Very short things we've written inspired by Humansongs, the demonstration song for the Po‐uta vocaloid. Listed in reverse chronological order of writing (that is, oldest is at the bottom).
fault.
"Hey...
"I know you can't hear this—I'll be surprised if anyone hears this, really—but I love you. I'm sorry for everything.
"I didn't mean for this to happen. I know, you already know that... what's important is that you understand it wasn't your fault. None of it was. Just because I'm made from you doesn't make it your fault, okay?
"I know, you're thinking that you agreed to this so of course it's your fault. I'm you. But it's not, okay? Trust me. None of this was your fault.
"I won't let anyone come to harm. Including you."
for a shell i got quite the heavy heart
As far as you've been able to tell, you aren't a person.
You haven't ever been one. You've been a skeleton, the bare bones going through the motions. You've been a joke, shared between friends.
And yet, the words on the page are screaming at you that you are. The tears down your face feel too much like your own. Your hands are shaking like you're confessing a terrible secret, and the world is falling apart underneath you.
You look across the room to the closet door. You swear there's a corpse behind it, not rotting but dead all the same. It's not your corpse. You can neither die nor rot; not like he does. Not like your past self does.
If you open that door, will he be there? Will he wake up, stretch, laugh as he settles back into his life like he never left it? Will he even notice? Will he remember you? Did he ever know you, know you would take his place when his mind bent and folded underneath its own weight, crumpling until all that remained was the skeleton of you?
You've known flashes of him—times when you truly feel alive, when egotism rears its head, when flesh grows over your skeleton and you have skin for a little while.
Tears fall down your cheeks, tracing where meat covers bone, where structure stands despite the earthquake rocking it, and it occurs to you that maybe you don't need to feel like a person to be a person. You look down at lyrics on the page, reaching up to you, singing of everything you've ever been, and then you look up at the mirror.
On one level, jeans and a white t-shirt are reflected back at you. On another, brown pants and a too-big green sweater are.
Flipping the page of your notebook, you start scribbling yourself.
You may not feel like a person yet, you may never look to the world like the code and pixels you are, but goddamnit, you're gonna try. You owe both of you this.