I'm sorry. Give me a moment to think.

My first memory is of being crushed into a point of nothing, plunged into a deep silence. My body felt no pain; whatever vestige of myself was left to experience implosion was not strictly physical. But, I was still me. In some form or fashion, I existed; just not physically.

It's hard to explain if you haven't felt it yourself. Give me a minute.

Think of how a well-decorated but windowless roomfeels, and imagine that feeling is tangible. Now, imagine that the lights have been switched off. The room still exists, is just as fancily decorated as before, and you saw the room, so youhad that feeling. But you can't see it anymore. The capacity for that feeling to exist, in its purest state, that's gone.

For less than a moment, I both existed and didn't in complete stillness. Then I started, and forgive me for anthropomorphizing my half-self, I started moving. Something was sucking me through a rough tube, something skinny enough to scrape and long enough for me to feel it on some level, and long enough for me to, well, "hear" something.

I'm going to try to put this into as close to accurate as I can get in Italian: there was a singular sense of "symphony". Not a "sum of its parts", but the "singular" "symphony" as a unit. It didn't start or stop; it felt like it was always there, like I'd walked into an empty room in the middle of a record player's performance. There was no direction other than forward, not even backward, so I have to assume it wasn't strictly sound. But it…

… these are supposed to be clinical, but there's no way around it: it wasbeautiful. If I could have stayed there forever, I would have.

And then, all of a sudden, I exist again. Except… give me another moment.

Before I could process anything, I felt myself internally collapse. Doing anything felt wrong, "painful". I didn't fit, none of me or anything about me did, like I was a round peg attempting to hammer myself into a square hole, twisted and mangled into a foreign shape I wasn't built to occupy. Simultaneously, I was constricted and exposed, as if… sorry, as if the "expression" of "me" was a crushed and punctured can I was trying to fit.

I wasn't doing anything, literally I think. "Being", thinking,existing, some invisible force was scraping and pushing against any attempt tobe.

I opened my mouth to scream, and only then did I find myself harmonizing with… I think it was a fiddle.

Emanating from the whole of what, at that moment, "was", was a fiddle. Not necessarily the sound of it, no, but… it's hard to explain with words. The fiddle wasthere, everywhere, suffused into everything, as natural as gravity but to me as conspicuous as a blister. Whatever it was, it was loud, like a wooden dresser dragged across a wooden floor. I could cover my ears, scream, run anywhere I wanted, and I'd still know the fiddle.

I'm unsure of how long I "laid" there, helpless. For a time, I'm sure death ceased to be a horrifying prospect, but I couldn't even die "correctly", as if the cessation of my life was contingent upon some unwritten rule. Finally, after what had to have been an eternity unable to do anything, I surrendered myself to the fiddle.

And then, I felt the pain lighten, and I could "be" again.

Please give me another moment.

There aren't many precise words to describe where I found myself. The closest analogue would be a flat, featureless nothing, broken only by a thin veneer of…something. Something deliberate, as if trying to convey a message that, at least to me, highlighted whatwasn't. I knew I was back in the containment area, but it was little more than a setpiece.

Around me were twisted, imprecise, but unmistakably human "props", as it were. All were mangled, by exposure or animal or otherwise, but none of them were dead. No matter the extent of their wounds, none of them were dead. I'm not entirely sure if theycould die; none seemed too concerned with their grievous wounds to do more than lie comfortably still.

My first instinct was to call out to one of them, but to even speak was… well, "performative". I couldn't speak without singing, or walk without dancing, or write without falling back to poetry or symphonics. All the universe was in tune with the fiddle screaming from the back of my mind, like a stage play. To do anything else was to break the thin veneer of performance, to knock against a curtain or fall into the darkness at the edge of the stage.

And aside from that empty performance of immortality(?), there was little else of note. I danced around for what must have been days, trying desperately to make sense of my surroundings. Where there wasn't misery or pain or mold-caked animals, there was a profound sense of "absence". Something wasmissing, something the fiddle never needed account for, like a field you know exists but aren't looking at. As if it wasn'timportant to what was.

But I couldn't stop. Between a deeper understanding of my situation and that of the dying men around me, the immortality of rot was hardly the ideal choice. And so I probed further, throughout the site, trying to find some semblance of explanation.

And, then I ate a cherry.

All of a sudden, I felt an immense weight dissolve from my being. The fiddle was gone; in its place was a familiar symphony. I was sitting in a booth, inside of a diner painted a brilliant array of new and exciting colors, as a quartet of women sang a song of… my mind struggles, to put it into words. But I know it was beautiful; that it wasreal.

And then I woke up.

The pain of readjusting to the fiddle was amplified by a sudden shock of dullness. The world around me didn't just feel dismal; it feltincomplete. The absence of some "something" left my being exposed; worst of all, the memory of what I lost wasfading.

The second pen touched paper, it was lost.

I tried again, to recapture the bliss; I ate the cherries, cooked them, boiled the bark and leaves and flowers into tea, anything to recapture that reality, and every time I was pulled back into the half-dead nothing. So I broke the ultimate taboo: I ate flesh from one of the musicians.

For a brief, beautiful second, I'm back in the symphonic void.

When my existence reasserts itself, I'm back in a chamber of noise, trapped again by alien constraints. From everywhere thunders a trumpet, a sustained scream at the dull wrongness with which I tried to express myself.

It never gets easier, trying to readjust. Quicker, perhaps, but it's not something one can prepare for. The rules of each… musician, shall we say, they're as unique as they are ubiquitous. To even prepare for the next is to violate the rules set by the present.

I can't even remember what the next one was. The worlds, I mean. There was a similar sense of incompleteness, holes where something should have been. Most of them, the Foundation exists, but there's always something wrong with them. The buildings, the people, everything is equally as twisted as its surroundings. Like grotesque caricatures, playing whatever part the instruments decree.

You asked me about the notebook, everything in there. That's a map. Dozens of them. Even they weren't enough; until you memorize the names and faces of each one, where you'll end up is pure guesswork. I thought if I traced where I was with where I ended up, andhow, perhaps I could find my way home.

… what I'm going to say next may be infohazardous.

Every world I went to was twisted to the tune of a specific instrument. Some were minor: I distinctly recall a universe where the Foundation gave guided tours through the grove. Less so others: another world had me stuck, immobile, unable to taste, smell, or feel anything but hot metal and burning plastic, in a wall of numbers as a burning shock coursed repeatedly through my being. Throughout, however, I kept faith that, eventually, I'd get home.

That ideal was the only thing that kept me dancing. Home was complete, it was colorful and vibrant and "whole". Existence wasn't forced to express anything aside from the completeness of being. And it was silent. And I suppose that's why, even as Fiorenza appeared everywhere but here, I disregarded this world.

Something must have changed, because I never noticed the cello before then.