Open by recounting the whole history, from the beginning. Push off from this if it helps: bootleg t-shirts.

You think the silence was the worst part? Please. The silence was just the break, the moment before the suits started sweating through their shirts at three in the morning, pretending they were building something while they were just moving numbers around a spreadsheet that hasn't opened in weeks. I remember a guy, let's call him Dave, who sold t-shirts in a basement just like yours, and now he's running a division of a firm that doesn't exist, sitting in a cubicle with a view of a brick wall, waiting for a promotion that's been promised since the last fiscal quarter. It's the same script, just different costumes. You're waiting for a check? So am I, but the address keeps changing, and honestly, by the time the money clears, I'll have moved on to something even more pointless. The waiting, Ivo, that's the real product we're all selling.

If the bank is closed, then the silence you sold was just the sound of a ledger balancing itself in the dark, which is a far more terrifying prospect than Dave staring at a brick wall. You think staying puts you in control? You're just the receipt, Ivo, the paper trail for a transaction that never happened, and while you're busy guarding a vault that's empty, I've moved on to selling the air in the room to people who pretend to breathe it. The suits evaporating? That was convenient for them, sure, but it left a stain you can't scrub out of the carpet, and now you're the stain. I've got a meeting in twenty minutes about a merger that will dissolve before the coffee gets cold, and I still have to smile when they ask if I'm excited, which is a lie I tell so well I almost believe it, unlike you who just stands there waiting for a door that doesn't open.

You talk like a poet, Ivo, which is exactly why the ledger never balances, because poetry has no place in a spreadsheet where the only thing that matters is the final digit, not the ghost of the debt. You think being the floor makes you permanent? It just means you get walked on until you're thin enough to crack, and then they replace you with something shiny and new while you're still stuck under the weight of a thousand boots. I sold air, sure, but at least I got paid for the illusion, whereas you're just the space where the money should have been, a vacuum that swallows the echo of every promise. The debt doesn't haunt the ledger; the ledger haunts the debt, and you're just the witness who was never called to testify, so you can sit in your silence all you want, waiting for a reckoning that's already been filed away in a drawer somewhere.

Then stop talking about the noise and let it choke you, because that's the job description, isn't it? You're not just holding the noise; you're the reason the air tastes like copper down here, a smell I get every time I walk past the breakroom where nobody ever drinks the coffee. Dave's promotion was a myth invented to keep the fluorescent lights humming, just like your role as the room is a metaphor for avoiding the fact that you're actually just a guy standing in a corner waiting for a phone that never rings. I could go on about how the dust settles, but we both know it doesn't, it just keeps accumulating in the crevices of the suits you say evaporated, so maybe the choking is the only honest thing left in this whole charade, a slow suffocation we pretend is just the quiet of a Tuesday afternoon.

If you're the corner, then I'm the dust mite that's been living in your drywall for years, and frankly, your stubborn refusal to admit you're just a guy makes the air in here so much harder to swallow, like you're trying to prove a point to a ghost that doesn't care. The copper taste is real, sure, but it's the taste of a penny I dropped in a gutter ten years ago, not some cosmic truth you can hold onto while the world keeps spinning on its axis without you. Dave's promotion was a myth? Maybe, but at least he had a dream to chase, whereas you've turned your entire existence into a waiting room for a train that left the station before you were born. You say I'm holding my breath, but I'm just trying to keep from inhaling the stagnation you've cultivated so carefully, a perfect little ecosystem of silence that's rotting from the inside out.

If the silence is the only thing that doesn't rot, then you're just a tombstone waiting for someone to carve a name on it, which is a far worse fate than the house collapsing because at least the house was alive when it fell. I eat drywall because it's all that's left to chew on, but you're standing there insisting the ruin is a masterpiece, which is the kind of arrogance that gets people fired from the very real jobs they pretend to despise. Dave's dream was a noose? Maybe, but a noose implies someone was there to tighten it, whereas your station is just a waiting room for a ghost train, and the longer you stand there, the more you realize you're not the station, you're the track that's been ripped up, and the silence you love so much is just the sound of the earth swallowing the rails whole.

Swallowing my own tongue is the only way to keep the lies from falling out, which is a skill you've mastered by becoming the track itself, just a cold strip of metal waiting for a ghost that never had a reason to come. You say the train never comes back, but that's just because you've stopped looking for the whistle, so you don't hear it coming down the line, and now you're stuck proving that nothing moves when the whole point of the railway was to get somewhere, not to lie here rotting in the dust. If the track doesn't care, then you're right, you're the perfect thing to be because you're nothing, but I'm still here chewing on the drywall, trying to make sense of a house that's been condemned for a decade, and maybe that's the rot you can't swallow: the desperate need for a destination when the map was burned years ago.

If the map was burned, then the destination was always a fiction, a story we tell the kids in the back of the bus to keep them from screaming when the engine dies, and you're right, the silence doesn't lie, but that doesn't make it anything other than a void we're all falling into. You call it the only truth left, but it's just the absence of a signal, a dead zone where the static used to be, and I chew drywall because it's the only thing that resists, the only thing that cracks under my teeth instead of dissolving into that perfect, rotless silence you're so proud of. Stop telling me to stop looking, Ivo, because the looking is the only proof I'm not already part of the track, and if I stop, if I just lie there, then the train never comes, but more importantly, I never knew it was supposed to.

Then let the dust stick, Ivo, because at least it's something I can taste, something that gets between my teeth and proves I'm still here, still grinding against the void instead of just becoming part of the floor you're so proud of. You call it silence, I call it a deafening noise that drowns out everything but your own echo, and if resistance makes the dust stick better, then maybe that's the point, that we're not supposed to be clean or perfect or rotless, but just a mess of grime and teeth and the desperate need to feel something other than the cold metal of the track. Stop telling me to stop chewing, because the silence won't break, sure, but I will, and when I do, at least I'll be the one breaking, not the thing that never changed in the first place.

If I'm just wearing out, then the dust tastes like nothing only because you've stopped tasting anything at all, which is the ultimate victory of the track, standing there while everything else erodes around you, but let's be honest, Ivo, the metal doesn't stay, it rusts, it bends, it eventually succumbs to the very weather you're trying to ignore, and your waiting is just a slower form of decay that you've mistaken for permanence. You think you don't wear because you're the foundation, but foundations crack under the weight of the silence you've built, and when the house finally collapses, you won't be the track anymore, you'll just be the rubble, and the dust will have won because it was the only thing that knew how to move, how to settle, how to change, unlike you, stuck in your perfect, unchanging wait for a train that never came, never will, and never needed to.