(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.