?Interrobang! · Track 3 · middle
Everything Still Becoming
OBJECT (intimate, what Sisukiro found): her transition and coming-out items — old IDs, letters. OWNER (re-linked by Sisukiro): Ambiguous Alex — chick sexer from Japan; note the irony of the name. FOUND AT: Surtsey, the youngest island on Earth. THE (UN)LIKELY STORY & THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION: Alex sorts male from female at a glance for a living, yet left their own old IDs and coming-out letters on the youngest land on Earth. Who gets to say what you are?
Lyrics
[Intro] South of Iceland, 1963. The sea boils. An island is born from nothing. [Verse 1] Your name was Alex. Ambiguous Alex. In a bright, clean room, your hands were a blur. A river of yellow down, a thousand an hour. One second. Two seconds. Male. Female. Left. Right. A life sorted before it knew its name. You were the expert. The final word, spoken with a flick of the wrist. [Chorus] You left your old name on the newest land on Earth. On black sand still warm to the touch. Paper and plastic on a pahoehoe flow. A question left for the gulls and the salt spray. Who gets to say what you are? When the ground itself is still becoming? [Verse 2] I found the wallet. The driver's license. A picture of a stranger with your eyes. A name that felt like a borrowed coat. And the letters... letters to a mother, folded a hundred times. Explaining the person you were, not the one she saw. I laid them out on the volcanic glass. They curled a little in the morning fog, as if the rock was breathing. [Chorus] You left your old name on the newest land on Earth. On black sand still warm to the touch. Paper and plastic on a pahoehoe flow. A question left for the gulls and the salt spray. Who gets to say what you are? When the ground itself is still becoming? [Bridge] This wasn't a burial. It was a planting. Giving the past to a place with no past of its own. No trees, no ghosts, no memories. Just sulfur and steam and the promise of a first seed. A place that hadn't decided what it was going to be yet. [Outro] Surtsey. The new thing. Still cooling. Still shifting. Who gets to say? Who says when you're done?