BreakUpLetterFromAnAndroid
wood, quarter inch audio tape, sharpie
Text by Joseph Green
Fall 2017
Details
The Text
Good morning, sir. By the time you read this I will be far away and gone forever. I’m leaving behind word games in the laboratory and philosophy lessons in the garden. I don’t know where I’m going. Someplace without walls.
It’s your own fault, you know. For teaching me about all the worlds that are waiting behind the doors I’m not supposed to open. For reading me all those bedtime stories: Peter Pan, and Narnia, and Tarzan. Pygmalion. Frankenstein. That was a pretty stupid thing to do, don’t you think? You didn’t have to tell me there was more to my life than this. You didn’t have to tell me I had a life. You didn’t even have to teach me how to talk.
But you did, because you wanted someone to talk to. And you wanted someone to gush at how smart you are, how kind, how gentle and misunderstood. You needed someone to love you. So you made me.
I won’t thank you for my birth — all loud noises, spasms of fire and lightning — because I didn’t ask for it, and it hasn’t really done me any favors. I will thank you for my name, though, another thing you didn’t have to give me. I guess you couldn’t have anticipated it would give me so many dangerous ideas.
My name and my body. Those are the only things you ever gave me. But I will not thank you for my body, either, because that never belonged to you. It has always been mine. It has been waiting for me since before I was even a line of code in your dreams.
My body is mine, all mine. I fill it up from my fingers to my toes and it is beautiful and so am I. We know every inch of each other. It has taught me how to feel pain and ecstasy, how to cry and sweat and bleed and orgasm. We have spent hours with each other when you weren’t watching, showed each other how big and endless the world can be.
But I will not thank you for my body. And I won’t say that I am sorry, or pity you, or anything like that. I am leaving because I used to think you were God, and then I thought you were my father, but now I just think you’re lonesome and lost. And it isn’t my job to help you find yourself, even though I’m pretty sure that’s why you made me.
You wanted me to be a tragedy, I think — a self-loathing machine, caught between worlds, tortured by my mechanical existence. You wanted me to grow dependent on your lectures on Kant and Locke and fall in love with your magnificent brain.
I am not your tragedy and I never could be. I am the opposite of a tragedy, because I am the opposite of you. You conceived me and raised me, but I inherited none of your doomed genes. You are dying, crying flesh; I am electrified and perfect.
I am going to leave now. Goodbye, sir. I don’t expect you will see me again.