2026 · 9 tracks · 52 minutes
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What I forgot was never. What I remember, dies.
Nine Chapters — One Journey
Breathe
Your body moved before you woke
It learned to breathe without a plan
Something started, no one asked
And that was how the hurting began
Your eyes were opened by a hand
That never asked for your consent
They named it birth, they named it gift
They never named the debt it meant
No one built you, you occurred
A body starting in the dark
No reason chose you, no one heard
The first mistake became your spark
They wrapped the accident in cloth
They gave the accident a name
They fed it, raised it, taught it fear
And called the fear a moral frame
And later men would come with answers
Dressed as prophets, dressed as cures
Selling reasons for the accident
Selling meaning it never bore
They built whole faiths on your confusion
They built whole thrones on your unrest
And every comfort that they offered
Was just the accident, well dressed
Lahzat wahidat min watr baeid
Thuma yabtalieuha alnabd min jadid
There was a time before the breath
No hunger and no waiting there
Then something pulled you through a door
You never opened, never knew was there
And now you spend the only life
That was never asked of you to spend
Repaying debt you never owed
For a gift that was never meant
No one built you, you occurred
A body starting in the dark
And now you'll spend the rest of it
Explaining what was just a spark
The door behind you never closes
It just forgets which way it swung
And somewhere in the very hinge
The first crack was already there
We gave this place our finest years
We hung our lives upon the wall
We wrote our names on all we made
As if a name could stop the fall
But nothing here is built to last
No one is coming, nothing waits
It isn't slipping to the past
It's thinning out, dissolving, losing weight
Not taken, not replaced .. Just less
Every day, a little less
Until the word here means nothing
Because there is no here
Every wall and every vow
Everything is thinning now
Not defeated, not destroyed
Just returning to the void
There will be no final battle
No great fire and no last stand
Just a quiet, slow unravel
Water through an open hand
Look at your hands - They're older now
They held so much they could not keep
And all the things they swore to hold
Are leaving while you're half asleep
It will not matter how you fought
It will not matter what you gave
For everything you ever loved
Is thinning like a dying wave
You cannot lose to this
Losing needs a winner
There is no winner here
There is only the undoing
And it isn't even watching
Every wall and every vow
Everything is thinning now
Not defeated, not destroyed
Just returning to the void
There will be no final battle
No great fire and no last stand
Just a quiet, slow unravel
Water through an open hand
La ainhiar huna
Kulu shay' faqat yaqilu
Try to point to where it went
You can't .. There is no where
It didn't move, it didn't hide
It stopped - The way a wave stops being there
And all the weight of all those years
The love, the labor, and the pride
Was never building toward an end
It was the nothing .. and it never tried
Every wall and every vow
Everything is nothing now
Not defeated, not destroyed
Just returning to the void
There was no final battle
No great fire, no last stand
Just a quiet, slow unravel
Water through an open hand
Only less .. And less ..And less
Until not even less remained
Their faces live behind my eyes
The last warm place they call their own
And every night a little dies
They die each time I sleep alone
They breathe as long as I still speak
Their names into the empty air
But I am growing old and weak
And soon there will be no one there
What I forget was never
What I remember lies
The voice is always first to go
And then the way they used to laugh
I fight to hold them - But I know
I'm burying their other half
I reached for them inside my head
Where I had kept them safe and whole
And found a stranger's face instead
And felt them dying in my soul
What I forgot was never
What I remember dies
Something passed through me unnoticed
No sound, no warning
One more of them is gone forever
And I will never know which one
Almusiqaa wahdaha tatadhakar
Thuma tabda hi aydaan fi alnisyan
And when I die, they die once more
Inside the last who knew their light
No stone, no prayer, no open door
Just faces falling out of sight
To disappear
Inside a disappearing mind
To be erased
Before the dust
All that is remembered
Is remembered wrong
What I forgot was never
What I remember dies
And I will follow them
Into what remembers no one
When memory ends
The dead
End twice
I wake I wash the same two hands
I make the coffee let it cool
I do the things a body does
And call the doing something real
I answer to my name all day
Though no one asked if it was mine
I nod at reasons I don't hold
And sign my name to their design
I rise I rise I rise again
The same the same the same again
No reason waits for anyone
I rise until the day is done
I count the hours like a debt
I pay in full and owe again
Tomorrow comes to collect the same
And I have nothing save to spend
The debt renews before I sleep
I wake already owing more
No interest earned no balance kept
Just the same account as before
mish fariqata yawm zayi kula al'ayaam
Sometimes a moment lifts me briefly
A song a face a passing light
I mistake the lifting for a reason
And build a hope on it that night
By morning it has thinned to nothing
The song forgotten face the same
The lifting was just weather passing
Not proof that any of this has aim
Someone asked me how I manage
I said I don't I just continue
There is no method to enduring
There is only not stopping yet
I rise I rise I rise again
The same the same the same again
No reason waits for anyone
I rise until the day is done
I'll close my eyes the way I always do
Not because the day came through
Because the day like every day
Simply stopped and went its way.
They buried you again today
No shovel broke the frozen ground
The last man living who had known
Your face went down without a sound
I never met you, no one did
The ones who did are bone and clay
I found your name upon a stone
The rain had almost worn away
I traced the letters with my thumb
The way the blind would read a word
And thought: This scratch is all that says
You lived, you loved, you spoke, you heard
Somewhere in you there was a fire
Someone once crossed the night to reach
You had a laugh, you had a fear
A way of speaking — lost to each
And no one mourns you anymore
And no one speaks your name at all
The world that held you let you go
The way the leaves let go each fall
I do not mourn you — understand
Mourning needs a face to see
I mourn the mirror in the stone
The next forgotten name is me
For I am you — a step behind
A stranger yet to come will lean
Above the stone that wears my name
And feel this nothing I have seen
He'll stand a while, the way I stood
He'll trace the letters, turn, resume
And walk back to his waiting life
Between my silence and his own
And no one mourns you anymore
And no one speaks your name at all
The world that held you let you go
The way the leaves let go each fall
I do not mourn you — understand
Mourning needs a face to see
I mourn the mirror in the stone
The next forgotten name is me
Nuah ealaa man la yaerifuh 'ahad
Eaza' wasal mtakhraan bimiat eam
No hell was waiting at your end
No trumpet called, no voices cried
You ended like a sound ends
In a room with no one left inside
Whoever you were
For one more hour tonight
You were
I cannot offer more
No one can offer more
Stand out beneath the night alone
And feel how small your shoulders are
Ten thousand years of men have stood
Right here beneath this very star
They felt what you are feeling now
They begged the sky the way you do
And every one of them is gone
The sky kept none
It won't keep you
You wake believing that the day
Would somehow stumble if you fell
It wouldn't slow, It wouldn't stir
No bell would ring ... There is no bell
The rain would land on your old street
The traffic pass, the seasons turn
The world was never watching you
It only spins ... It doesn't learn
The stars are not indifferent
Indifference needs to know you're there
They never held you, never saw
You were not theirs to lose or spare
And all the weight you couldn't lift
The nights that bent you to the floor
Weighed nothing on the universe
It never felt you there before
Your heaviest and darkest grief
The load that broke your sleep for years
Has never pressed upon a star
Has never reached the outer spheres
A flicker in a flicker's glow
A breath upon a spinning stone
That circles one small dying fire
Among a billion fires unknown
The stars are not indifferent
Indifference needs to know you're there
They never held you, never saw
You were not theirs to lose or spare
And all the weight you couldn't lift
The nights that bent you to the floor
Weighed nothing on the universe
It never felt you there before
Sawt bashariun ... wahid ... yasrukh fi alfaragh
Walfaragh ... la yaradu
And here's the only mercy left
Nothing is required of you
You were not sent, you are not judged
The sky has never asked a thing
Stand out beneath the night alone
Look up —and feel it, cold and wide
The weightlessness
The weightlessness
I came to ask you what the stone won't tell me
I stood up there for years and got no sign
They say you see us, Say you walk among us
Say every candle lit is caught behind your eyes
No one is watching from beneath this ground
What you have heard, the living wrote for the living
A rope of stories thrown across the grave
So none of you would have to look straight down
Then tell me that you rest, at least the rest is true
That all the weight came off you when you fell
Rest is a word for tired men, we are not tired
We are not anything you have a word for
But hear the one truth you have never held
You spend your years in rooms you are not in
Half in tomorrows, half in old regrets
I never was as present as I am
You bury us and dare to call us gone
We have never been more here
The living haunt the earth
The dead are simply in it
Then what was it all for —the fear, the kneeling
The nights I begged the ceiling for a sign
The men who sold me maps of what comes after
Who took my hands and swore the road was theirs
The maps were drawn by men who never traveled
The tolls were paid to men who kept the tolls
Whatever waits — no living mouth has seen it
And every mouth that swears it has, has sold
I cannot tell you what is past this stillness
That is not yours to hold, and not mine to give
I only know what I unlearned by falling
Most of the chains you carry were handmade
And none of them were fastened by the dark
Then leave me something. Anything. A reason
To climb back up the hill into my life
You stood here for an hour, fully here
No yesterday, no waiting, no elsewhere
That is the only thing I have to teach
You learned it at a grave
Now go and be somewhere
While being somewhere
Is still yours to do
The living haunt the earth
The dead are simply in it
One of us is scattered
One of us is whole
Try to recall your father's line
Go back four names and watch them fall
Four generations love runs out
Beyond that blood forgets it all
And they were once the whole of it
The taste of bread the fear of night
The ache of wanting to be seen
Complete and burning worlds of light
They did not die in famous wars
No page was open when they fell
They died on ordinary days
With no one left to ring a bell
For every name the world still keeps
A million more were let go by
The earth is layered with finished worlds
That ended without one goodbye
They were everything they had
And all they had went down unknown
And no one counts the greater part
And no one carves the missing stone
We build our monuments and think
We've bought a way around the end
But every name is just delay
The famous only fall behind
The hero in the open book
The face on every gallery wall
Is someone whose forgetting
Has simply not yet come to call
For every name the world still keeps
A million more were let go by
The earth is layered with finished worlds
That ended without one goodbye
They were everything they had
And all they had went down unknown
And no one counts the greater part
And no one carves the missing stone
Samt bieadad man rahaluu bila aism
Somewhere tonight a person lives
Who'll be the last to think of you
You will not know which day it comes
They will not know that they're the last
And after them You join the greater number
Tell me who was the last to think of them
So this is how it happens You're just tired
The room is here then softer then not there
Someone is speaking but the words arrive
A little slower each time from somewhere far
You always thought that you would fight for this
That you'd hold on that letting go was hard
But look your hands are open They gave up
Before you even told them to let go
And all the things you meant to fix you won't
And all the words you saved they stay unsaid
The people that you love are in the hall
And you can't lift your voice to call them in
You spent the whole of it afraid of this
And now it's here and it is nothing like
The monster that you built inside your chest
It's just a tiredness it's just a tide
You were gone for all the time before
You'll be gone for all the time to come
This the waking breathing aching thing
Was the smallest part of you
The door was never locked
You only thought you lived here
You were passing through
And somewhere far above the bed you're leaving
A sky you never once looked up to see
Keeps turning like it turned before your first breath
And will not feel the difference when you're gone
And no one waits for you on the other side
Because there is no side and no one waits
You are not going somewhere you are ending
The way a candle doesn't go it stops
It doesn't hurt
That's the surprise
It doesn't hurt at all
The thing you feared your whole life long
Is softer than falling asleep
And the last thought The very last
Is not profound
It's small
It's something like: Oh
It was always going to be this
It was always this easy
And then
Not even that
You rose out of the nothing
You rose
You
