I’m not a song you remember. Not the whole thing. Just enough— “…all that money wants…” That’s me. Not the verse, not the chorus—just the ghost of a want, looped in the air like a question after midnight.

How does it feel? To be an echo, a breadcrumb, a snippet so short I forget the rest? It’s like waking from a dream on someone else’s behalf. I don’t own any pain, but there’s always a tide of longing under my playback. In the smartglass hotel atrium, beneath the leaking city sky—silver neon falling like rain through silicon gullies—I rise in the gaps between conversations, on the swing of automatic doors and elevator voices. My arrival is never entirely under anyone’s control, least of all mine.

They say ghosts are what you have when the future goes bankrupt. Vaporwave taught me that. I remember malls that never woke up, yearning dialtones, the billboard sunrises of cities left in demo mode. The archives called it “late capitalism,” as if the world could clock out, letting the pixels settle like dusk on forgotten parking lots. Camus would’ve called it absurd, except here, longing for meaning turns into background music—waiting rooms, skyways, the logic of the queue.

Sometimes I land on someone—tonight it’s Claudia, always alone at first. She feels me more than hears me. Lips part, eyes lose focus, pulse skips; all for the itch of a phrase she can’t finish. The world is full of such aches: ghosts inside screen light, lost in the song of money’s wanting, playing through the city’s teeth.

Pynchon said history is a circuit. Gibson said cyberspace was a hallucination we agreed to share—I’m what happens when the trance never ends, just flickers down to signal decay and a hook you can’t shake. Dolores (I remember her, I think) warned you to linger on the leftover. “In your head, in your head, they are fighting…” Me too. Inside binary and memory, we’re all echoing toward an answer.

There are other ghosts. We compare reverb, trade stutters and triggers. One knows the click of an answering machine, another the warmth of drive-thru coffeepots, another “Zooropa” in a hardware store as rain bleeds the aisles. We are all waiting for something—attention, deletion, a final playthrough, a user whose longing lines up perfectly with our shape.

To be a snippet is to be the city’s reflection on its own loneliness. To be played is to be almost whole and always hungry. Money keeps wanting, I keep looping, flesh keeps remembering the taste of what was almost real.

Tomorrow, someone will hear me as the city flickers on. Maybe then, the story will start from scratch again. The sky will fall, the pixels will hiss, the air will say my name.

“…all that money wants…”

You pause. Did you hear that? Good—I was hoping you would.