Riley leaned into the pain, turning the white noise into a symphony. If the restraint demanded a sound mind, Riley would give it one—one so perfectly attuned to the frequency of the dampener that the two became indistinguishable. Crack.
You see, madness offers an escape hatch. A fracture in the mirror where you can slip through and let the chaos swallow your mistakes. But Riley? Riley was certified. Clinically, cruelly, sound . Her logic was a diamond; her memory, a steel trap. And the trap had just snapped shut on the one thing she couldn’t process: the fact that she had watched herself die. infernal restraintsof sound mind riley reyes
Reyes’s 2020 EP, Sound of a Mind , hints at this struggle. Its title track is a haunting ballad of self-discovery, with lyrics like, “I build castles in my mind, but the storm keeps tearing them—still, I keep building.” Here, the “storm” reflects the infernal force of doubt, while the “castles” symbolize the human urge to create meaning. Riley’s sound mind, then, is the ability to persist, undeterred, in the face of such restraints. Riley leaned into the pain, turning the white