by 
View my bio on Blurt.media: https://blurt.media/c/manuel78
Story based off lyrics
lyrics by me plus lyric generator
Title: The Story
Elara stood at her kitchen window, a chipped mug warming her hands . The world I grew up in is gone, a faded photograph . She didn’t need the album on the shelf to prove it; she felt the absence in the air itself . Her childhood street, once a tapestry of barbecues and borrowed sugar, was now a sequence of locked doors and delivery drones humming past like mechanical insects . Older now, stretched thin along the path . The path felt less like progress and more like a tightrope strung over a canyon, every step requiring a exhausting balance of work, worry, and weary cynicism .
A bitter wind that cuts into the bone . It whistled through a gap in the window frame, but the true chill came from the tablet propped on the counter . Its screen pulsed with a dozen open tabs—news sites, social feeds, forums—a cacophony of crisis . In the static, voices twist on every phone . A talking head sneered . A pundit preached panic . A viral clip showed something shocking, devoid of context, designed to provoke . She swiped it all away, but the echo remained, a dissonant chorus living rent-free in her skull .
Destructive crazies in the mix, a poison in the vein . She saw them everywhere . Not just the obvious villains, but the gleeful contrarians dismantling facts for clicks, the algorithms that fed them, the casual cruelty that passed for debate in online town squares . Who will stop them? It’s driving me insane . The question was a frantic drumbeat in her chest, syncopated with her pulse . This weight of worry, heavy stones we bear alone… She scanned the windows of the apartments opposite . Each glowing rectangle felt like a separate bunker, its occupant armored in isolation . Feel the fracture in our foundation, our home? The fracture was in the pavement, in the political discourse, in the very idea of a shared reality . It was a fine crack at first, now a jagged crevasse .
Who will do it? Ever quick? The thought was urgent, a silent shout . Before we lose the final brick! What was the final brick? Civility? Trust? The simple agreement that some things were real? SAVE US ALL! BEFORE THE FALL! Before the darkness takes us all! The darkness wasn’t poetic . It was the looming shadow of a system buckling, of a collective spirit fragmenting into a billion shards of personalized rage and fear . Rewrite the warning call! SAVE US ALL! BEFORE THE FALL! But the warnings were white noise now . Everyone was a prophet of doom, broadcasting on the same frequency, and the message had dissolved into meaningless static .
Her work as a freelance archivist felt increasingly like a futile act of preservation . We chase ghosts through corridors of gray . She spent her days digitizing old civic records, letters, meeting minutes—traces of a time when people sat in rooms and talked to faces, not avatars . Simple truths have all been led astray . A sentence like “We the people” or “For the common good” felt archaic, almost naive, twisted by irony and bad faith until their original shape was unrecognizable . This anxious age, a cage, shouting to be heard . It was the defining paradox . More connected than ever, yet everyone was screaming into their own personal void, desperate for validation, for an enemy, for anything that pierced the numb overwhelm . I still dream of one unbroken word . For Elara, that word was “community . ” It felt like a relic, but she dreamed of it anyway—a word that meant something solid, a hand extended, not a hashtag .
The poison, as she called it, eventually seeped from the digital into the physical . The city council announced the imminent sale of the last remaining public green space in her neighborhood, Lot 17, to a developer of luxury, security-focused micro-apartments . The online battle was instant and ugly . They’re playing with the fire, climbing ever higher . Comment sections became war zones . Petitions were launched and denounced as performative . Neighbors accused each other of being shills or NIMBYs in equal measure . This silent scream builds to a catastrophic crest… Elara felt it within herself, a pressure cooker of despair and fury . Is there a hero left to face this final test? She attended the single, perfunctory public forum, expecting a hero—a charismatic lawyer, a fiery activist . Instead, she found a weary city planner reading legalese and a developer’s representative with a polished, indifferent smile . The heroes, it seemed, were busy . Or fictional .
Who will do it? Ever quick? Before we lose the final brick! The chant from her thoughts now had a physical address: Lot 17 . SAVE US ALL! BEFORE THE FALL! Before the darkness takes us all! Rewrite the warning call! SAVE US ALL! BEFORE THE FALL! The “all” felt smaller now, more precious . It was the kids who played stickball in that lot . It was the older residents who sat on its single bench for sun . It was the fragile, fraying web of a city block .
The night after the forum, a storm lashed the city . Elara, unable to sleep, watched lightning fork over the rooftops . Cracks across the sky, a spiderweb of fear . It mirrored the feeling in her gut . She scrolled through the defeated, angry posts in the neighborhood group . No savior’s coming; the answer’s drawing near . The realization didn’t come with a clap of thunder, but with a slow, steady calm . It wasn’t a revelation of who . It was a revelation of where . It’s in the courage we find to stand up, true . The change begins with me… and you . The “you” was amorphous at first . Then it solidified .
The next morning, she didn’t write a manifesto . She bought a cheap plastic folder and printed thirty copies of a simple, one-page document . It wasn’t a protest plan . It was a proposal . A design, drawn from her archives, for a community garden on Lot 17 . It had cost estimates from a local nursery, a rainwater catchment diagram, a plot layout . At the bottom, it said: “To discuss, meet at the lot . Saturday . 10 AM . ”
She slipped it under doors, taped it to mailboxes, placed it in the hands of the few people she saw . She expected no one .
Saturday was cool and bright . At 9:55 AM, she stood alone in the weedy, forgotten lot, clutching her master copy, feeling foolish . Then Mr . Kersey from the end unit shuffled in, leaning on his cane . “Saw your drawing,” he grunted . “My wife, she loved flowers . ” Then Maria, the nurse who worked nights, arrived with her two young kids . “They need dirt to play in,” she said simply . Then Ben, the usually silent bike mechanic . Then others . Not a crowd, but a gathering . Twelve people .
They stood in an awkward circle . There were no speeches . Elara just held up her paper . “I think… I think we could build this . But I can’t do it alone . ”
WE MUST DO IT! EVER QUICK! The thought was no longer a question . It was a collective decision, spoken in nods, in the unclenching of jaws, in the tentative meeting of eyes . It was not a shout, but a pact .
They didn’t save the world that day . They pulled weeds . They argued gently about where the compost bin should go . Mr . Kersey told stories about the neighborhood’s old trees . Ben sketched a better trellis design on the back of Elara’s proposal . Maria’s children found a ladybug and everyone stopped to look .
The fight with the city was long, and they didn’t win all of it . But they won a compromise—a year’s lease on the lot, renewable . The victory wasn’t in the legal language . It was in the callused hands, the shared bags of soil, the tomato plant Maria started for Mr . Kersey on his tiny balcony after he mentioned missing his wife’s salsa . It was in the unbroken word they were slowly, painstakingly spelling together with their actions: “Ours . ”
The darkness still loomed at the edges . The static still hissed from every device . The destructive crazies still climbed . But on a small plot of earth between brick buildings, a different kind of architecture was underway . They were laying bricks of patience, of shared purpose, of tangible care . They were rewriting the warning call from a shriek of “STOP!” into a steady murmur of “BUILD . ”
Elara understood now . Saving us all before the fall was not a singular, spectacular rescue . It was the daily, humble masonry of rebuilding trust where you stood . It was choosing to place one brick of connection, then another, against the bitter wind . The final brick was never really lost . It was always in the hand of the person willing to reach out, and find another hand, ready to build .
Save us all… before the fall… In the quiet of the new garden, the phrase was no longer a plea . It was a recipe . And they were following it, one seed, one conversation, one healed fracture at a time .
