Chương 118: 4.8 Ten Words - Joe Satriani (3:28)

Z3ke (Original Poster) I took everyone's advice and found a bar last night that was willing to let me play. The whole thing was interesting and there's a bunch I wanna tell you all about. I've been sitting here for the past couple of hours trying to write this post and explain everything that happened to me, but I keep deleting whatever I wrote because it all comes out sounding wrong. Let me just say that I think I understand how my music works. Or maybe it's my class.

Or maybe it's the way that all my skills fit together. Whatever it is, I understand it a hell of a lot better than I did yesterday. The problem is that every time I try to explain what happened, it feels like I'm only able to get about 10% of the experience down. I read back what I wrote and all the words are flat and colorless and maybe you guys would understand it but it's not at all what I'm actually trying to say.

And it's driving me insane because I'm pretty sure that's exactly the problem my class is supposed to solve. I'm not trying to be all mysterious and cryptic here. I'm literally saying that I think my music exists to bridge the gap between what people feel and what they're actually capable of explaining. Or maybe that's not quite right either and the music is just supposed to evoke feelings that I give them. Maybe. See? This is exactly what I mean.

I try to come up with the right explanation and immediately realize that I'm fucking it all up and it's frustrating as hell. I can see it perfectly in my mind. All the words come to me and I've got the picture of it in my head, but the moment I try to type it all out and translate my thoughts into language for you all, it falls apart. I can only poke around the edges of the thing, and that's not nearly good enough. I think I talked about describing colors to someone who's never seen them before.

I think I did it back when I was in the Under-MIZ and I was telling you all what my skills felt like and how it was kinda freaking me out at the time. Well, I'm gonna steal that thing again because it's the closest comparison that I've got. Sure, it might be a trope or whatever (trope probably isn't the word and I'm getting even angrier because now ALL language is failing me) but I'm gonna try and use it and you're all gonna understand. Okay. You're trying to explain colors and you're pulling your hair out because…

how can you explain blue? You can try and compare them to other colors and you can talk around the idea of blue and you can use metaphors, but there's always an essential part of the idea that just refuses to fit inside a sentence. That's what this feels like. When I was playing last night, there was this moment where everything that I couldn't explain were suddenly 100% understandable. And it wasn't because I found better words or suddenly became an amazing orator. It's was because I didn't need the words anymore.

Jesus Christ this is difficult to explain. Have you ever sat down with a friend and you had a conversation late one night and they genuinely want to understand you and you try to explain everything that's going on in your head? I've had those late night conversations. You know exactly what you're feeling and you know your emotions and you know why you're hurting or angry or exhausted or scared. The whole thing makes perfect sense in your head.

But then you open your mouth and all the words come dribbling out and they're always a mess. You stumble over yourself and you leave some important parts out and you use the wrong examples, and then before long you're listening to yourself talk and you're like "that's not at all what I meant." But it's the best you can manage and it's frustrating because your best just sounds like a cheap imitation of what you're actually trying to say. That's what language has always felt like to me. But last night…

my music doesn't need language. It was like I could play those feelings directly instead of trying to describe them. If I wanted someone to understand that dull, suffocating malaise that settles over me sometimes, I didn't have to search for the perfect sentence that would no doubt fall short.

If I wanted someone to understand what depression feels like - what it's like when all you want to do is lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and let the world drift past without you - I could make them feel it instead of explaining it. Fuck. Even writing that paragraph annoys me. I'm reading it back right now and I'm thinking that no, that's still not it.

It's closer than anything else I've written today, but the whole thing still feels incomplete and I just want to throw my tech slate against the wall and scream and go for a walk. I can already imagine some of you reading this and screaming at your screens and telling me to "get to the damn point because you're dancing around it." And you're right. But it's frustrating because I can't get to the point. I'm not trying to be vague.

I want to tell you all what happened during the performance, but every time I write something down I see that what I gave you is just ordinary and what I'm trying to say has weight to it. So, I've decided not to rush it. Instead, I'm going to back up and tell you all about the rest of yesterday and maybe by the time I get to the bar and my playing I'll have figured out how to explain what happened without wanting to just delete everything. And if I don't…

then I'd rather wait another day than reduce something this important to a couple of sloppy paragraphs. I think I owe you all, and myself, a better explanation than that. So… write amongst yourselves while I try to figure out how to say something. Have you guys all figured out how I'm gonna get out of Cliffhaven? What have you all come up with in terms of ships I can sail on? MapHackJunkie Oh snap. Zeke the teacher has come by to grade our homework.

I do appreciate that you gave us something specific to research Zeke, but I don;'t know how much help we're going to be. Cliffhaven was never really a city filled with memorable captains and merchants. Most of them existed because the game just needed bodies to stand around the docks. By that, I mean there were NPCs named Roger, Chilton, Daveson, whatever, but they weren't exactly fleshed out characters. We knew they existed and we knew they had a name and that was about it.

We had no clue whether they were any good at their jobs. It's not like we got a bunch of backstory for them. Craaazzzzy | It's not like we got a bunch of backstory for them. | There were a few people that we know about. It's not like everything is a black hole in Cliffhaven. At the same time, the place isn't like the rest of the Deadlands where every named NPC eventually tries to murder you or recruit you into a cult. Also, most of what we know comes from old Syndicate's Wake videos on YouTube.

We can't exactly walk around and scout people for Zeke. Malv0lio (Primary) I've already started putting together a proper list of recommendations. Unfortunately, Map's right. It's not a long list. We've only got about three names of people. I'll send it to you later after I've done my own work on it Zeke. IridumSky Whatever you do, don't sail on the Hearth's Glory. The captain is nuts, he's basically trying to do daring stunts because he thinks it'll make the Hearth like him.

TacticusRat62 I'd be careful about leaning too hard on game knowledge here. It's been incredibly useful so far because you've been dealing with lore and locations that we already know existed, but you should definitely be using this forum more as a starting point and not the be all end all. Your story is set in a more realistic Fracture-verse. Remember what happened with the Holdfast?

You went there and met up with the Mayor, then we told you to gamble and earn a bunch of cash so you could buy maps that would lead you deeper into the Under-MIZ. That failed because you informed us the dood was a lying cheater. And none of that was in the games. That's a good reminder for you that you're dealing with a living world and not an MMO. Our game knowledge isn't the same as real-world knowledge. SignalLoss ^Tacticus.

We've got an encyclopedic understanding of the Fracture-verse and its games, but that doesn't mean we're infallible. If we tell you that a captain has a good reputation in Syndicate's Wake, you should treat that as a lead and not proof. Keep an eye on him and do your own due diligence. Im_Panda You know… there is that famous pirate captain that stops around Cliffhaven sometimes… Now I know we're trying to keep Zeke out of trouble… but… sea shanties!!!

A group of pirates could be good if any trouble rolls around on the voyage, and if Zeke gets one their good side, they could be useful friends to have. Blazer66 No way he crosses that ocean without setting off at least one Kraken. RedCarpetManiac He doesn't need to be messing around with pirates. We just got him out of the most apocalyptic of the settings. He doesn't need more danger. SaltBae Zeke, spend less time studying the captain and more time watching the crew.

Find somewhere on the docks where you can sit and watch the ships for a few hours before you buy passage. Watch how the crew all treats each other. Do the sailors seem comfortable around the captain, or do they go silent as soon as he walks past? Are people working efficiently because they know what they're doing, or because someone is screaming at them every thirty seconds? Ships are like workplaces. Imagine that you're going for an interview. You want to scope out all the managers.

If you found a guy in a workplace who was screaming at the staff and being a complete tool, you wouldn't want to work there. Do the same thing with the different ships. Even if you're only booking passage for a couple days, it'll be worth it. DuckDetective13 ^SaltBae. My dad always said you could judge a restaurant by watching where the cooks ate after their shift. If the staff isn't going to eat their own food, that's telling you something. Same principle here.

If the sailors keep signing on to work with the same captain year after year, voyage after voyage, there's probably a good reason for it. Most people don't voluntarily work for someone who is incompetent, cruel, or likely to get them killed. HecateTeaCozy Can I ask what everyone's hurry is to get him out of Cliffhaven? He's only been there a few days and we already see him being better for it. He's wandering around the harbor, soaking in the hot springs, and complaining about stairs instead of nightmare horrors.

I'm actually enjoying the slower pace of the story, and I don't think there's anything wrong with letting him spend a few more days recovering in a peaceful village before he heads off into the bowels of hell. Bookwyrm86 Samesies. We've all gotten invested in his adventure, so it's easy to forget that Zeke has spent all his time in the Fracture-verse surviving one traumatic event after another. Cliffhaven feels like he's actually getting to enjoy some of the better parts of the Fracture-verse.

There's nothing wrong with letting the dood recover for a bit. GravellyVoice1 Hells nah. Don't have him just hanging in Cliffhaven. He needs to continue on to Brightharbor. Not saying he needs to run headlong into another apocalypse, but he does need to keep the story moving. Plus, Brightharbor has all the same easy pace as Cliffhaven AND it's in Emberveil. The Fracture-verse is so much larger than just Cliffhaven and The MIZ, and exploring it is a key part of enjoying the games. Caboodle (Proctor) You do you Zeke.

Keep living your best life. Honestly, there doesn't seem to be a bad decision here. Either you spend another week in Cliffhaven and recuperate, or you decide to sail for Brightharbor and relax there. Either way, the next however long should be easy going for you. Your decision is really "which pleasant coastal city do I want to visit next?" After everything that you've gone through, that's a pretty nice problem to have. ShivSays Mal… I'm going to call you out here.

You've been trying to convince Zeke to head to Emberveil ever since you were made Primary… but where's his warning list? Back when Null was his first primary, he handed Zeke a survival manual. He told him who to stay away from and which dangers in the area he should avoid. Obviously, the joke is that Zeke used that as a check-list of who to piss off, but Null still did his job as the primary. You've mostly just told him to head to Brightharbor and then just sat back. Byte-Sized Ooo. Yes.

Tell him about the dangers and wonders of Emberveil. Yo Zeke, when you are ready - and I want to stress that I'm not saying to head straight there - you should head to Mourne Hall. There's this quest in the game called The Harrodean Inheritance, and it's like a murder mystery. You can get some pretty cool loot out of it, including something called a "meditation stone" which boosts your magical regeneration. I'm not sure how it would work with your Rockstar class or anything, but it's pretty awesome.

The best part about all of it is that this forum has completed The Harrodean Inheritance. We can give you all the answers and a detailed walkthrough for the whole questline. It would really just be you walking into this mansion, enjoying a dinner party and some dancing, and then getting some loot. Marcelloll | but where's his warning list? | Why is nobody warning him about the fucking Fae?! Zeke, if you're reading this, don't trust those fuckers, EVER. BaryBybax Nah.

His obvious first stop should be the Between Bazaar. Granted, we're not entirely certain when Zeke is going and the place is only there for a single day every month, but if he just hangs in the area he's sure to see it. He needs to go there so that we can finally get some answers about the moths. That questline has haunted me for years. I WANT ANSWERS!! ClickWhirr It doesn't have to be exactly like how Null wrote it out. But you should definitely give him a who's who of Emberveil.

Gavinfoxx So what's our plan for when he inevitably Zeke's himself into the Hearth? Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. ShivSays That's what I'm saying. He doesn't know enough about Emberveil to make any good decisions. He's going to see some weird ass building and think to himself hey, that looks like a good place for a quick rest and then we're not going to get updates from him for a decade.

M-Bomb'Hey guys, I slipped on a banana peel and fell through the door of this weird building, slid down the waxed floor through a few hallways, then down a flight of stairs, and I think the exit disappeared. Where am I?' Zeke, three days after making landfall. Malv0lio (Primary) Alright. Message received. I'll work on something for him for when he lands in Brightharbor. What I'd suggest is that you all help me out with it too.

I'm only one man, so instead of everyone dumping a bunch of facts on him, we should divvy up the work and come together. DM me if you want to help out. We can have groups writing about political factions, dangerous monsters (the Living Stories and Houseborn) and another group talking about loot that would be easily gathered by Zeke. Once we've got everything together, I can compile it into a single guide instead of forcing Zeke to piece together information from fifty different replies.

Caboodle (Proctor) | I can compile it into a single guide | Oh… you mean like doing your job? Just as long as you prepare him adequately and don't go all Crush and just send him off into danger.

Z3ke (Original Poster) Okay. I think I've figured out where to start. I'm gonna save the bar for later because I'm still struggling to figure out how to word it without it sounding like I'm just babbling and lost my mind. Instead, I'll back up and tell you all about the Singing Cliffs because that happened earlier in the day and it's a whole lot easier to put into words. So, I left my tiny apartment in the morning and I was feeling a hell of a lot better than I had the day before.

My legs were still complaining every time I stood up, but the pain had dulled to a slight ache instead of a vicious stabbing. Between getting a full night's sleep and soaking in the hot springs, I finally felt like I'd recovered from the unofficial Cliffhaven initiation ritual of making visitors climb thousands of flights of stairs before they got to the city itself. I put the harbor to my back and left town through a coastal road. The farther I walked, the quieter everything became.

The sounds of shouting dockworkers and the clatter of cranes and the constant rumble of wagons rolling over stones died off and was replaced by the sounds of gulls and the steady rhythm of waves crashing against the cliffs below. It was pretty peaceful and I just walked along the road, content for once. Eventually I reached the Singing Cliffs, the tourist trap set just outside the city. At first glance they don't really look like much.

It's just a long stretch of cliff with stalagmites (or stalactites, I can never tell the difference) scattered about the place. Then you get closer and you notice that someone carved hundreds and thousands of smooth holes into the rock. Every hole is slightly different. Some are wide and some are narrow and some disappear deep into the rocks while others barely penetrate the surface. The angles are all different too, pointing in all different directions.

And then the wind picks up and you realize why they're called the Singing Cliffs. The breeze hit and it cooled some of the sweat that I'd got from walking out during the day, and it hit the different holes and they began to sing. Some of them let out these low tones that I could feel in my bones. They were like those timpani drums, just rattling my body and vibrating through the cliffs.

Other holes caught the wind and let out these soft, high and haunting notes that drifted out over the ocean before fading into the distance. Every gust of wind rearranged the music, adding new voices while others disappeared because the wind never blew exactly the same twice. I stood there and listened and enjoyed it all. But also… I'm gonna complain and say that you all ruined this world for me.

After about thirty seconds of just sitting there and listening to the wind, there was a small bit in the back of my mind that was trying to figure out what the trick was. I half expected my puzzle intuition to start buzzing and show me hidden carvings or symbols. I started checking around the Singing Cliffs for pressure plates or some way to shift the rocks so that I could get the wind to hit some sequence of notes that would unlock a secret door or summon an ancient guardian or point me to a lost treasure.

In my defense, after everything that happened to me it was believable that you'd all send me on a legendary quest rather than a simple tourist attraction. So I spent about thirty minutes or so poking at rocks and looking behind outcroppings and generally making an idiot of myself before I finally accepted that nothing was going to happen. There wasn't a hidden entrance. There wasn't a treasure vault. There were no mysterious spirits congratulating me for discovering an ancient ruin.

The cliffs weren't magical, they were just cliffs. They'd been there for generations and, I found out later, that people in Cliffhaven took it upon themselves to occasionally head out to the Singing Cliffs and repair a few of the stalagmites whenever the weather wears them down. And occasionally, someone adds a few more openings if they think it'll improve the sounds. It's something like a rite of passage for the youth of Cliffhaven.

They drink and gather together and head to the cliffs and drill small holes into the rock and then, when they're older, they can take their kids to the cliffs and point to the musical note that they made and tell their kids all about it. That's beautiful to me. It's this thing that everyone in the city does. It binds the community together. At some point in the distant past, someone looked at that stretch of coastline and decided that the world would be a little more beautiful if the wind could sing.

And then the people who came after them all agreed, and they took it upon themselves to maintain it. Then the next generation came along, and the next, and the next. Nobody was trying to make any money from it. Nobody was building it as a monument to some king or "great man." It served no practical reason whatsoever beyond making people stop for a few minutes and listen. I don't know.

Maybe it's because I've spent so long in the Deadlands where every building exists because somebody needed it to survive another day. Everything there has a purpose. Every wall, every barricade, every weapon, every stockpile of food, it all exists because life was hard enough that beauty became a luxury. Then I come to this place and find proof that people have spent generations preserving something that exists for no other reason than making the world a nicer place. Ugh. Whatever.

I'm getting kinda sappy here and I don't know exactly where I was going with. I liked it is all. After I left the Singing Cliffs I wandered around Cliffhaven for a few more hours before realizing that I was running out of excuses. You all had been harping on me to practice my music skills and start looking into what all the songs did and what I could get out of my Rockstar class.

And I could tell that, with how I was dragging my feet by doing anything but heading to a bar, I was nervous about actually practicing my music. Walking into a bar and asking, "Hey, can I play a few songs?" was somehow more intimidating than fighting monsters. Combat is relatively easy. Well… not easy. I don't mean easy. It's still frightening as hell. But Combat is straightforward. Something is trying to kill you and you either fight or you die. There isn't a whole lot of ambiguity there.

But walking up to a complete stranger and asking them to judge something personal about you is completely different. I mean, I'm not even much of a musician. I've stumbled my way through a couple songs, and all that was during moments of fight or flight where nobody is really listening and judging my performance. I must have walked past three different bars before I finally forced myself through the doors of one. There wasn't anything particularly special about the place that made me choose it over the others.

It was mostly just sailors and merchants and dockworkers grabbing dinner or a drink after work. There were maybe thirty or forty people inside, and the place smelled like roasted meat, spilled beer, and sea salt. I found the owner behind the bar and spent thirty seconds trying to figure out how to start the conversation. Eventually I just blurted it out.

"Would you… uh, would you be interested in live music?" He looked me up and down, noticed my complete lack of guitar because I'd forgotten to take it out of my dimensional storage in the first place, and then shrugged. He told me I could play a song and if people liked it, I could stay. If they didn't, well, I'd gotten a free audience for one song. I made my way over to this small corner in the bar and pulled a stool from one of the nearby tables.

I grabbed my guitar from my storage space, sat down, and tried not to think about the fact that everyone in the room was now looking at me. I'm normally not at all nervous about people staring… kinda. But this felt a little different. I strummed a few notes on the guitar and then decided to start with one of the songs that you lot had given me a pdf for: The Man Who Sold the World. The moment my fingers touched the strings, Instrument Mastery Activated.

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, it still catches me off guard whenever one of my skills activate. It's not like something grabs control of my body. I'm still the one playing. It's more like a bunch of muscle memory is added to my body and I don't have to think about finger placement or timing or whether I'm stretching far enough to reach a chord. My hands simply know what to do and they do it.

I also know that I've freaked out about it often enough, but I haven't told you all that it also feels kinda incredible. Have you all ever tried learning something and you keep beating your head against a wall and then you finally reach that magical point where everything suddenly clicks and you know how to do something. Well, imagine that and turn that feeling up to a hundred. Every note I played came out clean. Every transition I made felt effortless.

My fingers weren't fighting the guitar, they were dancing across the strings. For those few minutes of that David Bowie song, it felt like I'd been playing for decades instead of just stumbling through the music. About halfway through the song I started relaxing. My nerves faded away and I felt like maybe everything was going to work out after all.

A couple of the conversations in the bar died down, some of the people turned to look at me, and I even caught one of the bartenders stopping for a second to listen before getting back to work. Then the song ended and the applause began. But it was tepid. People politely clapped. A few nodded at me. One guy whistled in appreciation before going back to his drink. The owner smiled and gave me an approving little nod, letting me continue.

But everyone else just sort of returned to what they'd been doing before I started playing. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a bad reaction. It's not like they were booing me or anything. But there was no heart in it. I was just some dude who had got up to play a song they'd never heard before. Nobody booed and nobody laughed and nobody insulted me. If I'd been playing at some open mic back in New York, I probably would have walked away thinking I'd done a decent job. But it wasn't my music.

I didn't get the same feeling from it as I did from when we were getting chased by the Black Teeth and I was playing Black Betty, or when we were in the middle of a massive gunfight and I was playing some Bonnie Iver. I'd played well. I knew that I'd played well. Instrument Mastery had made sure of that. If someone had been grading me on hitting the right notes and keeping perfect rhythm, I would've gotten full marks.

But as I sat down on the with my guitar beside me, I realized that technical perfection wasn't what had happened back in the Deadlands. Instrument Mastery wasn't the thing that made my music special. It made me a decent guitarist. It made the mechanics effortless and let me focus on the music instead of thinking about making mistakes. But that's all it did. It gave me execution, and execution by itself wasn't enough to make people feel the things that I knew my music was capable of.

I wasn't even planning on trying another song. I figured I'd come here and tell you all what happened and let you all argue about what I was doing wrong. But then I remembered something one of you had posted a couple days ago. Someone gave me the tabs for Ten Words by Joe Satriani. I'd spent a little time practicing it the day before. Not a ton, just enough that I wasn't going in completely blind. So I figured… why not? Worst case scenario, I'd play one more song before heading back to my tiny room and passing out.

I rested the guitar against my leg again and started. Instrument Mastery activated immediately, just like before. My fingers found the notes and I played effortlessly. But this time something was different. I wasn't thinking about the guitar anymore. I was just letting my mind drift. When I was playing Bowie, all these little thoughts were running through my head. Don't rush this part. Watch your timing. Remember this transition. Keep the rhythm steady.

Even with Instrument Mastery doing most of the work, there was this part of my brain that was still paying attention to the mechanics of the guitar. But this time… I just let my mind drift. I stopped worrying about whether I was playing well enough and I stopped worrying about the audience and the owner and everyone watching me. I just wandered. I thought about New York and my tiny apartment there. I thought about the subway and how it would get unbearably hot during the summer.

I thought about standing outside the back of the bar during smoke breaks, and the utter ordinariness of my life back then and how things had changed to impossible degrees. The memories started drifting elsewhere and I thought about the Eaters. I thought about waking up in a world that wanted me dead before I even understood where I was. I thought about the terror of realizing that there were actual monsters in this world.

I thought about learning that there was a piece of me that had been taken without me ever even noticing it, and wondering what else the Eaters had taken. The music kept going and thoughts of Patch and the Roaring Drake came unbidden. I remembered sitting there after escaping from the Deadlands that first time and finding a place where I could finally just sit and breathe for a bit. I remember Patch pouring drinks and the gambling and the random people who were living ordinary lives in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

I remembered leaving them. I remembered standing there in the second bar, talking to all these people who I'd only met a few weeks ago and realizing that Patch and Milicent and Jackie and Daryl and all of them had somehow started mattering more to me than friends that I'd had for years back home. The melody kept carrying me forward and I saw the Deadlands again. I saw the endless gray and the ruined roads and the silence between fights that somehow made the chaos of the fights even worse.

I thought about the Reclaimer and everything that it had taken just to survive long enough to stand in front of that thing. Then, without really deciding to, my thoughts shifted again. I saw Cliffhaven. I saw the waterfall pouring between the cliffs and the harbor waking before sunrise and the Singing Cliffs letting the wind make beautiful music. I saw the hot springs where I soaked and recovered.

I saw strangers laughing with one another and sailors complaining about the long voyages while attendants walked around with towels and drinks. Nobody had been running. Nobody had been screaming. Nobody had been trying to survive. Everyone was just living their lives. And that's when something changed in my music. My Persona and Performance activated, but unlike when all three of my class skills had activated before, this time the music wasn't trying to warp anything or boost anyone or hamper monsters.

All three of my skills activated and then just… faded into the background. The guitar stopped feeling like a guitar and - this is the point where I'm gonna lose some of you - it started feeling like a voice. Only, this one wasn't using words to communicate. Again, that's a shit explanation and I read it back and it sounded stupid. But fuck it. I'm gonna keep going. Words are a crude approximation. How can they be anything else? How can I put into words all the emotions that I've felt?

I know what depression feels like. I know what relief and homesickness and exhaustion all feel like. But by the time I put all those experiences down into words or try to use sentences to convey their meaning, something gets lost in the translation. Think about depression. I can write the sentence: I was depressed. Everyone reading it understands what those words mean. But nobody actually understands what that depression feels like. They understand the definition but not the experience.

I can tell you that it feels heavy. I can tell you it feels empty. I can tell you it makes getting out of bed feel impossible. All of those sentences are true and yet none of them are accurate. They're approximations. They're little labels we stick onto experiences because language doesn't have a better option. It's the same with grief and loneliness and hope and love and fear and all of it. The words point to a feeling but they're not a feeling itself. How could they?

Words are small things and can't remotely explain a thing in all its grandeur and enormity. So I stopped communicating in words entirely. Now, here's the thing. I don't think that my music translates feelings into songs, because songs still have lyrics. I think it bypasses language altogether. I played and it was like… instead of describing an emotion I was presenting the emotion itself.

It's like the difference between someone explaining what the ocean looks like and actually standing on the shore with the waves rolling in around your feet. One is information and the other is experience. If I wanted someone to understand the crushing weight that depression puts on a person, I don't need to find the perfect metaphor anymore. I can just play.

If I wanted someone to understand what it feels like to survive one disaster after another until the exhaustion stops feeling temporary and instead sinks into your bones, I can play that too. Ten Words worked where Bowie didn't. It wasn't because it's a better song and it wasn't because I suddenly became a better guitarist halfway through the evening. Instrument Mastery was active during both songs and my fingers were just as accurate and the notes were just as clean.

The difference was in how I approached the music. During the first song, I focused on playing correctly. During the second, I started thinking about what I was actually feeling, and somewhere along the way I started communicating through the music. The guitar started translating all these thoughts and memories and emotions into… I don't know, maybe something that leaked into other people. It's like everyone in the room could feel what I was playing.

They weren't listening to the words because Ten Words doesn't actually have any lyrics. They were listening to the magic coming off me. God dammit I still can't explain it. I played and the song wasn't triumphant and it wasn't about someone standing on a mountaintop after conquering the world. But it also isn't meant to be tragic, either. It's not about wallowing in misery or guilt or grief. It lives somewhere in between those two extremes, and that's exactly where I've found myself since arriving in Cliffhaven.

For the first time since waking up in this world, my life doesn't entirely revolve around surviving until tomorrow. None of what I've done since coming to Cliffhaven has been about surviving an emergency or fighting some great and terrible monster. I think what the song was really about for me, and what I was able to convey through the music, was that I was finally given permission again. Permission to exist as a person instead of a survivor.

Permission to wonder what countries exist beyond the ocean instead of worrying about whether I'll still be alive next week. Permission to sit down and eat breakfast and listen to music and think about tomorrow. I don't think I could have explained any of that to someone if they asked me directly. If you'd made me sit down across a table and describe how Cliffhaven has changed me, I would have done exactly what I'm doing right now which is stumble over my words and give you something vague and unsatisfying.

But while I was playing, none of that mattered. I didn't have to explain it. I just had to feel it, and somehow my music translated that into something that everyone else in the bar could feel to. When the last note faded away, I finally looked up from the guitar and realized the room had changed. The entire bar had gone quiet. Conversations had stopped, drinks sat untouched on tables, and the servers had all paused where they stood.

Nobody was looking at me with the excitement that you'd see after a flashy performance. They all just looked thoughtful, as if they'd all had the exact same memories and emotions as me. The silence of the room lasted several long seconds, but surprisingly it didn't feel awkward. It was more like everyone had finally emerged after a hibernation, or they woke after being asleep for so long. Eventually a man sitting near the back of the bar let out a slow breath, looked over at me, and quietly said, "Thank you."

And that was it. No cheering. No standing ovation. No requests for an encore. Just two simple words and it was like everyone in the bar was just nodding along with it, like it was all anyone could say that wouldn't cheapen what had just happened. I stored my guitar and left the bar and headed back to my tiny room, and I've been struggling to write all this ever since.