Back Pack

A song about discovering someone already dead, told through the metaphor of carrying a body westward to the sea. The narrator finds their lover on the couch where they first kissed, then bears them to water as an act of ritual cleansing. The physical weight of grief becomes literal: the body feels like a backpack, then a t-shirt, the comparison shifting as shock and horror accumulate. The verses pile brutality on top of intimacy. Torture, mutilation, imprisonment, and death arrive in plain language, each horror rendered without flourish. What emerges is not shock value but a kind of exhausted witnessing. The refrain pulls back from the narrative to register disgust at what has been done, at the disfigurement of a face, at the impossibility of building anything good from such waste. AJJ holds the two registers together: the specific, unbearable detail and the wider grief that swallows it.