Damages: Part Seven – Fragments

When the structure breaks, the pieces don’t disappear. They learn to function.

There’s a kind of damage that doesn’t leave a scar…
because it never finishes forming a wound.
It’s not one moment, It’s thousands of tiny ones.
Too conflicting, layered, out of order.

That kind of damage doesn’t leave you broken, that would almost be easier. It leaves you fragmented.

What fragmentation feels like

Fragmentation isn’t dramatic.
It’s not cinematic.
It’s a slow erosion of self, where the bricks eventually stop being a wall and start being a pile.
It’s waking up one day and realizing you don’t know how to be one person anymore.

You’re functional. You get things done.
But your thoughts don’t flow… they de-rail.
Your emotions don’t stick to anything… they ricochet.
Your memory doesn’t rewind… it reboots, and each BSOD lets the rot sink farther in.

You become a collection of reflexes, role-switches, safety optimized reactions that never had to exist.
But they do.

My fragmentation

I’ve lived this.
There’s the part of me that acts as the ground the pile of bricks lays on, then
there’s the part that performs, the part that protects, the part that aches push on the bruise…
The part that collapses when the bruise gets pushed.

They’re not personalities, not stories…
They’re real fragments… Purpose built for function, emotion, sensory, self. — functional, emotional, sensory selves
Shaped by necessity… Stabbed into the fabric of reality so that I had something to hold onto.

Synesthetically, they each carry their own textures.
One moves in smooth white arcs.
Another is jagged… black-red, sharp corners and metallic taste.
There’s one that sees everything through a layer frost.
One that only hears sound in left-channel dissonance.

They were never given names.
They were just the only way I could keep functioning when being completely me… was no longer possible.

Music as containment

Damages wasn’t built by a single voice.
It couldn’t have been.
Each song carries a different fracture pattern.
A different lens. A different survival shape.

That’s why the record feels unstable in places.
Why some transitions are abrupt.
Why some lyrics contradict each other.
They weren’t edited for unity.
They were built to hold each piece as it is… tension in the paradox.

Why this matters

There’s shame in fragmentation.
People want to believe you’re either whole or broken.
But what if the truth is more complicated than that?
What if wholeness was never available,
and fragmentation was your nervous system’s best attempt at staying visible?

I wrote Damages to honor that.
To give structure to the fragments
without forcing them to fit back together.

Because they’re still me.