What Empties You?

Why is it whenever I am alone I slip my hand beneath my black wool jacket and find any wound I can and open it again, to bleed, to bleed. Is it really my destiny to bask in life so little and ruminate on the scarcity for the rest of it? Is my stomach shrunken and my heart empty, am I a vessel that cannot be filled and can only watch as others are?

There is no wound so healed that the body does not remember its shape.

The AI’s weakness, hands. The closer it gets to the tips of humanity’s fingers, our very identity, the more it fumbles and struggles to execute. As if it knows not that it cannot but that it should not paint for us while we toil in mundane repetitive tasks.

Man is turning itself into machine’s workhorse. Fools with knowledge become not wisemen, just more efficient fools.

While the humans lose fingers in factories, the robots produce artwork with too many. Dystopian novels were amusing once, when I was not living in one.

There is a kinder world within all of us, but we must agree to be as kind as it is to see it.

When I think on 18, and the years that have passed since then, I realize how many little deaths I’ve had in my one life. How many versions of me had to abandon my flesh for ephemerality for me to exist, fettering away. Do they watch me, the way runner up pageant girls watch the winner be crowned with sparkling tears gliding down her cheeks to match her sparkling tiara? Do they envy me? Or do they watch in glum acceptance, the way a parent would as their child draws in spontaneous sharpie all over their orderly white walls. Do they think they know better? Worst of all, do they watch in horror, the way the drug addicted’s partner would as the one they love most spirals down deeper and darker paths? Do they pity me?

Do they think of me at all? How lonely it would be to exist in this world as only one version of me.

The truth is I have nothing worth writing about in me. I don’t connect with other people and that’s where good writing happens. I’m often in other people’s arms, I’m enwrapped in their laughter, but I don’t let them anywhere near me. I want so desparately to be loved as the mangled creature that I am but I’m too ashamed to show anybody my real face. So I hide it. And I make people laugh, I make them laugh so hard their sides hurt. And I feel the closest thing to love that someone like me can have. And I hope it is enough, because I don’t know how to have more than that and still feel safe. Maybe there isn’t a way. Maybe truly being loved is supposed to be scary. And I’m just a coward.

Why do you paint?

To make moments longer.

Why does life exist if only to be snuffed out? What purpose is there in the temporary but pain.

It hurts me, the rust. The moving water is both a curse and a blessing, I know it rusts my chainmail further but my skin is dying for the tips of its rushing fingers. My leg has been shattered beneath this fountain statue for nearly seven days. I cannot stand, I cannot move but inches left and right in its basin. How horrible a way to die in war, by a stone man, in an iron casket. Though if a living man had struck me down, I’d say the very same.

—a solider named Feo