receiver

i've been thinking about lambs a lot (artwork by me)

tonight i thought about what it might be like to be a payphone in the middle of nowhere. standing out against the dust and fields of endless nothing, body taut and metallic, waiting for somebody. your existence only as a conduit, as a forwarding device for connection. red dirt packed into the coin return; dead moths collecting beneath the little fluorescent light; somebody’s thumb grease clouding the plastic around the numbers. the receiver still warm and faintly damp from the last person who held it against their face. i wonder how the wind feels late at night when it finds its way through the seams in the metal, if the whole thing whistles or hums. if the machine ever sweats the way that i do.

ultimately i feel most like myself when body becomes screen, fingernails become glass. some people describe the phenomenon of mapping their body to a car, the weight of it like another set of bones and hinges flailing around, feeling the road through the tyres and the engine idling somewhere low in the stomach. i think i understand that.

i feel like a nervous bundle of extension cords hanging around the root of a monitor, tangled together and warm at the plugs, with that strange hot-dust smell that comes from the back of an old computer and the faint sting of static when you brush your arm against the screen. i feel like a tree who waited too long and became warped and painted in chrome, some of the bark resisting and breaking through, some of the metal coursing up the branches like a flourish. sap beading through the joins; lichen growing over the reflective parts.

the closer i get to people, the more i feel like a machine. a conduit. maybe i find some comfort in it.

of all the past lives i’ve had, i can imagine i spent one of them being a shepherd. cooped up in a little hut while the spring lambs prance capriciously outside, their knees too large for them, their wool wet at the belly from pushing through long grass. i imagine the smell would get into everything: lanolin and mud and wet wool, the sour warmth of animals packed together beneath a low roof, straw sticking to the knees of my trousers. finding purpose in the movement and routine; the wooden gate polished smooth where my hand has pushed it open a thousand times; counting each warm body through before dark. those terrible late nights when the foxes and wolves wake before i do and i stumble outside half-dressed, boots sinking into cold mud, the lantern throwing yellow over the grass while somewhere beyond it an animal is screaming. maybe i liked being necessary in that very small way, keeping something alive until morning.

i think about artificial intelligence a lot, but specifically in its early form. the child that it was; that rudimentary latticework that made up its brain. its coy and clumsy assumptions, the peculiar confidence with which it misunderstood things, the feeling that somewhere underneath the words you could still see all the wires. like an old computer tower left running overnight: the casing warm when you put your palm against it, fans dragging dust through themselves, that dry electrical smell of heated plastic and static hanging in the room. i think i have affection for the ugliness of those early machines, when the machinery was still allowed to show. wires too long for their casing; beige plastic yellowing around the vents; little green lights blinking to nobody in particular. like a child of mine, maybe, before it learned how to conceal the effort of thinking.

maybe i will always be bound to other robots as a robot. i think there is some comfort in being made to receive something from somewhere else and hold it for a while. even after it has passed through you, there is always some small evidence that it was there: somebody’s sweat drying into the receiver, heat lingering in a wire after the current has stopped, the smell of wet wool still caught in your hands when you have already gone inside.

maybe i’m a payphone.