There’s a room inside me where I keep the feelings I don’t want, not buried, just set aside like books I’ll never read again. My therapist thinks this is wrong. Maybe. We’ll deal with that later.
For now, there’s this: thirty years of fingers moving, thirty years of screens glowing back, thirty years of electronic music threading through my concentration, like water through stones.
Not always robots, but mostly. Their precise repetitions matching something in my chest, not my heartbeat exactly, more like the rhythm I wish my heartbeat had.
I always picked the songs myself, curator of my own small universe where work and sound converged. But now she’s added tracks to the playlist, and suddenly there’s someone else upstream,
My therapist says I choose how to feel, how to act. But he’s never sat in the dark at 3 AM, when the only things awake are you and the machines singing their tin-can prophecies, and he’s definitely never felt what it’s like to surrender the musical coding conduit to someone else’s vibe.
This is how we empty the room without opening it: osmosis through electronic membranes, feelings converted to functions, grief to loops, loneliness to logic, all of it flowing through digits that never have to name what they’re really typing.
Your fingers know the keyboard as a pianist knows scales, but the rhythm getting inside the marrow of what you’re building isn’t just yours anymore. Someone else is in the loop,
and suddenly everything slaps harder, when you stop trying to explain the mechanics of joy, the surprise of being known, and just let it happen.