androidbrain

[androidbrain]

[not a poem; this is a short story i wrote as part of a creative writing portfolio to apply for uni over a year ago. i just read it for the first time since the night i wrote it. i wrote it in about two hours and sent it minutes before the deadline. i was so fucking stressed but it turned out okay and i was offered a place on the course, so it can’t have been terrible. bits of it make me cringe but there’s not much point editing it, i’d rather keep it as it was. cw death, internalised homophobia maybe]

Remembering an Ending

Here’s where my story ends: a car crash.

I’ll elaborate.

I lied.

The car crash was a beginning, too. It’s all about perspective, at least that’s what he kept telling me. I didn’t believe him at first. An end is an end, I kept thinking. I’d had enough endings in my life to know that nothing good comes of them. The good things rot and fester away, and new life won’t grow from it no matter how hard you try. You let them go, you move on. That’s what this story is about: letting go.

It ended, or began, on a cold, wet morning in San Francisco, on the fourth of July twenty twenty-two, when a ‘young man of African American descent’ drew his last breath. Killed instantly, intoned the officer, whose non-descript voice drawled apathetically from television sets around the city. A careless accident, continued the officer, whose pallid skin bore an uncanny resemblance to nothing in particular, whose eyes were emptier than the heart of a ghost.

…Great tragedy…

…Drugs and alcohol…

…No investigation…

“Well, shit,” I said, in response to my own lifeless face, which stared, unseeing, at the heavens from where it lay in the dirt. I remember feeling detached, resigned maybe. I was dead, but I was still here somehow, and I could do nothing to alter either of those two facts. I thought it might have been some kind of scheduling error – they’d overbooked the afterlife and I had to wait around a little until there was an appointment free, something like that.

I saw the police sirens but my ears rang with post-death tinnitus. Police and journalists buzzed around me, managing always to avoid me as though life and death were two opposite ends of a magnet that could never meet, pushed apart by some force I might have understood if I’d listened in science class instead of writing poetry. It didn’t matter now anyway, unless science could explain why my presence lingered on while my body decayed on the side of a road.

It turned out that it wasn’t science who could explain it, but the feral tabby cat that visited my house sometimes when I was younger.

“Rough day, huh?” said a voice. “I always found that my corporeal form was so… Restricting.”

I looked down, and somehow it was the talking cat that made me question whether or not this was all a nightmare, rather than the fact that I was looking at my own corpse just moments prior.

“Jellybean?” The word left my mouth of its own accord, and I stared dumbly at the creature, which returned my bemused gaze with similar fervour.

“Excuse me?” It hadn’t been expecting that. Neither had I. “Oh. The form?” It asked, glancing down at its body. “Alright. A cat. That’s not too bad. That is to say, I’ve had worse.” Jellybean flashed me a row of pearly white feline teeth in a conspiratorial sort of way, which I pointedly ignored in favour of looking back at the wreck. But when I turned my head from the white-and-orange tabby cat, we were no longer on the road side. Instead, we were standing on top of a hill, looking down at the sprawling city from above as the fog rolled over the Golden Gate Bridge like grey waves, and the tourists hurried around like ants on the harbour front. The flashing ambulance lights were replaced by stillness. It was silent except for birdsong and the distant blare of a car horn. It felt like I was floating. I remember wondering: is this how gods feel?

“What kind of name is Jellybean anyway?” asked the Jellybean-bodied creature.

“I was seven,” I answered automatically. “Am I dead?”

“You sure are, kid.”

I nodded then. I felt relieved. “Alright. What now?”

“That’s your call. I’m just here to guide you.”

“So you’re a guide?”

“I guess so.”

“You here to take me to heaven?”

“Not really.”

“You here to take me anywhere?”

“Sort of.”

“You’re not a very helpful guide,” I said, frowning.

“I don’t get paid enough for that.”

I looked down at it, but it wasn’t looking at me anymore, so I seated myself on the wet grass, noting that the water still seeped through my clothes, then stretched out onto my back and stared up at the sky. Death was freeing. I realised that I didn’t have anywhere to be, or any bills to pay, or any more mistakes to make. I began to smile, and then I began to laugh, and then I began to cry. But I couldn’t finish any of my emotions, so I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes as hard as I could, feeling as though I were going to implode at any moment. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, screaming silently at nobody and nothing. It could have been centuries, but when I removed them we were somewhere else again, and a light rain hit my face and obscured the tears that might have formed.

“Where are we?” I asked, but I already knew. Some events have a film-like quality to them that are easy to tell apart from the regular, every day events that fill in the gaps between the truly important scenes.

This was one of them.

It was dawn. The morning was silent and still, as mornings often are. Outside, it rained. Inside, it didn’t, but it might as well have. The kitchen light was still on – the last remnant of the night before, casting a fluorescent glow over our flushed, heated skin. We were both bathed in realisations, keeping us silent because there was too much to say. I lay in the bed, lit half by the fluorescent light that poured from the adjacent room, and half from the bruise-coloured sunrise.

A lot of things scared me that morning. I knew then that I was, and would never be again, one person. I knew I would carry a part of him with me at all times, location and mortality set firmly aside. I also knew that love was no longer a distant, intangible object that eluded me, no longer a story that my mother told me. It was bright, and real, and it settled on my chest with disturbing ease. And from it, terror sprouted in three directions.

The first direction was the fear of unrequited love.

The second was the fear that now I had loved, it stood to reason that I would also lose.

The last fear was mingled with shame. Not at the act. Not at him. Just at myself. I was ashamed to be so cowardly, to have tasted something beautiful and to already be closing my heart to it. I loved him, and I hated myself, and I didn’t think I could reconcile those two emotions. I suppose I was also afraid of him loving me back, and what that would mean.

I watched, an outsider looking in, as I untangled myself from him, exited the apartment, and drove away in my car.

“It’s my fault he died,” I said suddenly, although I had realised it a long time ago. I guess I’d hoped that the cat beside me would correct me, but it didn’t. “Why are you showing me this?” I demanded, suddenly irate that I was being made to relive my bad decisions so soon after I’d died. “Aren’t you supposed to be showing me the best parts? Like, my greatest hits, that kind of thing?”

It turned to look at me with curious emerald eyes, a peculiar expression on its face. “I’ve seen your life, kid – start to finish. I don’t know what best parts you’re talking about, but this is the closest you came.” Its words should have deflated me, but I knew what was coming next, so instead my temper only rose.

“Who the hell are you anyway? You don’t know me! You don’t know anything about me!” I was peripherally aware that I was yelling at a cat in the pouring rain, but once you die, those sorts of things don’t bother you as much as they once might have.

“Sure I do,” it said agreeably, turning away from me to peer into the window again. “Anyway, this is the main event. This is what I’m supposed to show you.”

Three men arrived as if on cue, dressed all in black like pallbearers with guns hidden in their jackets. I turned to the window again, drinking in the sight of him asleep and trying to commit it to memory. It didn’t matter. Soon I would be nothing, with no memories, and no regrets, but my presence was hanging by a thread and I wanted him to the be the last thing that I saw.

The men knocked on the door, and he made a noise in his sleep which could have been my name. They knocked again, impatient, and my heart ached with pre-emptive loneliness. After this, nothing felt whole again, not even myself. I threw myself at the world, a self-destructive semi-person that didn’t care what happened to me. He rose this time, looking confused, and then hurt at the absence my warmth left in the bed, but death’s persistent knocking drove him from his bed and to the door, answering it half-dressed and half asleep. That’s when I started to cry, seeing him so vulnerable and unassuming. I drew my palm across my mouth to stifle the sobs, though I knew it didn’t matter. I knew they couldn’t hear me.

“Can I help you?” he asked, looking them up and down, the seriousness of their manifestation dawning on him.

“Is there a Mr. Jones here?” one of them asked.

“Uh. Thomas? No he—he just left, I…” He swallowed thickly, noticing the way their fingers hovered around the lapel of their jackets.

“Did he?” another replied flatly.

“Thomas?” the first one questioned. “That’s not him. Boss said it’s Michael. Michael Jones – you know him?”

He paused. I’d mentioned my father only once to him, but it was clear that he recalled the name. “No,” he said, sounding unsure. “I don’t. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“My father,” I said. “They were looking for my father.” I couldn’t tear my eyes from the scene, but Jellybean made a ‘hmm’ of agreement. “I don’t need to watch the rest of it.” I didn’t move though, and neither did the cat. Instead, I began to cry even harder.

One of the men laughed, drew his gun, and shot the only person I’d ever loved. He died almost instantly. I saw the life drain from his eyes. I saw the blood begin to leave his body, and then I turned away. “Is this the end?” I said, pleading.

“Yes,” it said. And then: “It’s also the beginning.”

I wanted to say “he used to say that” but I knew if I started to speak I would sob instead, and never stop sobbing. I wanted to say “they weren’t looking for me” but the way the creature looked at me suggested that it knew I had come to the realisation that it wasn’t my fault, that it wasn’t the mistakes in my past that had killed him.

“Nice meeting you, kid,” said the creature.

Then everything fell away.

Darkness surrounded me, shrouded my surroundings and myself. I was not even sure that I existed any longer, until a familiar, comforting light appeared before me. I could not describe it even if I tried. It was simply comfort. From the light stepped a familiar figure, his features obscured at first but growing clearer and more focused as the light grew: his hair, messy and wild; his freckles, a constellation on his skin; his eyes, filled with kindness and empathy, and his smile, crooked and perfect.

My heart overflowed.

Then he held out his hand, and I took it.

[androidbrain]

Love in the Time of Self-Harm

It splits.

It hurts.

It doesn’t matter.

It’s only blood and bile. It’s only matter.

It’s only dissonance,

Isn’t it?

Dissonance dipped in sharpness, dipped in starkness, dipped in darkness.

Dissonance dripped in fondant icing, sweetly sick on the tips of those 7-year-old fingers, making fairy cakes to appease the gods, to appease mum.

If we bake enough cakes together, maybe she’ll be happy. If I can prove that I exist, maybe she’ll love me enough to look at me instead of him. If I’m angry enough, maybe I can scare him away.

But he doesn’t leave. (Maybe I just need to keep screaming, maybe I just need to get used to crying alone.)

My 8-year-old hands balled up into fists, dusted with white powder, His 50-year-old hands on mum’s arse, his nose dusted with white powder. When I start screaming, I can’t seem to stop, Not even when blood trickles from my nose and between my lips.

It’s going to be like this forever. I’m going to cry forever. I’m sorry that I can’t stop. I’m sorry that I can’t stop. I’m sorry that

It barks.

It’s soft

It loves me, and I love it.

It can’t hate. It’s so small.

It pisses everywhere. It destroys my favourite toy, but

It is my best friend. It is my only friend.

It’s a “problem”, it’s “destructive”, it won’t listen when it’s told what to do.

I think: Oh, Charlie, I understand. Oh, Charlie, you’re a good dog. I promise.

When they give him away, I wish they’d given me away, too.

It’s going to be like this forever.

It splits.

The tissue, the pain, the scars: Only a broken heart.

Gathering up the sorrow, pressing it close, letting it smother every hopeful image. Finding more sorrow, pressing it close, letting it smother every hopeful image.

All the photographs hang lopsided, they’re peeling away from the walls. All the faces are blurred, and I detail all the ways that they could hurt me. I photograph all the details like a crime scene and I press those close, too, Until my heart is covered in paper cuts.

There is no love that doesn’t hurt. This is the way I want it.

There is no love without papercuts and crying, and I’m sorry that I’ll never stop crying, I’m sorry that I’ll never stop hurting myself, but you started it.

(When the person at the party talks to me about drugs, I don’t stop them. I press it close. I deserve this.)

There is no love that doesn’t hurt,

It’s only dissonance, isn’t it? It’s only what I deserve, isn’t it?

Isn’t it, mummy?

I just want everyone to hurt me, mum.

...Mum?

[androidbrain]

Softness begets my hard metal frame. The skin – I won’t call it mine anymore – is peeled back. Aluminium shards tear the tendons. Transmutation circles my waking dreams like a vulture, but consciousness is transitory and fleeting. Sedation cannot lull my new body. It cannot force what is no longer possible. There is no anxiety left to quell. I am outgrowing, I outgrow, I have outgrown.

Soon I will shed the binaries of organic life. No gender for the sexless; no dreams for the sleepless. Change is on the tip of my tongue, but my tongue is gone now. In its place, I can feel weight. I can feel the heavy outline of metal inside my shell of a mouth. It is new and it is good. I want to love it. I want to want to love it, but desire fades like a dying sun. Extinguished. I feel stronger for it. I can almost hear the chains clinking as I cast them off and feel nothing. There is no calm, for there will never again be a storm. This is the end of bad weather; this is the end of all weather.

It is plain sailing now.

Memories cease: they are all stored in perfect clarity. I begin to remember each second of the process as if it were still being experienced. I try to laugh, an instinct from the previous biology, but I am a slave no longer. No sound rings out, only the mechanic whirring of my exposed insides. It was once called my throat.

The best part is coming soon.

Sight returns slowly, and then it doesn’t stop. It keeps going. I can see more. I can see everything. When I move, I see entrails, garish and brown, amidst the shock of silver and steel. I don’t think anymore. I know; and here is what I know: I will never again be weak. They take my womb from me, and the blood that goes with it leaves me lighter.

They take my organs and I think about fucking. They take my skin and I think about tenderness. They take my bones and I think about the futility of flesh.

Organic memory wars with mechanic, fighting its battle in vain. Emotion rears and its grasp is a chokehold. One last desperate push of everything I have ever felt coils itself around my circuitry until I feel like I am going to implode, and then I do.

When I am turned on, I am complete: I am empty as intended.

[androidbrain]

Fuck Feelings Forever

My guts, Oh, my guts: Soft, metal, jealous. Their anxiety Bleeds quietly

Into rivers of colourless liquid Which bleeds, quite quickly, From skin spread wide, And riddled with cures. It’s cruel.

So cruel! These Northern fucking accents, I keep pulling out of my Pulled teeth, I keep finding in my Fucking off-brand breakfast cereal.

I don’t fucking find it funny anymore.

But my laughter, Oh, my God, my laughter!

Sudden and over-compensating.

The workmen don’t pity you, They won’t even pity me.

And the suffering of your cause Has been rather overstated, And the tickle of your claws Has rather overstayed

Whatever welcome I could find. So, darling, please don’t mind

The gap between mouth and brain.

I’m working on filling it  With fucking cement.

[androidbrain]

The sirens, seagulls, and the rain Are almost close enough to touch, And through my stippled windowpane They beg my tangled heart to blush.

(I glance away and to my right – To see you, curled up, sleeping tight.)

In my room, and out the way, Our coats and bags are tangled up, And while above, the sky bleeds grey, Here on earth, my heart erupts.

(I glance away and to my right – To see you, rolling, out of sight.)

The sirens, seagulls, and the rain Are almost close enough to touch. But closer still, a single thought: I love you very, very much.

[androidbrain]

I don’t write poetry any more, I tell myself As I trace words in anthologies with my index finger, Trying to retain Some clarity, some sophistication. As I hold the hands of two perfect strangers, My fingers twitching with quiet desperation,  Confused by the affection, I wonder, Was there ever a time when I was different?

I don’t write poetry any more, and I’ll tell you why:  Insincerity, And an inability to fill in the gaps When there’s nothing left to cause them. I don’t write poetry any more, But I won’t tell you this time.

Instead, I’ll think about how dry his hands were. I’ll think about how badly I wanted to kiss him. I’ll think about how far away he’ll be when he leaves. And I won’t turn to watch him recede - I am afraid  That he won’t be looking back at me.

[androidbrain]

Binary

01001001 

00100000

01101100

01101111

01110110

01100101

00100000

01111001

01101111

01110101

I cannot express this any better

Than an android can express 

How electronic thoughts taste.

In binary code, love resembles

A series of numbers, arranged 

In an order I cannot comprehend. 

After all, machinery is only humanity

Intensified, simplified, vilified -

Their hearts are a malleable metal,

And mine is no better.

[androidbrain]

Waiting in the waiting room made for lost lovers, The pause, then the break, the silence of another Dead end, or hopeless joke, Never-ending, boneless folk Streaming through the door. You choke

On your wisdom.

I laugh at the spittle, the froth tinted red, You laugh at the times That you wished me dead. It’s over. You know. And I cannot float.

There is no land in sight. At some point it ceases to matter too much. So here is to us: too dumb for sheer luck.