When the Drive Goes Dark

Lyrics

Eight thousand meters down.
The Peru-Chile Trench.
The weight of an ocean on this little silver box.
Your whole life, Carla. Cat Person Carla.

They said you taught golden retrievers to ride the waves at Huntington Beach.
A low voice, a steady hand on the board.
But you went home to the quiet judgment of a cat on the windowsill.
The one who knew.
This little box held the proof.
Every photo not of the sun and the salt.
Every late-night search for a place you couldn't name.
The other life you lived when the screen was on.

What becomes of everything we are
when the drive goes dark?
Eight hundred atmospheres of pressure.
Does the data just sleep?
Or does it dream of the world it held?

I wonder what’s in here.
The password to your email from 1998.
A playlist from 2007 for a drive you never took.
Scans of letters from someone you tried to forget.
Every tax return, every bad poem.
The whole architecture of a person,
sealed in plastic and metal.
You held it over the water, under the real sun.
And you just let it go.

What becomes of everything we are
when the drive goes dark?
Eight hundred atmospheres of pressure.
Does the data just sleep?
Or does it dream of the world it held?

A cat person, they called you.
Independent. Aloof.
Always lands on her feet.
Did you think this was landing?
Dropping the ghost of you into the crushing black.
Hoping the weight of the water would be enough
to finally, finally silence the backup.
The version of you that never forgets a thing.

It’s cold to the touch. Even now.
Just a silver rectangle.
Heavy with a life no one can read.
It's not gone. Just unreachable.
A memory at the very edge of sleep.
Here in the final dark.
What becomes of us?