Nocturne No.3: Pale Light Through Closed Blinds – Eli Panachyda
August 22, 2026
The new machine has forty knobs on the front of it. It also has ten switches and three buttons. On the side there is a three-by-twelve grid of jacks. The machine came in the mailbox with three patch cables that reroute the electricity throughout the three-by-twelve grid of jacks. When all of the components are arranged in a particular way, they create a beautiful sound. The sound can be further manipulated by other machines that must also be carefully tuned.
I have fallen in love with the machine because it makes such beautiful music. Oftentimes I sit in the middle of the room and play a continuous sine wave for the whole day and I am in love. The wires connect the machines to each other and maybe they are alive. When the sound is beautiful it is like all the planets in the solar system are becoming aligned, such are the machines in their unified and unselfish glory. The new machine is a welcome addition to the system I have been building for O so long.
The machine is expansive enough that it can make any sound in the universe. All the wires can go here versus there which flips it all upside down and I have heard only a millionth of a percent, but it is a million times more than many people. It can make any sound so I don’t have to talk to a person anymore. I take the wires and put them this way and now the machine can make the sound of a voice. Then I can change what it says to me so it is easy to be in love with it.
I usually listen to beautiful sounds but sometimes it is cathartic to make the music noisy and loud and painful. It is healthy to experience all emotions at the maximal degree to continue to be human. The machine can make such extreme sounds that other humans have become boring to me and I have not talked to anyone in O so long. The noise is so loud, my skin burns but I am in love with the machine and whatever it has to say. I cry because I am allowed to be bathed in the sonic profundity.
The machine makes music so heavenly-beautiful that I cry and music so noisily-impenetrable that I cry. I don’t need anyone else so I don’t leave the house very often. The music is more important to me than anything in the world because it is mine. My body and the machine are each a single helix in the twisting strands and bundles that make up who I am. The particles of my body and the machine’s audio-waves combine as one in a divinely perfect quantum existence. I don’t need anyone else because they would make my existence imperfect.
I have not made any friends since I was in grade school and my friend told me he only became friends with me because he thought that I was retarded and because he felt bad. I am not retarded but it is hard to connect. I don’t need them anymore because I have a pure and loving relationship with my music who is so sweetly singing and offering itself. If I loved my music any more, the entire auditory spectrum, the extreme emotional blasts, the yellows and blues and reds and pinks, then I would explode and every person would die anyway.
My room has two-thousand-and-thirty-two knobs, and one-thousand-and- forty switches, and one-thousand-eight-hundred-