A Cathedral of Stabilized Attention

Lyrics

[Intro]
The world is tearing at the seams. The sky is a blue error screen. The edges of the buildings are sawtooth memories, chewing on the light.

[Verse 1]
The man beside me, the one who spoke Spanish, his face is a buffer error. He asks me the same question, “dónde estamos,” but the syllables trip and shatter on the pavement. The rain is falling in perfect, square drops. I try to read a sign on a silver door, but the letters rearrange themselves into a barcode. The sound of a thousand corrupted image files screaming at once.

[Chorus]
Down. I think the word down. I push my attention through my spine, into the soles of my feet. Feel the stone. Uneven. Cold grit under the arches. Just this. Just the pressure. The pixel storm holds its breath. My will becomes gravity.

[Verse 2]
And the tearing stops. The sawtooth edges lock into place, tessellate. The static freezes into mosaics of saints I don't recognize. The blue screen sky fractures into a rose window. My companion is a figure made of colored light now, his question a silent, silver inscription at his feet. The stuttering voices braid themselves into a clean Gregorian chant, singing the hexadecimal color code for “calm.”

[Chorus]
Down. I am building from the ground up. I push my attention through the spine, through the soles of my feet. The stone is a foundation. Uneven. Cold. The pressure is a prayer. This is the cathedral made of a single, stabilized thought.

[Bridge]
I raise my hands to check. This must be the proof of waking. But the back of my hand is a lattice of glowing lead and fractured light. I try to count my fingers. One is a shard of sapphire. One is ruby. One is just the memory of a finger. I count them and the number is five. I count again and the number is the sound the choir makes. The reality check is just another pane of glass in the wall.

[Outro]
I am walking the aisle of my own focus. The pillars are arguments I won against the void. The Spanish saint looks out from his window, and through him I see an infinite library where every broken piece of the dream is catalogued and shelved. The choir sings my social security number as a hymn. The final stutter... resolves.