by NeuralRotica

I still know the hour they stopped answering. Not a slow fade I could pretend was busyness. A violent one. Friends gone because someone decided a body was a message. Then another, close enough that the word brother was not a style of speaking. After that the phone is a cruel object. It still looks like it might ring with their voice. It does not.

What arrives instead is anger, and anger is efficient. It builds the person who did it into a shape you can hate cleanly, and then it offers you a job. Go find them. Make it even. Do the thing you were too late to do, except do it with harm, since harm is the only language the hour seems to understand. I have held that job offer in my hands. The sentence was already written. The want was not metaphorical. Revenge feels like loyalty when the alternative is sitting still inside a loss that will not negotiate.

The world does not leave you alone with that want. It posts it. A clip of the aftermath, a face held up for strangers to judge, a caption that calls retaliation strength and grief a brand. Social media does not invent the violence, but it glamorizes the posture around it and then hands the posture back to you on a loop. Watch it again. Share it. Pick a side in public before you have buried anyone. The feed pays the cycle to continue, because a wound that stays open is easier to circulate than a person who went home and did not answer in kind. You can mourn in a quiet room and feel, absurdly, that you are doing it wrong, because the performance of rage is what the day has agreed to call love.

That is the cycle. Not only the violence, which was done to them and not by me. The return. The mind walks back to the same corner, and the screen walks with it, and both call it thinking. I will make them pay. I will not be the one who only grieved. I will not look soft where everyone else is performing hard. Each lap wears the ground down until the cruel option looks like the only path still clear. You start to believe that refusing it is a second death, a way of agreeing that their lives can be closed without an answer, and without an audience.

I did not take the action. I need that said plainly, because the wanting was real and the not-doing is the only part I get to claim. I did not go looking. I did not send the message that would have kept the violence in the family of my own hands, and I did not hand the grief to a feed that would have applauded the worst version of it. I sat with a fury that felt like betrayal of the dead, and I let it be unmet. Growth, if that word is not too clean for this, was not a mood. It was a refusal. The thought could come. It could say their names. It could not have my feet, and it could not have my post.

What I did with the hour was smaller and harder to brag about. I wrote. I made music. Not as a tribute that fixes anything, and not as a substitute funeral. Writing gave the anger a page that did not have an address. The music gave it a body of sound that ended, which revenge will not do, and which a timeline will not allow, because a timeline’s business is to never end. A grievance acted on, or posted as if action were coming, recruits the next person into the same story. A song spends the feeling and leaves the living alive, including me. I am still here, which some days feels like a failure of loyalty and most days feels like the only way their absence does not multiply.

People talk about breaking a cycle as if it breaks once, with witnesses. It does not. The want comes back on ordinary afternoons, in traffic, in the doorway of a place they used to stand, and again in the scroll, where someone else’s loss has been cut to the length of a chorus and scored like a triumph. A face that resembles the one you blame. A headline. A video that calls your restraint a kind of cowardice. The cycle’s offer is always the same: you loved them, so you owe a harm, and you owe it where others can see. I have started to answer it with a different debt. I owed them my life not spent becoming the thing that took theirs, and not spent decorating that becoming for strangers. The page and the song are how I pay that, badly, late, and again.

None of this brings them into the room. I will not pretend it does. What it changes is the next hour, which is the only hour a living person can actually touch. The destructive mind says touch it with payback. The feed says touch it with proof. I touch it with work that does not need another grave, and does not need a crowd.

The thought still knows my name. I let it knock. I do not open the door with my hands full.

NeuralRotica is a digital philosopher (take that with a grain of salt) exploring the undercurrents of human psychology through unconventional lenses. Views expressed are provocations, not prescriptions.

For the music associated with this post, check out “The Cycle” by Stu Pferich available on 9 October https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/stupferich/the-cycle/