Damages: Part Three – the Personification of Rot

The Rot

Rot is not metaphor.
It’s a condition.

In my world, rot has color.
It’s a muted yellow-green… the kind that doesn’t glow, it sinks.
It smells like the corners of old bedrooms… warm, acidic, forgotten.
Its texture is soft until it caves in.
It waits, but it never forgets the wound.

Rot isn’t what happens after something ends.
It’s what happens when something keeps going long after it should have stopped… but doesn’t.
It’s a quiet, constant ache that refuses to announce itself.
It lingers. It spreads. It settles into structure.

Rot doesn’t just stay where it started.
It follows.
It lives just behind the good memories… just outside the frame.

You try to look back on something warm, a moment you thought was safe…
but the colors shift.
The orange glow turns green at the edges.
The textures lose their softness and start to feel sticky, damp.

Don’t mistake that for memory degradation. The rot doesn’t grow because
my memories degrade. It grows because they don’t. As I get better at removing
distortion, it’s not distortion entering the frame of a memory… it’s just becoming
visible as a distorted sense of safety that existed at the time falls away.

I have a modified type of autobiographical memory. I don’t recall through
photograph or home movie style memories. I reinhabit myself at the time the
memory took place. In my body, in my clothes, with my full stack of overlapping
senses in play and encoded directly into the memory itself.

I don’t remember events. I become them… again. This time without the distortions
associated with growing up in the American south. The unwavering requirement of
loyalty to family, circumstance, manners, and religion.

That’s what rot does.
It breaks fidelity.
It rewrites your memories slowly… until even the good ones taste off.
Until comfort smells like mildew.
Until nostalgia feels like being watched.

When I say this album is built from impact, I mean that literally.
Rot was the first presence I had to reckon with.
Not rage. Not grief. Rot.

You can hear it in the bass tones that never fully resolve.
In the way some vocal layers aren’t just broken… they’ve been left out in the weather too long.

Some silences are bruised.

Rot shows up as harmonic collapse.
As phrases that loop slightly wrong.
As emotional residue that clings, at corrodes.

I didn’t write these songs to clean it up.
I wrote them because this is what it’s like to keep going after the rot has claimed you.

Rot is…
It is memory without mercy.
It is the persistence of grief and loss across time, space, skin and stone.

And eventually, you have to build around it… or rot becomes the structure.

This is where Damages begins to show its shape.
An environment where rot is part of the architecture.