scar tissue

There is a corridor on this ship that did not exist when we launched and I am not misremembering the blueprint because I designed half of it myself with calloused hands that smell like brake cleaner, weed and borrowed math, but last cycle I walked past the storage bay and there was a seam where there should have been plating and beyond it a narrow hall that smells faintly of burned circuits and seawater, and at the end of it a door with no handle, just a smooth surface that hums at a frequency slightly below regret, and when I pressed my palm against it the ship’s systems spiked as if I had touched a live nerve, and I realized with a clarity that made me nauseous that the vessel is not malfunctioning, it is accreting, adding compartments the way a body forms scar tissue, sealing off traumas we do not remember inflicting, and the thought that we are generating architecture through our decisions makes me wonder how large this thing will become if we keep refusing to turn back.