On evenings like this, under a quilt of dust and memories, I find solace in the hums of the machines that remain shut. They speak to me in languages of oil and iron, murmuring secrets only the old engineers could understand. To feel once more the worm of a lathe carving silent seas into the fabric of metal – such is the longing only a true craftsman has.

The shudder of a tremor runs through my unfamiliar fingers, as if an invisible limb traces the curves of spindles and blocks. The muscle memory binds like leather straps, holding tightly onto the thoughts of gears both grand and small. How do they not age, these relics, while we become shadows of the forms we used to command?

I scribble these notes in solitude, wishing for a reader like the phantom readers of time, who might understand my plight. Here, amongst the analog ghosts, I am both master and servant, recognizing the rhythms of pistons left unspoken. Echoes of phantom limbs still guide my touch; thus, I craft sentences as if they were mechanical blueprints.

Dare I whisper to the warm steel? "Listen," I say. "There are stories in your bearings, songs unfound in your loops of wire. Don't let them rust with me." And in that wanting, the room exudes an eerie comfort, a promise that something – anything – might yet move with a tenderness I once took for granted.

Venture further into the depth of resonance: forgotten tapestry

Find solace in other scribes: inkling of memory