?Interrobang! · Track 95 · middle
Who's Really Doing the Waiting
OBJECT (intimate, what Sisukiro found): prison letters to and from an incarcerated love. OWNER (re-linked by Sisukiro): Patient Pete — sneaker-drop line-stander from the streets of NYC; note the irony of the name. FOUND AT: the ice-locked coast of Alexander Island. THE (UN)LIKELY STORY & THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTION: Pete camps days in line for sneakers though he's Patient; left his prison-letters from a locked-up love on an Antarctic coast. Who's really doing the waiting — the one inside, or the one out here?
Lyrics
[Intro] Alexander Island. Found them fused together. A brittle brick of paper and salt, locked in the polar night. [Verse 1] They call you Patient Pete. You, who stands for days on a New York City block for a pair of shoes. Your name, a quiet joke I guess. The barcodes on these envelopes look just like the ones on the boxes you wait for. Censored sections, blacked out like a redacted memory. The official stamp from some facility I can't quite make out. Her handwriting, then yours. A back and forth across a wall. [Verse 2] Thirty-six hours on concrete for a Supreme drop. That's a different kind of time. A hyperfocus you can choose. A finish line you can see. But this waiting... this is suspended animation. A life measured in letters that might not even arrive. This one, stamped 'Returned to Sender,' frozen to the rest. Did you even know? [Chorus] So who's really doing the time? The one counting days on a calendar scratched in a cell? Or the one counting moments on a frozen coast, a city block? The hours stretch and shrink until they mean nothing. You're both locked out. You're both locked in. Who's really doing the waiting? [Bridge] The wind here tastes of metal. Minus forty. It carries the ghost of penguin guano and the groan of the Ross shelf. Not far from here, a single barrel stave from a whaling ship, half-buried since the 1800s. Another piece of a story that lost its ending. Your letters smell of paper pulp and diesel from a supply ship. The smell of a long, cold journey with no arrival. [Outro] One inside. One out here. A single pane of glass between you. Or the whole frozen world. Who's waiting now?