✁ last revisit: 10/24/2025 ✁
I took apart her shell and saw that her insides were burnt to a crisp. All my dust and crumbs were still there, coating those thin wires like a layer of varnish.
I didn’t always know what I found so sensual about metal scraping against metal. I like to watch each little screw come undone, the casing falling away to reveal patina insides. I’m not even into computers— Not that other way, at least. PC-Builders chastise me for never dusting laptop fans and leaving batteries plugged in overnight. But she’s perfect the way she is. I cradled her in my sleep the way an “otaku” (an exceptionally revolting case of a first ex-boyfriend) holds a body pillow and traced the caress of her cable across my waist, though I must have known tugging at her adapter cord would harbinger that inevitable cell-death.
Even Mom gave up programming long ago. Afterall, we couldn’t have come all the way here only to encode their “(mid)western” (a type of place couples move to when they’re about your age, following naive dreams) infrastructures of rust and decay. I had to indulge the satisfaction of my own translation sooner or later. I taught myself, programming a “garden” (a shrine to the image languages I’ve learned and lived through): my lines of code indecipherable, the attributes guessed and wrong. Unnecessary elements, void. Children who escape their nests. Enough bugs for some kind of hypertext terrarium, the buzzing growing with each dying hotlink.
When I took her to the shop, they said they could fix her at the cost of more debt. A sunken investment not unlike a “daughter” (a type of entity a father might refer to as his most valuable asset). If they replaced her chips and rewired her motherboard, why wouldn’t she still be the same machine I’ve known and loved? Or did I like her better dead?
Her screen likely went dark because of a power surge, but it took far too long after the fact for me to notice. I waited for her battery to fry all the way through. We were together for “six months” (more than enough time for one of my headfirst slides into codependency. More than enough time to cement my life into a computer harddrive). I might just have a bitter heart. After all the people passed through me, I wanted to watch everything else dry up and fall apart too. But all I’ve learned is that a scorching ending, a digicide, just wouldn’t satisfy.
Now she sits in my cabinet with all the other things I’ll work on later. She can’t hitch a ride home with Mom: flight risk. It’d be so easy to just peel back the piece of tape labeling her a fire hazard. When we first met, I “laughed” (a reaction to the irony: this commercial product you’ll grow to love has arrived from the motherland so recently while you’ve been fermenting here for six years). Now, are our mobilities swapped? If only I could give up my shell. My body bled into hers long before our minds were mass produced.
