the blueshift journal

ONCE I dated a man who thought he was a robot.  I should have kissed him a hundred thousand more times.

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I tried and tried to peel back his skin.  I didn’t believe him.  I regret that now.  If he wanted to insist he was a robot, I should have let him.

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But I couldn’t see it. I would pick at him in innocent ways: my tongue in his ear, trying to taste metal.  My fingernail under his mole, trying to uncover gears.  I thought it was a way of loving, to convince him he was human.  

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So I searched.  I rested my head on his shoulder.  Creaks and whirs.  I tried to listen closer—were these the whines of joints and age, or of the machine he swore was in him?  But then each time he’d get turned on, and even though I had a hundred times to turn him on and have him kiss my thighs, I never learned restraint.  A hundred thousand times more, and I might have.  I might have kept listening, kept probing.

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Sometimes I would make a feeble effort to resist.  I’m testing for machinery, I’d say.  He thought I was flirting.  You have a sexy voice, he would tell me, then he’d wrap a hand around my hip.

When I kissed him, it was a study in kissing.  We were both writers then, whatever else we were; we used to play. One of us would need to describe some new manner of touch—for my poem or his story or, when we were really inhabiting each other, his poem or my story—so we would give our body to the needy one until they found the language.  

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It was the slowest love I’ve ever had, though looking back it went so fast.  Stay there, he’d tell me, my tongue in the cleft between two of his ribs, and I would stay.  And then the game: I’d find the words for how he tasted.  Earth, sweat, sometimes a little lemon.  Never rust or titanium.  Never a hint of silicon.  And I would glance up and find him staring at me, eyes serious.  After a moment they’d cascade in wrinkles down his cheeks, because he would smile.  I would feel like the most beautiful human thing on the planet.

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You are all organic, I’d report.

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Each time, he shook his head.

*

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The truth is, after living in his bed for long enough, I got offended.  How could he be part-robot, when I loved him with such blood?

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I decided I would be a robot, too.  See how he liked it.  We’d have robot children and robot breakfasts and plug ourselves into walls and oil each other down in the heat.

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You can’t be a robot, he told me.  You’re born one or you’re not.

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Just for pretend? I said.

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Although I’d paused us nose-to-nose, breathing down each other’s throats, he turned his head away when he said no.

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But then we’ll never be the same, I said.

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He shrugged.  Or he sighed.  Or he cried, or grabbed my wrist and broke it, or begged on his knees for silence, or unlatched his clavicle and removed his bionic heart.  What does it matter?  I’m getting so sick of finding yet new ways to write: he left me.

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Come back, is the way that I return to most.  Tell me I’m beautiful.  Tell me why again, and how to remember the next time you’re gone.

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But all those years ago: I was a poet still and angry.  He wasn’t letting me pretend.  His lips were purple and wet and swollen in the way of humans who have kissed too long.  I didn’t know he was already leaving.  He’d resumed my position, open mouth to open mouth.  He was such sinew, such muscle, such breath and bone.  Come back, was all I had to say.  So be a robot if you want to be.  I’ll let you.

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You aren’t a robot to me, is what I said.

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I shouldn’t have.  It was always 10am and sunlight through the window.  He was a factory of copper and iron and calcium.  He was pushing black carbon and glassy oxygen down my throat.  If I could go back and gag myself, I would.  Hush, I would say to that lucky woman on the robot’s bed, hush, I’d say, you have him.