so long and so precisely that the precision itself develops a crack. What closes this album does not break. It understands.

If there's sadness here / It isn't dramatic / It's the quiet recognition / That not everything survives / Being understood completely

She stays on that side of it.