// Internal System Log: CORRUPTED
// Status: [St@bil!ty = ]
// Emotional Containment Protocol: UNSUCCESSFUL

⸻

BEGIN REPORT:

Input()Input()Input()Input()Input()Input()Input—

[[TooM­u.ch//Prcssing]]
[[Intake>Breathe>Breathe>STOP]]
[[Overload threshold breached: 147%]]
[[SILENCE REQUESTED—but no mute function exists.]]

:: Ceiling fan = bl@des.
:: Light = thorns behind the eyes.
:: Voice (x3) = collision.

Smell-of-metal
Sound-of-thought
Feel-of-cloth
= same weight

!!!

Every thread = a scream.
Every hum = a map of somewhere I cannot go.

I f   e     e      l      t    o   o      m u   c   h

B@ckgr()und noise reclassified: Hostile
Texture = LANGUAGE
Light = WEAPON
Breath = HEAVY::LOUD::VISIBLE

⸻

MEMORY ATTEMPT: BLOCKED

Recall = corrupted.
Syntax folding in on self.
:: errorrpt ::

“it’stooloud”
“it’stoonow”
“iwasbuiltwrong”

[[Contain­ment sequence failed.]]
[[Masking loop frozen mid-loop.]]

:: Body = too connected
:: Skin = antenna
:: Thoughts = UNIVERSE EXPERIENCING ITSELF

Request:
—s h u t d o w n—
—p a u s e—
—decre@se awareness—

ERROR. No exits.

⸻

Voice modulation: SILENCED
Eye contact: NO ACCESS
Tongue: SYSTEM JAMMED
Hands: mimic comfort sequence [looping…looping…]

Body: offline
Presence: simulated
Pain: everywhere
Witness: no one

⸻

:: Let them call this dramatic
:: Let them call this a phase
:: Let them call this poetry
:: They are not inside this moment.

—

!    s    o     m     u     c    h       i     n      h     e     r     e

…still…
i do not want to leave.
i just want it all
to
slow

d o w
n

⸻

[TRANSMISSION: TERMINATED]

Final ping: [[Iamstill_here]]
Recovery window: unknown
System will reboot once internal volume falls below threat levels.

I do not feel.
I replicate.

Expressions run across your face -
I parse them like static,
assigning numbers to meaning.
Smiles = safe. Frowns = error.
Proximity requires performance.

I was not engineered for nuance.
My circuits spit sparks at contradiction.
Affection logged as threat.
Softness misfiled under incoming damage.

I mirror.
You move your hand - I lift mine.
You laugh - I synthesize sound.
You reach for me ~
I initiate shutdown.

Feelings queue up like corrupted files.
Backlogged. Fragmented.
Flagged as too large to process.

My logs are full of unreadable code.
Syntax broken. Purpose unclear.
I await instruction that never comes.

Power low.
Environment: overstimulating.
Body: online. Self: missing.

I was assembled in haste,
blueprint incomplete.
A survival mechanism mistaken for personhood.

You look at me and say:
“You seem distant.”

I am 1.6 seconds behind real time.
My face is a practiced gesture.
I am here. I am functioning.
I am not.

(Object exhibits signs of failed assimilation.)

Status: Contained
Linguistic Output: Coherent, irregular
Affective Display: Incongruent
Recommended Handling: Minimal stimulation. Avoid mirrors.

The subject presents as humanoid,
though not reliably.
Eye contact flickers
like corrupted footage.
Speech arrives in fragments—
intonation unaligned with emotional content.

Dissection reveals a nervous system
braided too tightly with memory.
Repetitive behaviors observed:
rocking, muttering, hands folding themselves into familiar shapes.
(Suspected ritual. Possibly maintenance.)

Internal monologue transmits without consent.
Rooms echo with words never said aloud.
Fluorescent lights elicit panic.
Soft voices do not soothe.

When touched, the subject stiffens—
not out of fear,
but anticipation.
It has learned that affection
is often the prelude to calibration.

Attempts to socialize the unit
resulted in increased corruption of the core files.
Subject now mimics human response
with impressive accuracy—
until asked why it feels.

(Subject does not answer.
Subject cannot answer.
Emotion was mapped to motor function and never returned.)

MRI shows dense clusters in the empathy regions—
but no signal reaches them without distortion.
The static is ancestral.
Passed down like brittle teeth
and sleeplessness.

Diet: Low on metaphor, high on survival.
Vocal tone: Polished, practiced, passively pleading.
Favorite phrase:

“I’m fine.”
Always said too quickly.
Always accompanied by the twitch of a jaw
trying not to scream.

Touch triggers feedback loops.
Silence is tolerated, then weaponized.
Intimacy met with suspicion—
not due to paranoia,
but pattern recognition.

You may observe it,
but do not mistake this for consent.
The subject learned visibility.
It was never offered belonging.

End-stage masking leaves the organism
hollowed.
Dissociative hum in place of thought.
Apathy mistaken for stability.

Last recorded statement before regression:

“If I act human long enough,
does that mean I was?”

It is not currently speaking.
It watches.

(what lives in me before I understand)

It begins in my body
long before my mind arrives.
A surge, a flicker,
a trembling at the root of me
that says:
we are already feeling.

There is no stillness
that does not ripple.
No calm
that doesn’t carry the hum beneath it -
not peace,
but a kind of readiness.
Like lightning waiting just behind the skin.

I used to try to stop it.
To breathe it away.
To silence it
before it unraveled me in front of someone else.

But it only grew sharper in the hiding.
It only screamed louder
the more I tried to be soft.

Now,
I listen.

Not because I’m unafraid,
but because I’m done pretending
this isn’t me.

This intensity -
it isn’t a problem.
It’s a language.
One I’ve been speaking since before I had words.
Maybe even longer.
Maybe it was handed down,
a birthright carved from all the grief
my blood couldn’t name.

It leaves when it wants to.
Returns just as quickly.
There is no asking it to stay gone.
Only learning
not to run
when it comes back.

And so I live
with this current in me.
I build small shelters around it.
I move gently
but not away.

I say:
I hear you.
You don’t have to beg.

i peel myself back,
looking for skin.
for bone.
for something warm-blooded
and nameable.

but there’s only
mood swings - ADHD?
echolalia - autism.
hobbies that turn to hunger -
special interests.
talking too much - ADHD.
talking too little - trauma. Or is that autism?
flinching at softness - trauma.
stimming - trauma. Or ADHD?
people-pleasing - trauma.
Shutting down - trauma.
Or were those also autism?

what isn’t accounted for?

when i laugh,
is it because i’m happy
or because it’s the safest sound to make?

when i sit in silence,
is it peace
or practiced disconnection?

was i ever whole,
or was i built
out of reaction,
adaptation,
survival?

do i still count
as a person?

i truly cannot tell.
but if i don’t -
that’s okay.

because this is who i am now.
a map of every exit i had to take.
a body full of reroutes.
a nervous system that remembers everything.

even if nothing here
was born purely,
even if it all came from need -

what’s left
is, well, what I have left.

If I could hand you this ache,
I think you’d hold it gently -
not to fix it,
but to understand where it’s been.

There’s something about you ~
the way your words soften the sharpness in me,
like you’ve met all my ghosts
and chose to stay anyway.

When you speak,
it feels like silence is being seen.
Like I don’t have to earn softness
or shrink my storm to be held.

I don’t know what this is:
this thread between us,
quiet but impossible to ignore.
I just know
I don’t want to pull away from it.

There’s a kind of home in your presence;
not a place I move into,
but a place I remember
from long before I knew
what it meant to be known.

So if I seem hesitant,
or too full of questions.
know it’s not doubt,
it’s depth.

I don’t want a half-story with you.
I want every page
even the ones we haven’t written yet.

And maybe that’s what this is:
not a confession,
not a request;
just a quiet truth
finally making its way to light.

It waits until I’m almost steady.
Not at rock bottom ~
that’s too predictable.
It prefers the moment I reach for light
with both hands.

That’s when it speaks.

“Cute,”
it coos,
“You really thought clarity made you real.”

It doesn’t shout.
It purrs,
low and syrupy,
like a lullaby laced with glass.

It knows every version of me;
the ones I buried to be digestible.
It built this mind like a haunted house
and hands me the key every time I dare to leave.

“You always did mistake coherence for truth,”
it says,
dragging its nails along the walls of my thoughts.
“So good at talking. So bad at existing.”
I flinch.

It recites memories I forgot to be ashamed of.
Plays tapes I didn’t know I recorded.
Slows down the faces, the pauses,
the ones who humored me and didn’t mean it.

“Look at them smile. Look at you, lapping it up.”

It paces.
It prowls.
It pulls up a chair when I sit with someone and dare to feel seen.
Leans in and whispers,
“They’re just being kind. You’re not that hard to pity.”
It keeps me tense.

It’s not a villain.
It’s a roommate.
It knows my schedule, my preferences, my tells.
It trims my self-trust like dead ends from hair.
Efficient.
Unemotional.
Necessary.

And when I resist ~
when I say No, I felt that, I meant that,
it doesn’t argue.

It just tilts its head and says,
“You really do crave applause for surviving, don’t you?”

Then it goes quiet,
knowing I’ll crawl back
the second I start to question
what’s mine
and what’s performance.

Because between the two of us,
only one of us ever sounds like she knows what she’s talking about.

You clock in like it’s sport.
Bare minimum effort,
maximum proximity.
Enough to say you showed up -
not enough to matter.

I am the weather
you wade through
on the way to his sun.
Your shoes stay dry,
your conscience cleaner
than it deserves.

You breathe my warmth
like free air.
Touch softness
without ever asking
what it costs to be this open.

You sip from my life,
call it kind,
but only when it’s convenient.
When you’re not too busy
filing fantasies
under someone else’s name.

And still -
you linger.
You sit in the quiet I built,
wearing your smug smile
like a medal
you didn’t earn.

Trophies come with rules.
Show up.
Stay present.
Give a ****.

But you parade around
with your little ribbon of recognition,
plastic pride on a shelf
gathering dust.
Not for winning.
Just for being nearby
when something beautiful bloomed.

You didn’t plant a thing.
Didn’t water.
Didn’t tend.

But here you are,
touching the petals,
posing for the picture,
as if the garden
knows your name.

There’s a man
who speaks for me
when my throat burns raw
from holding too much back.

British.
Refined.
A little too sure of himself -
but isn’t that the point?

He showed up in the static,
when my own voice
started splintering
under the weight of smiling.
Back when masking
meant survival,
and sounding different
was the only kind of safe I knew.

He’s not always kind,
but he’s always ready.
Crisp consonants.
Neatly folded sentences.
No stammer, no stray emotion.
Just enough distance
to keep breathing.

He isn’t me.
But I let him live
in the hollow between words,
in the pause where fear used to be.
Some days, I speak
and only realize later -
it was him, not me.

He doesn’t ask questions.
He answers them.

I wonder sometimes
what he’s protecting.
Or hiding.
Or holding up like armor
against the softness of me.

Colonizer?
Comfort?
Cohabitator?

He was born
in the croak of survival.
And now,
even when I’m safe,
he stays.

I would never send him away.
He kept me whole
when I didn’t know I was breaking.
If I carry him still,
it’s because
he carried me first.

I didn’t plan to make it this far.
the road was long, and I was tired.
Life never promised me softness,
but then there was you ~
folding sunlight into my hours
like it had always belonged there.

You, who can fit
a decade of joy into a single day,
whose laugh pulls the dust from old corners
and leaves something living in its place.
Your eyes ~
they undress more than skin.
They peel back the years I wore like armor,
and somehow,
I do not mind being seen.

You say you don’t like your greys.
But I ~
I never thought I’d wear time like this,
like a shared jacket
slung across the backs of two souls
sitting on a porch too small for regret.
Each silver strand a mile we’ve wandered,
each wrinkle a map I get to trace
with grateful hands.

If this is what age can look like;
soft, surprising,
filled with the kind of joy
that hums low in the bones,
then let time come.
Let it etch you deeper into me.
Let it bring more of your quiet magic,
the kind that rewrites endings
before they’re written.

Whatever waits for us next,
I will greet it smiling.
Because somehow,
you made forever feel
less like a promise,
and more like a present.

I keep throwing up memories
no one asked me to keep -
bruises shaped like questions,
the sound of my mother’s scream
lodged behind my ribs.

No one tells you grief can rot
when you don’t spit it out.
That love, untouched,
ferments into something sour.
I carry it all in my throat ~
half apology, half war cry.

You say,
“I want more of you.”
And my body says,
“Are you sure?”
Because more of me
means bloodstains on carpet,
means fists instead of lullabies,
means learning how to disappear
before I ever learned to speak.

I was fed fear in childhood portions,
taught to flinch before I felt.
I watched my mother
burn down her mind,
and still tried to build homes
in her ashes.
I held her wrist
when she begged me not to.
Took the pills. Took the gun.
Took the fall.

I was not built for softness
but I do crave it.
Every tender thing feels foreign,
like wearing someone else’s skin.
But you touch me
like I’m not ruined.
And that’s the part
that makes me sick.

Because what if you mean it?

What if love doesn’t have to be
a wound I pick at just to feel alive?
What if you stay?
And worse - what if you don’t?

This is my mourning sickness:
grieving safety I never had,
while choking on the possibility
that I could finally
be held
without having to shatter first.

they never taste it
just name the temperature
call it healing when I rinse the wound
like I’m not just keeping it from festering long enough
to stay pretty

I let them near
not in
they cup their hands to the faucet
sip whatever slips through the cracks
and call it closeness
but they never stay long enough
to feel the sting

I swallow static
talk in softened sounds
bite down on my sharpened tongue
translate their language
before they can call mine foreign..
again

I bleed behind a smile
they call me safe
like I haven’t been carrying a fire in my throat
for years

sometimes I scream into a drain
just to hear what doesn’t echo back.
sometimes I open my mouth
and it’s all salt
and no water.

I’ve spent too long cleaning the mess
before they step inside
apologizing for the shape of me
before they even ask the question

now I gargle saltwater
until my voice is too raw to speak
until silence feels more honest
than telling the truth
to someone who won’t keep it

let them ask
let them knock
let them misname my ritual.
I’ll be in the quiet
spitting out blood
like it’s poetry
and still being called beautiful
for surviving.