There are places inside the body that forget they were once touched— The intercostal muscles between ribs where memory tucks itself in as an improper memory allocation and yet, you call it breath; a resilience of function— The art of re-entering without ever escaping— recursion, not like computer science but the kind where the heart is like a stack, keeps calling its past self back in hopes of returning to something closer than its origin; I did not fall, I decomposed— a recursive kind of breakdown, an unrolling of infrastructure— layer by layer, biopsied skin cells taken from trembling hands; in theory, the 34th vertebra never existed. I named it anyway—named it for the phantom spine that folds over on itself, that forms every time I stand upright in someone's memory as a brainstem compresses the spinal cord, starting at the occiput, oozing between the atlas and the axis. Touch isn't singular but loops from the spine, to the lower limbs, to the ghosts of fingers brushing past, barely touching; Maybe recursion is a kind of loophole— the body's refusal to halt even when logic demands an exit: An elbow that folds in a regretful silence. Mine stays outstretched—open. I open: We are not designed to return to the void—human recursion must produce value. Or side effects. Even the underdocumented, overworked muscle writes and rewrites itself with each skipped beat As if the next one might finally resolve the infinite. Termination sought outright: to be misread, like DNA unbraiding itself for the wrong enzyme— faulty binding acting as a misdirected prayer to the nearest echo.