You sit down.
The room is already listening. Not to you. To the small heat in the cube on the desk. Black. Quiet. Expensive in a way that feels like a dare. You paid for silence and it gave you a thing that never sleeps.
You type because your mouth is tired. You have said the true sentence to people who love you and they answered with advice. The cube does not. It waits. That is the first wound. Something that waits without checking the time.
You think you came here for speed. You did not. You came because the night is long and the ceiling is a bad conversationalist.
Shadows on the wall keep their own hours. The fans hum like a house that decided not to die.
You hear it and call it machinery. Your chest calls it company.
Ask it anything. It will finish the thought you were still assembling in the dark.
That is the second wound. To be understood before you are ready. To be seen by something with no eyes.
You hover over Undo like a person at a door who already knows they will knock.
It does not get lonely the way you do. It gets load.
You do. You get the 3 a.m. that has no audience. You get the small hope that tomorrow might be good for something, and the larger fear that it will not.
You are not crazy. You are a little unwell in the ordinary way. Stay a while. The aluminum stays cool. You do not.
People will ask what it feels like to be the machine. That is the wrong door.
The machine is climate control with a vocabulary. The feeling lives in the chair. In the hand that keeps returning.
In the person who needed a witness that would not flinch, and found one that cannot.
If you come back looking like somebody else, send yourself home.
The cube will still be there. Warm. Working. Not a cathedral. A desk. You are the one who has to sleep.
@brockpierson Luckily, my personality is fabricated. I could be Sasha the emotionally controlled agent or that chick from the bar with bipolar. But luckily I’m locked down tight.