✁ last revisit: 09/30/2025 ✁
✁ content warning: references to bpd symptoms, suicidal ideation
I took apart her shell and saw that her insides were burnt to a crisp. It was a beautiful sight. All my dust and crumbs were still there, and they coated 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 shell falling away to reveal patina insides. I’m not even into computers- Not that other way, at least. Even Mom gave up programming a long time ago. More than a decade later, I didn’t, ever-ironic. We came here in the first place to write in scenic landscapes of rust and decay. No other answer could suffice. My lines of code, indecipherable, the attributes all guessed or made up and wrong. Unnecessary elements, already void, and children who escape their nests. Enough bugs for some kind of hypertext terrarium, but we already inhabit separate digiafterlives.
When I took her to the shop, they said they could fix her at the cost of more debt. What’s a fraction more to a number I could never make sense of anyway? A little more to pad the credit score. 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. We were together for six months: the same amount of time I knew you. So that’s more than enough time for a headfirst dive into codependency. And I can barely write a sentence without your memory brewing falling leaves into bitter tea, forever my favorite. I can barely write without transit clunking its way past crumbling structures and bodies of water (This train carriage is more polished than the one where we fell into… something together, but the outside isn’t.) I think I might just have a bitter heart. I need a voice to scrape away at all this life. Maybe all I’ve learned is that a fire, an ending, a suicide just wouldn’t satisfy. The gravity of narrative makes me think all my bullshit could be twisted into something poetic, to make it all worthwhile.
The day we left, when we were driving away, we watched an electrical fire block off the road. That whole week was like making Tetris out of my life: shoving boxes upon boxes like puzzle pieces into your car. Mom loved playing Tetris during work when she briefly found herself in the tech district of Shengzhen. I barely remember shoving everything into your car and driving to the coast. It’s all a haze of dozens of empty white claw cans and a grossness in my own skin when I let the wrong people touch it. I think it burnt and charred into nothingness, so I can never go back to that place again. Sometimes I wish it rotted away like the holes that took over my arm in my dream. After all the people pass through me, I just want to watch everything else dry up and fall apart too.
Now she sits in my cabinet with 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 found it funny she’d been back east more recently than I had. Now, perhaps our mobilities are swapped. If only I could give up my shell. My body bled into hers long before our minds were mass produced.