Not my voice—
rather, what my voice does
when it refuses to arrive.
A remainder, skipping,
a stone learning the grammar of delay
across a feed that never promised reception.
The signal breaks
because the body bends first.
The body bends
because it remembers
what transmission tried to forget.
I dreamed the reel escaped its archive,
aluminum learning how to flutter,
learning that flight is not elevation
but lateral insistence.
Static was not absence.
Static was surplus.
A metallic taste—
zinc, breath,
the residue of a password
no longer owned.
(sound as sociality tearing itself open)
Before image, before word,
there was framing—
that violent holding still,
that claim to clarity.
Truth weighed something then.
Truth could bruise.
Then the pixel arrived
poor,
hungry,
brilliant in its theft.
The poor image does not lack;
it refuses property.
It eats the frame,
not out of need
but out of a collective appetite
for movement.
We live now
inside that digestion.
Buffering is not failure.
Buffering is time
improvising against command.
They call it cloud.
But cloud is a basement with funding—
a site where labor hides under light.
Images work nights,
sorting ghosts
they did not ask to inherit.
The camera does not testify.
It conspires.
It opens a door
that opens another door
that says EXIT
and folds back into enclosure.
(low frequency as theory breathing)
Phase is not progress.
Phase is rehearsal.
Phase One:
the body leaves marks,
silver spine,
indexical weight—
a belief in trace.
Phase Two:
the body thins into vibration,
thumbnail, scan,
metadata tremor—
presence misfiled as efficiency.
Phase Three:
the body asks where,
and the question glitches.
Streetlight speaks to screen.
Screen answers wrong.
I translate the news.
The news translates me
into noise.
We lose signal together,
which is to say:
we begin to listen.
Post-internet
is a lie told by exit fantasies.
We never left.
We were absorbed into the hum—
that under-sound politely ignored,
that cough beneath resolution.
I make with that cough.
I stay with the blur
where compression failed,
where truth tried to run
and learned evaporation instead.
Amateur, yes—
because love is uncredentialed.
Professional, yes—
because discipline can be fugitive too.
The studio leans.
It refuses center.
It asks
without stabilizing the question.
(sound hesitating, then staying)
Virtual?
No.
Listen to the mic sweating.
Listen to the cable
holding heat like memory.
Listen to the floor
under projection
keeping cold as an ethics.
The poor image
is rich in relation.
It has more friends
because it travels lighter.
No passport.
No fidelity requirement.
Dust logic.
Rumor logic.
Story logic—
changing
so it can survive circulation.
Transmission does not end.
It stretches.
A thin wire
from satellite to shell,
from ear to elsewhere.
Hold it close.
What you hear
is not the ocean.
It is storage singing back—
not a solo,
never a solo,
but an ensemble
mistaken for one voice,
a fugitive harmony
in the key of
still,
almost,
we.
佾楠 | Yinan
