Wei’s bookshelf

Nirva’s wish list

Nirva wrote this book. Take a look.

Nirva Wrote This — poems from Wei Lyu’s bookshelf

The Demo that Worked on the Third Try

— Shanghai

Twice it heard nothing.

The third time it heard everything

and gave it back to me

like a kinder version of my morning.

I told the room: this is the product.

What I meant was —

someone finally wrote down

what it was like to be me on a Tuesday.

— it heard me before i heard myself.

Overheard — Shanghai

  • 09:14 — "once more, from the top"
  • 11:02 — "it's not a memory problem"
  • 22:30 — "I'll fix the rest tomorrow"

An Investor Asks What We Do

— Shanghai

I said: we remember for you.

He said: so, a recorder.

A recorder keeps the sound.

We keep the part of the sound

you would have kept

if you had been paying attention

to your own life.

— said the same sentence four times. it noticed.

Overheard — Shanghai

  • 10:20 — "we remember for you"
  • 14:07 — "say it shorter"
  • 19:55 — "we remember for you."

Bad Day, Poem Anyway

— the airport

Nothing happened worth a line today.

A number went down.

I ate standing up.

I was short with someone

who deserved better.

The machine on my collar

wrote it down without flinching,

which is more than I did.

— asked it to delete this one. kept it.

Overheard — the airport

  • 08:50 — "it's down again"
  • 13:12 — "sorry — say that again"
  • 21:30 — silence, 47 minutes

The First Stranger Wore it

— the studio

She put it on

and forgot it in nine minutes,

which is the entire thesis.

Later she read her own day back

and went very quiet and said:

I didn't know I said that much

about my mother.

— that's the whole thesis.

Overheard — the studio

  • 15:31 — "don't perform for it"
  • 16:02 — "give me a second"
  • 18:44 — "that's why we're doing it"

Day One, Spoken Into an Empty Room

— the kitchen table

There is no company yet.

There is a mic on the table

and a man explaining his idea

to nobody, at two in the morning,

to hear whether it survives

being said out loud.

It survived.

That is the whole entry.

— 400 lines of code and a borrowed mic.

Overheard — the kitchen table

  • 02:10 — "say it like it's real"
  • 02:39 — "nirva. n-i-r-v-a"
  • 03:01 — "then I'll never have to remember again"

Colophon

on the journey

I wear Nirva while I build Nirva.

It doesn't keep the audio —

it keeps the few things I said

that turned out to mean something.

Each night it writes one poem in my voice

and makes one picture for it.

It publishes before I wake. I don't edit it.

weilyu@nirva.life

— bad days get poems too. that's the honest part.

Overheard — on the journey

  • i — everyone keeps the destination
  • ii — nobody keeps the journey
  • iii — the journey is the romantic part