It Marks You Even If You Don’t Stop There

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Hello, I'm Wilkins, stories all the time. Glad you are here.

Let's get into it. The phone still vibrates in my hand as if it can't settle from

what ever current just passed through. The motel shadowy can find press closer,

every inch of old wallpaper and stained carpet now charged with the feeling that nothing outside

is truly ordinary. I dump my gear across the bed, hands shaking but practiced, cables,

battered camera, the little voice recorder everything rifled through, every memory

car detected and reinserted. The lost and found phone I placed separately

shirted in the motels to rid Bill Waschhoth as if covering it might blunt a weird hum beneath

its plastic. The sun is a sick gold over the parking lot

two week to cut through the headache throbbing at my temples.

I want a shower, I want a drink, I want to call Anna and demand to believe that something

at exit 194 erase styles of my work and nearly got me no, I won't call it abducted, not yet.

But I can't do any of those things until uncertain truly certain that this isn't all stress,

caffeine or the pit in my career sending me chasey shadows into the dark.

My laptop boots up slowly, the found laboring against heat and dust.

I pull the phone, that battered relic from the talons girl to the first new voicemail.

Only static at first, then the warp syllables I now know are someone's name maybe minesnack in

the humming distance. The second more voices crowded and riders as if they all tried to

cry through one tiny mic. There's desperation there now begging, warning, so tangled I can't

pull this a single word. The last message is shortest, just one breath and a sound like gravel

dragged under tires. I go to play to recordings through my editing software hoping equalization will

cut through the noise but the software freezes crashes, refuses to read them. Whatever brought

these voices, it doesn't want them clarified. When I tried to email them to myself instead

insurance and kiss my tick turns up blank in a morning the phone froze up an error I've never seen.

File type unknown, media unsupported. The more I poke at it the worse the glitching spirals.

My next call is instinctive Anna. She picks up her word clip with sleep or irritation.

You haven't slept to have you. I need you to listen to it. Are you safe? Just tell me you're safe.

Her voice is more anxious than I expect and at a low end brings a spike of guilt.

I tried to tell her what happened half-reached after so great van and abduction right in front of me

vanishing file after file. I describe the empty lot, strange voices, the managing staff dragging

someone out into the nowhere of this pocket of Kansas with statistics or safety nets with holes

knotted by hand. I beg you to believe something unnatural is going on. Those are paws.

Exhausted anxhails. I think he need a break or proof something I can take up the chain. None of

this is usable if it's just static and you're saying you feel watched. She stuck in her role protecting

the show a business herself. Get some rest, file a report if you have to, but take care of yourself

first. My throat closes and on a dozen angry retorts ask for backup. Fly out. Demand someone

listen, but everything feels both too urgent and too late. No one will believe me, not without

evidence. Maybe not even then. After it we hang up, I'm left in the clawed silence of cheap,

chemical smelling motel air, and for the first time in weeks I feel something close to fear that

isn't tinged with curiosity. I stuff the phone into a ziplock bag, wedge it deep into my pack,

and check every lock on every window and door twice. Still, I don't sleep.

I play and replay the messages, listening for a pass or a code. The static blares into white noise.

I let it play until the sun rises and the phone dies, cold and silent beneath my pillow.

The day crawls by in piecemeal, internet searches, fun cold smurs go straight to voicemail,

the few who answer either claim not to know the missing, or I'll sign up when I mention eggs at

194. On a last ditch urge, I pull up the HTTPS feeds for a string of security cameras along the

highway. A few are managed by truck stops, one by gas station, another by the city's road

commission. I pull over them, min it by minute, I stinging, fingers aching from clawing at the

controls to scroll back in time. There. Caught on a cam amounted above the gas station's air pump,

the barely visible shape of the grey van, traveling from the rest stop to nowhere, a time that matches

my own lost hires. In another camera stream, further east, I catch a flicker of genitorial

bleed just inside the frame, stepping into the woods behind the rest facility out of the designated

staff lot, hello. In every bit of footage, time sums jump, lag, overlap, matching the missing

persons records I've already logged. Every single disappearance, mapped out again and again in

fleeting, clutching fragments. The real pattern isn't just at exit 194, but in the gaps between what's

captured and what's erased an epidemic of missing information spread by hands moving objects

on people invisibly through official lines. I haven't eaten a meal that qualifies as food and days.

My skin feels loose, stretched too thin over bone. When I check my phone, I see a colonel log from

a number I don't recognise. I answer on the third ring, but there's nothing only the sound of

breathing, slow and measured, followed by the words, don't let them see you back there again.

The coldest connects before I concurse at whoever's in the line. That's when I realise I'm not just

being observed I'm being tracked. A car, sometimes the grey van, sometimes I sit down with mirrored

windows, seems to pop up everywhere I stop. Even the room key to my motel may not be a shield,

a proper chair under the knob and wedge the bat of fun and my back are precorted together

as if pairing the two will conjure some protection. Fear is not abstract now. It is the grind of

gravel under the slow circle of tyres near my mordell at 3am, stirring of silence when I call the

county to push for public records and get told, three separatines, that there are no open investigations

that exit 194 before the line disconnects. My own account is erased from the county's online

system I press credentials return as not found when I attempt to verify them on a public site.

My message is to Anna slip into her spare. Every digital trace feels fragile,

easy to rewrite. By late afternoon exorsted, hungry, hollowed out I realised simply

reporting the truth won't change anything. I walked to the back of the motel, breathed the

chemical air and checked the phone again. One new voicemail. A whole buff listening, letting the

anticipation and dread settle in my chest like a swallowed stone. As the sun dips past the tangled

edge of the highway, a plan for them. I need confirmation irrefutable proof or something close

enough that Anna, law enforcement, anyone with clout won't turn their backs. If this is truly

orchestrated to some organisation using the rest stoppersomechanism for feeding the gaps in America's

consensus reality, passing people along into a prominent statistical nowhere than the only way through

is to catch them in the act as something they can't erase with a keystroke. I go back to my

ID chart, mocking every person I've interviewed, every mention of the janitor whose name I don't know

but whose face pops up across a decade of photos. I tally at times 2.16am, every event, every power loss,

every erasure. Everything converges again and again on that vanish stretch of lot outside the

rest stop now as spot in my mind as infamous as any haunted house or crant scene. The camera footage

is mostly gone. Recordings blank. That the phone batter, jury rigged with the portable charge of

this time still vibrates when I walked a lot at dusk as if reacting to patterns and geography

rather than human touch. Few more voicemails accumulate by the time night presses the world into a

metallic hush. Each message feels closer to the last, voices beating across the line sometimes

saying don't stop other times weeping or naming things I've seen only in my notes.

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I walk the rest stopgrounds in the false cool of midnight rains cutting in low sweating sheets.

No sign of John. No staff on duty except alone attendant who eyes me over his phone,

not lifting a finger when I hover at the entrance. Instead the shadows are full of movement

shapes exploring perimeter fences. Flassoite's arcing into thickets at the lots edge,

the sound of a not so distant horn that makes my skin crawl. I decide I have to see what to

behind the facade, literally and otherwise. I skirt the main building, ducking beneath the

glare of the motion lights triggered for some other traveler. There's a narrow strip of wood

behind the rest stop, ragged with tangled brush and stunted evergreens. Trash and broken bottles

cluster against the trunks. As I slip sideways into the trees the noise of the highway delts

into low on a prison vibration. Five minutes along the tree line I spot evidence of old camps,

fire blackened logs torn bits of foam pad, a long rotted pair of children's shoes.

Deeper in I find the scattered remains of what feels like decades were the vanclaimed

belongings tote bags dirty blankets a splintered crutch. These are not just toss junk,

some of dates named written in fading sharper. I recognize the carving on a fragment of

wood matching a key fob from the lost and found box my first night. A sentence scripts through

memory. Missing poster always reappearing. Itons left and left behind, it turned as if by ritual.

I nearly missed the utility hat chaff sunk in among thick roots, metal gun green with age and rain.

The only hint of purpose is a strip of police orange paint almost vanished and a faint whiff of

osam. I lever it open with a broken branch, the hinge is complaining at the effort. There's an

immediate drop in temperature, a sudden blanketing black. The sand is earth, moulds wet,

and the faintest tang of diesel exhaust. Phone in hand, I ease down the circular steel rungs,

feet finding and certain purchase out of instinct more than side. I keep my pocket flashlight

angled straight down, eliminating what looks like grow after row of corrugated pipe, branching tunnels,

and scroll graffiti of bored kids while waymocks for those who know what to look for.

A stick figure drawn by flashlight, numbers I don't recognise a barely legible scribble,

keep moving. The tunnels branch. One slopes towards a lot, the other beneath the main building.

Both are scoured with old handprints and boot mocks, recent enough for dirt to still be to top

the tread. A sand catch is behind me deliberate scrape of a shoe, not animal. I freeze.

The scratch echoes, then subsides. I make myself move. A hundred feet in,

his seaward the pipe opens into a low, dirt floored room and abundance for station,

it walls festooned with aged bus schedules and rotting clipboards, perhaps a repurposed

office or a way station for whoever moves beneath the rows of asphalt above.

Junk is everywhere, clothing shoes in the smash sets, an old first aid kit.

On the wall, an inventory chart with names scratched out, directions and coded arrows symbols

repeating in a pattern I've seen on staff keys and locker tags. There's a bedroll in the corner.

Nearby, a stack of rest stop memorabilia, a badge reading amanda, a tarnish trucker's hat,

pink plastic princess crown I recall from a missing person's report out of Acheson 2009.

Personal items that should have been returned, or at least locked, instead buried here.

Above, muffled voices transmit through a venta-cracking two-way radio,

the sword you'd use for covert communication. Ships are 20-change hands-same as before,

flipping brick a keep-cover tight. For my perch in the gloom, hot pounding, a spy pair of

shaped moving past the grating above. Boots, coveralls, the glint of guide badges.

Maintenance staff with their doubles. I keep my flashlight angled away,

prying not to shake. If I'm caught now, there's no way out except through these tunnels,

no guarantee anyone would ever see me emerge. I snap, a dozen furtos in a jittering panic,

praying some will survive for Devaglitch took my last batch. Then I climb back up,

the ladder is slow and silent as muscle memory allows, emerging at last into the heavy,

sticky Kansas night. On the way back to the lot, I noticed that more cars have appeared,

quietly, ringed along the dock edge. Trucklight idolo, shuttered as if waiting for something,

or someone. A single distance silhouette leaned against the dumpster too tall and

wiry for the janitor, but the posture is unmistakably watchful. I slip into the building through

a side door, phone press close, the tunnel duct critty in my cuffs. The inside is almost empty,

safe for a staff meeting I catch through cracked glass, three voices. I make out the janitor's

weary timbre at the manager's clip sentences. They talk about logs, statistical noise,

keeping rotations clean, and about someone me I realize is still sniffing around. I took back

before the door creaks. My mind runs wild with conspiracy, but the details, the tactile signs,

all confirm it, this is not a haphazard series of vanishings. This is a calibrated system,

a network adjusting on a fly to the unpredictable variables of human curiosity, trauma, and error.

A mechanism using the rest stoppers both stage and mask cycling through forgotten people and

items, laundering disappearances so hewn to statistical patterns that no single case is alarming

on its own. The main highway carries on as if nothing has changed. The people who pass through will

forget the faces of those not meant to be seen, forget even what they made themselves have lost

on that patch of ground. The next day, exhausted and grim, is stake out the location from the

facade of the lock that's disguised as a sleeping trucker, hood up, hat over my brow, phone,

and camera hidden beneath loose blankets. My breakdown is staged perfectly, car hood up,

hazard lights blinking as dust thickens. Traffic Thins

For my vantage, I count four vehicles circling, never stopping, radius chirping faintly through

rolled up windows. At exactly 2-0 away, M, shift change. The same janitor, the woman, her face

hollowed, her movements bone tied approaches the entrance. I watch as she passes a small object

to flashlight or maybe a phone through an open window of the manager's car. The pattern is automatic,

ritualized. Staff emerge checking their watches, radios out. The grave amples up just shy of the

glitch prone parking row. I can see inside a pale boy in the passenger seat, eyes wide, and

comprehending. One staffer opens the door, it leans in, and the boy vanishes behind the closed glass.

A surge of light snaps through the lock just one overhead, blinding, directly over my car.

Everything else blocks out. The phone in my hand comes to life, screen flickering,

speakers alive with barbed whispers. A voice surges, now clear, you can't save them, you can't save

yourself. The janitor appears in the sudden light shuffling toward me. She stops beside my

open hood, leans down, her face tight with grief and some bad attenderness. He should leave,

she says, the words barely are whisper. It's always been this way, since before me, before any of

us. I want to scream at her why how, who lets this go on. But she just shakes her head.

Collection point blind spot, who runs at nobody you'll ever meet. We do what we can, sometimes we let

one go. Her hand trembles over mine, as if by human contact she can pass meaning without saying

another word. A fight breaks out behind us, two staffers run, one chase by three others.

The manager wrestles a duffelbad out of a truck, shoving it into the open cargo hold of the

grave van. I record as best I can, fingers numb with cold and adrenaline. The phone is shrieking

now overlapping voices, some pleading, some cursing. They are all here too many, someone gasps,

help it and then nothing but the grind of static. A scream rings out as one staffer is tackled.

Another figure, stumbling from the woods, barrels toward the van but is swept up by the group

clustered around the rear doors. Inside, the van is black beyond imagining an envelope into which

people can be swallowed without trace. I run, heart pounding, dodging the headlights,

vaulting the concrete divider, retreating toward the tree line. The janitor follows but falls behind

gasping. She collapses, vanishing from sight beside a broken tree, shoulders racked in silent

sobbing. A crouch, recording, uncertain if I will ever see daylight again. The sky is full of

horns, semi engines, thunder echoing the tremor running through my bones. The phone is screaming

low in my pocket now a single, endless pulse. Breathless, I glance back, the lot is emptying.

The fight is over. The van idles only a moment, then slips away, only the fiend is glow left behind

in the gap where the world seemed to warp and a person's future ended. I'm left shivering,

stirring at the outline of a lot. The rest stop, for all anyone else will ever see, is returned

to normal. One tire detentant sweeping up crumpled for apples, a slow drip of coffee behind glass,

the night's wallowing itself in its own reflection. I press the phone to my ear,

desperate, frantic, and listen to the last new message. It's my own voice, lay behind static,

saying with an outie, don't look, move on, don't let them see you. I do not move for a long time.

The sun will rise soon. Somewhere, someone will live because this night's pattern was broken

or because it was never meant for me. I do not know which. My breath is still ragged in a half

dark. I stagger from the trees, belly scraping earth, phone in hand, recorder flickering its orange

record dot. I reach the shoulder of the highway, walking under the halogen cast of a rose-side

lamp, the world reduced to the husk and whisper of my own footsteps. The phone is finally true

silent at my side. Stray traffic breezes by, indifferent as ever, and I force myself to put one

foot in front of the other, pulling away from the rest stop, the words, the engine noise,

and the edge of memory. I walk until this guy is a thin blue above the horizon. My car is

further than I remember, maybe, without thinking. I meant for it to be. At last, I stand at

top of a low-range looking back at the entire lot. The lights blink on in sequence, as if nothing

out of order ever occurred, a hundred little glass eyes opening for a world of travelers on their

way to anywhere but here. In that moment, as the chill starts to bleed out with a coming dawn,

I leave the batter lost and found foam behind me, wrapped tightly in the towel that arrived in.

I place it against the trunk of the tree where the janitor sat weeping and step away,

refusing to look back even as a faint bus getters through the air. I do not run, I do not pause.

I walk, steady, until I reach the mouth of the highway and let it all fall away behind me.

Finally, I stand by the shoulder and watch the horizon brighten through when

should glass straight with mud. I breathe, eyes fix on the traffic sliding endlessly west.

All I can think is that, for now the line between vanishing and continuing is as thin as my own

resolve. I press my thumb to the recorder, steady my voice, and say nothing else at all.

I press my thumb to the recorder, steady my voice, and say nothing else at all. That morning,

I limp the last half-mile to my car, dry leaves and grit kick to my shoes.

A strip of police take clings weekly to the edge of a temporarily closed sign at the rest stop entry,

already sun bleached and peeling as if warning only out of habit, not intent.

I know better than to call local law enforcement, the last sheriff's deputy I track down won't

return my voicemails, and my press credential recently in it typically turns up as

revoked in the online verification database. I burn gas along the state route, tongue dry with

exhaustion, and creep into the first rows I dine at that's open at six, stiff-limbed and wide beneath

the deadening for recent lights. Inside, a waitress in lemon yellow polish

supports me coffee without question. I lay my battered recorder between the salt and knuckens,

but I don't press play. My hands are shaking too hard for that, and for a moment I wonder what

kind of person looks at me now and simply moves along, as if I blend so perfectly into the warm

pattern of this place I might as well already be gone. The aftermath is all anticlimax.

The city is too big, too indifferent for the current I bring back inside my own head to

everyone else, on just another haggar commuter, one more lost night carved out by kphine and insomnia.

Still, when I reach home, I debilt the door on pure reflux and stole the remainder of my

feel-kit deep in the closet cameras, drives, backup recorders all cold and drained. My notes are

amazes scratched arrows and nervous handwriting, half indescribable, no closer to clarifying the

events than a fever dream. The washed out daylight pressing and through my basement window doesn't

quite break the spell of what's knotted up in my chest. I try listening to the last few voicemails

one more time, phone cup close, volume up. Each is worse than the last cries and warnings,

a rough edge of where is the cut in and out before resolving into terrified static.

Once, I think I hear my own names spoken clearly just the syllables and then a hiss,

as if the speaker vanished in the middle of the coal. After that I lock the phone in a drawer,

wrapping it twice in flannel and slide about a notebook on top. There is no ritual, no closure

just containment, a quiet stay against whatever tries to reach me again from the static.

My producer is chilly when we finally speak. I played some of your tapes and says, her voice lowered,

as if someone else might be listening. What's there is mostly dead air in wind?

You sure you weren't recording while driving. I want to laugh or to scream, but managing

either exhaustion is a river, and I wait through it, replying only that there are other cuts,

backups, evidence she hasn't heard. If there's more, send it, but you should know

Legals already flagged most of this isn't substantiated rumour, they wouldn't let us run

anything but the simplest angle, a mysterious common ground, one of those half urban legends

that make for a good Halloween episode. She pauses, reluctantly offering, but I'm worried about

here, these late nights would ever happen to try to let it go. Letting go is not a real option.

In the weeks to follow, I mainline coffee in web forums until my inbox of a foes of speculation.

Even when the podcast episode has 13 heavily edited, sanitized minutes on the exit 194 urban

legend beneath a layer of tense music and stock car noises nothing essential remains.

Listen a split between dismissing it as a hoax and flooding the tip line with stories of

their own roadside nightmares. I keep tally, but none of the precise matches, the common thread is

always absence, always the sense of having glimpsed something at the edge of vision that steel

sleep for nights after. No police inquiry, no county audit. The rest stop enters a brief new

cycle after several anonymous tips none of which are mine for all the good they would have done.

City officials investigate and then declare, with the practice finality of bureaucracy,

that there are no credible connections to missing persons at exit 194 at this time.

I troll the local news and message boards, watch us threads referencing the loss in

from box, the vanish staffer, or the child's face at the semi's window are quietly deleted.

Sometimes a new anonymous user mentions strange interference on their debt comfortage,

or how ringing phone in an empty lot drove them away at night. The posts disappear just as quickly.

It is only me, a three in the morning, sitting beside windows veiled from the street,

who sees the pattern tick on its final, a shape and form the way a memory flees the mind at the

edge of sleep. The static returns in my dreams, always at the same time, night after night,

and possible to keep at bay. Driving late if I'm ever forced to take the

industry to grip the wheel and stare down every exit sign with animal dread, refusing now to even

look on the green board for 194 looms out of the sodium haze. Once, I catch sight of a grave van

darting through the fog at the far off ramp mirror. I turn off and double back,

pulse in my throat driving useless miles before I'm sure I'm not being followed.

The fatigue deepens. Food goes tasteless. Conversation becomes a matter of performance never

entirely present, always somewhere between the ring of the phone and the wine of fluorescent

lights on tile floors. The closest second to comfort is thinking, late at night, of the janitor

sitting on the earth, sobbing not for herself but for what she is enabled by an action by routine.

In brief, listed moments, I let myself hope she made it out, or at least that she will not be

there forever, her blue uniform blending into midnight shadows as her hands bury tokens of the

lost in the dirt. Once, I work up the nerve to reach out to the family of the boyce,

so taken a number from the old police logs, now attached to a disconnected service,

but the call forwards to voicemail. I leave my name stumble through the outline of what I witness,

but there is no return call only silence. An email I send to a possible sister bounces,

a blocked message citing privacy concerns. Nothing. Even the most determined survivor,

I think, has learned the madness of keeping the story alive. I move the phone, now en route three

times, first to a locked desk drawer, then enter an old toolbox, then into a safe deposit box

at branch I've never used before. But always, every week to the day, it vibrates to succena,

M, and alert that never shows a missed call or message afterward. Sometimes, in a moment of

perverse curiosity, I press play, but the messages are always blank empty air at the sound of

traffic rumbling hopelessly away in the endless dark. Afternoons drift into evenings.

I cross off names in my contacts list that I know weren't answer, no matter how many

voicemails I leave. Delivery men panned at my door for signatures, but none of the packages are

ever from me, I stop opening them, stacking cardboard in the atrium of all the other things left

and claimed by the world. I keep the shades drawn. I work half-speed, then quarter-speed,

until Anna sends a gentle email asking if I'm still interested in stringing for the network.

Even she does not mention exit 194 again. Some part of me becomes convinced that the only reason

and sill here, still able to walk away, is that the rest stopped pattern was never meant

for those who might bother to listen to the static. That somehow, the small mercy of inquiry

a habit hammered in by decades saves me defaith of vanishing utterly, if only by hair's breath.

But just as often, I believe it's only done luck that kept me on the safe side of the glass

this time, some other statistic filling the gap where my story would now be ending.

The winter comes early. I stare too long at the frost-fogged window once and to

for heartbeat think I see the light to the lot flicker in the distance, but this is many miles away,

nothing but a memory stitched to the horizon's trembling line. I write up a draft summary

for what I hope will be a book, organizing files into need, lifeless folders, incidents,

interviews, incidentals, possible conspirators. But in the end, it seems pointless.

Files erase themselves, evidence to case, and the only thing left is a story no institution

once told. A month passes, then, too. The world moves on, traffic at the rest stopper assumes,

though, according to a brief blip in the newsfeed, state officials report staffing

difficulties in unexplained searches and repair costs. The lot is stripped lid again in blue and

orange, the lobby shuffled with new velvet cordons on a clean glass case. The lost and found

is empty briefly, then begins to fell again, piece by piece, with straggloves and match sneakers,

and other markers of passage. One night, just as the late snow taps the city window, a package

with no return addresses left at my door small, battered, wrapped in brown paper and sealed with black

tape. I bend hard hammering and bring it inside. The postmark is obscured by Marker No Clues,

I open it over the kitchen sink, and I've slicing the duct tape, breath-halting in my chest.

Inside is a single object, the key fob from the rest stops lost and found, but not the one I

last saw. This one is freshly carved, the wood smooth, far-nished or dull shine. And on its

face, nestled under a film of transparent plastic, are my own initials burned in with deliberate

strokes. I hold it to the light tracing each letter. It is unmissicable, I am now the owner of

an item that marks the vanisher possession that was never lost, now returned to me for a debt I

didn't know I owed. For a long moment, I don't breathe. There is nothing else in the box,

but a single scrap of folded paper blank but for the time 2-16. That night, my nose aflade so thin

I can hear the hum of every appliance in the house, the shifting pipes in the basement where my gear

still sits, or cold and silent. I stay up tea and touched on the counter, waiting for the inevitable.

At exactly 2-16am, the lost and found phone rings once. Then a second time. Then, after a pause

long enough for my pulse to beat at a dozen jagged fears, it stills. I do not answer. I can't.

But by dawn, I can't resist, I thumb the display in, hands non-playbat the new message that waits.

Through static and flanged, looping echoes, I hear my own voice fragmented,

walked croaking out the warning I want told myself to record, but never had, if you're hearing

this, it's already too late. Don't stop at exit 194, don't the message cuts off of the hollow

thud of this traffic, a shriek of a horn, and something like a screen smothered by wind.

Frozen, I stare at the battered phone until both the display and my resolve drain away.

When I finally look up and out at the city, mourning leaking, it's cold light through the clouds,

I see the glimmer of highway runoff miles in a distance just the faint pulse of taillights flickering

with a rude bends. Standing by the window, I realise I do not know how many more will vanish before

the cycle is broken or if anyone will even mark the loss. Maybe now, it does not matter who listens

or if any of us, having heard the pattern beneath the traffic, ever truly return.

And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next one.

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