Somewhere in me,
a great ocean has iced over.
The ice itself is brittle,
and if pressed,
a great tide of tears
will rush forth.
It threatens to drown
all who are near.
I will not cry,
I promise them.
I will not cry,
I promise myself.
It is futile;
the world is more cruel than anyone might hope,
and given simply time enough,
the ice will buckle.
The tears will come,
and I will know my failure
for what it is:
inevitable, and mine.
I am fishcaught
mouthhooked
(I should have learned to keep mine shut)
on the barbed bits of you
that have always,
always
lured me.
Now I gasp,
out of of breath,
suffocating in your grasp.
Only I couldn’t bear it
if you let me go.
You caught me —
now it’s your responsibility
to hold on,
until it’s over,
one way
or another.
I’ll learn to walk on land,
or I’ll lay down
and die on it.
Just so long as I’m near you,
I don’t mind.
This is Part 10 of a Serial called Disconnection.
* * *
Dreams were remembered by Autorun, catalogued for viewing the next day, but most people couldn’t follow the shifting tide of input while awake. Nothing made sense, and it was much shorter — less a movie, more like a series of disconnected absurdist trailers.
She always watched hers, anyway.
When she dreamed while the digital thing rewrote her flesh, she imagined she could taste blue fire, and that she was back at her first sync point, in the chair, connected, waiting, and that Prime had never come — that she had imagined it all. That her protocols were refused, and she never felt that first, giddy rush of sensation, of full-body communication.
Waking from that nightmare was a relief, even if she was still laying pinned beneath the dead bodies of her compatriots.
She woke to an overlay in impossible blue. She blinked her left eye a few times, heard servos and a few clicks, but felt no pain.
A cursor blinked in her field of vision, pulsing in time to the beat of her heart.
Then, words:
AR>? You're awake.
“Oh, fuck me,” she whispered.
AR>? You do not need to speak aloud.
Really? she thought, frowning enough that she finally felt the faint pull where the implant had embedded itself.
AR>? Really.
Oh. Fuck.
* * *
I am terrible at promises.
I am a liar and a fool.
I am weak and I am maddening.
I am fearful and I am broken.
I am hopeless and I am miserable.
I think of myself as unloved, unlovable, unknowable.
If you really knew me…
If you knew the real me…
If I could be honest…
But no one wants that.
No one wants honesty.
They want the neat little package.
They don’t want messy.
They don’t want miserable.
They don’t want sad.
They don’t want broken.
This isn’t Hollywood,
and I’m not your
manicpixiedreamgirl.
Nobody wants something
already broken.
There isn’t enough glue
to mend this.
Maybe I should keep
breaking myself
until I’m only dust
and then I can either
blow away
or
make myself
into something entirely new.
When I came back up
I was dead.
I’m still dead.
I’m not here.
My eyes are water blue,
and my lungs
are full of salt.
I want to burn something
into my skin
to prove I exist.
I want to etch something
along my bones
to prove it hurts.
I want to fold you up
in my arms
and make a cage of myself
so you can’t leave me.
Don’t leave me here
to sink again.
Don’t leave me here
to fall.
I thought I was immortal.
The husk of me
is all that’s left.
I don’t know
when it happened.
I’m talking to empty air.
You’re already gone.
One of us is a ghost;
the other one
is just dead.