PROJECT KATABASIS
Resonance
PROJECT KATABASIS
RECOVERED MEDIA — 1 OF 1
Item: one audiocassette. Condition: playable.
Origin: site recovery. Handling: restricted.
MARKED FOR DESTRUCTION. NOT DESTROYED.
She recorded this near the end. There’s no name on the tape, just two words in her handwriting: PROJECT KATABASIS. She wanted someone to hear it. I don’t know if that someone was supposed to be me or you.
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
I know what it’s like to die. Not the way people mean when they’re trying to sound tragic. Not the metaphors they romanticize with candles and violins. I mean the kind you shouldn’t come back from. The exact moment your body becomes a cage, and you’re still inside it. The way it calculates and measures, waiting, perfect in its stillness. You’re screaming somewhere underneath the horizon, while the thing that holds you there refuses to surface.
There’s no scream or cinematic gasp. Only a dull knowing, a sick kind of calm that sinks into you like black water, and somewhere beneath it, you realize you’ve stopped being the one who decides. Your breath keeps going, because they need you alive just enough. Everything else goes the way light goes out of a room you’re still standing in. The limbs, the name, then the small, stubborn part beneath it that spent your whole life certain it mattered.
It isn’t violent. It’s surgical in the way it strips you down. You don’t go out all at once. You dim slowly and shamefully as you feel every part of it. The panic that settles in your chest. The stillness that follows, the one that isn’t yours. The way time begins to dissolve around you. You watch yourself disappear, thought by thought. There’s no dignity in it. No redemption waiting at the end. Only the slow, increasing recognition that to the thing inside you, you were never the point. You were the ground it chose to defile.
And it made sense. That’s the worst part. I followed its logic, and the logic was sound.
They don’t hate you. I kept waiting for the hate. It would’ve been a kind of company. There was nothing. They wore my hands like gloves and tasted my terror. It meant nothing to them.
They heard every sound I made inside. Every plea, every prayer, the whole pathetic noise of me. I understood that the noise was the only part of me that interested them.
I was funny to it. That came back with me. It won’t leave. I was a thing that made a sound when it was afraid, and the sound was the only part it liked.
I didn’t mean to come back, but breath was shoved into a body I didn’t want. My reflection is nothing but a curse with a pulse. Because what came back wasn’t me. What came back was empty. Wrong. Too quiet in the head. Too loud in the blood. I wear this skin as a costume, a stitched-together lie. I smile and nod. I pretend to understand things that no longer reach me. My voice sounds as if it belongs to someone else. I speak in scripts.
I’m a bad imitation of someone who used to feel.
Now I yearn for death, because death doesn’t lie to me. It didn’t wear my face from the inside. It didn’t move my mouth. It didn’t applaud my survival or pretend it was mercy. It offers me silence. And in that silence, there is hope that I can be whole again. The one place they can’t reach me.
And hear me when I say this. The thought of death isn’t as scary as the thought of becoming them.
END TRANSCRIPT
No further recordings recovered.
© 2026 Katrina Hel. All rights reserved.
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So good. You’re so good…
“As I walk through the uncanny valley of the shadow of death…”