a ritual-poem pieced from corrupted transmissions, recovered from the decay of cultural memory.
you are not the first to read this.
you might be the last.
We were born into
aftermath.
Mid-scroll.
Mid-sell.
Mid-collapse.
The feed was already bleeding.
The sirens came standard.
and we built futures on it.
No
origin story.
Just a thousand restarts.
Every
truth pre-owned.
Every
god A/B tested.
belief reduced to analytics.
our rituals were optimized away.
Some of us
smiled through meltdown.
Some turned
ruin into personal brand.
Some
forgot silence was ever a choice.
we sold survival before we needed it.
and made irony a lifestyle.
Language
broke first.
Then
memory.
We spoke in
loops.
We mourned in
pixels.
We loved
through buffering.
we looped our grief like code.
and called the glitch a heartbeat.
The
prophets logged off.
The
sky was sandboxed.
Maps
failed.
But we were never lost—
just
located.
Labeled.
Predicted.
Handled.
location is not liberation.
only exile with coordinates.
This is not the ending.
This is not even the fall.
This is
the
middle—
cracking
at
system speed.
the system resists resolution.
until we hit reboot, not ground.
Still,
the lungs
pull air.
A door
stays ajar.
A song
slipsthrough the static.
the melody survived the collapse.
in the static, it waits.
Somewhere,
a child
looks up.
And the
skyis still
a
question.
what survives always wonders.
and that wondering is the answer.
// H.M. Stefanec // reveriesinred.com // MIDDLE.STATE.2025
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