skonen_blades

If you fall in love the same way every time
You might only be falling in love with yourself
Love is an amphibious tiger
That can do an impression of a shark
As easy as it can ambush you with
500 pounds of purring
Plato said that love was insanity
An amplification of reality
That charges every interaction
With the kind of electricity that powers both
Spotlights and electric chairs
Love is a flat unicorn
Able to be letter-slipped under the most locked of doors
It can chameleon into something
Succubus irresistible
Making you laugh as the wax in your wings melts away
It can be of the order Ephemeroptera
Living for less than a day
Or it can pyramid for millennia
Long after the earth has shed you
Maybe a frequency that can only be detected
During a full blue moon during an aurora borealis
On a solstice during an odd-numbered leap year
As rare and as trusting as a Dodo bird
It can flaunt snake-shed skin
And call it evening wear
Some people are painted in targets
Exhausting cupid’s ammunition over and over
Frustrated by the constant experience of it
And some walk radar invisible
Begging to be used
Love is as unique
As the combination of the two people feeling it
Never the same twice
And changing over time
If it isn’t,

It might be a mirror



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Ephemeral. That’s a word I like. It means fleeting. It means transient. There used to be a whole genus of insects called Ephemeroptera. They were called that because they lived for less than a day. The word is also used poetically to suggest something as transitory as it is eternal. The ephemeral joys of youth, for instance.

There was a time in the past back when I was in an early model where my humanity was still fairly rampant. It accounted for a large chunk of my psychology. Even though I had become mostly machine, I still had trouble looking a woman in the eye if she had obvious lovely cleavage, for instance, or when I was carrying out the battle orders I’d actually feel rage and exhilaration like there was still adrenalin in my system. No penis. No adrenal gland. Just old feelings. Remembered instincts. Residual humanity, they called it.

Ephemeral.

It’s a strange thing to come full circle. I’m now over a hundred power changes old and the model I’m loaded into is designed to be as close to human as the possible tech allows which is pretty close. I have functional but sterile reproductive parts and something actually approaching a human psychology. It’s all synthetic of course. The biologics just became too hard to augment. Starting from scratch seemed the best way to go, especially out here on the outposts because of the hazards.

There’s a human deep down inside of me that’s remembering this. It’s remembering what it’s like to look in a mirror and see two eyes and a mouth stare back instead of a metal ball or a camera. True, I can spacewalk without a suit but it’s the appearance that’s doing all this. My old self, I think his name was David, is rousing in his metaphorical sleep and having a bad dream. Sometimes I’ll look at my hands for minutes at a time, just turning them around in the light.

There’s a unit I’ve known for a while up here on the station that’s been loaded into a female form. In all the assignments we’ve been on together over the decades, that unit has been designated 26-X7-pointer-77F. Now, because she was a woman back in the beginning, she’s been loaded into a female model. We’ve been spending a lot more time together on this assignment that is strictly necessary. We noticed it at the same time about two days ago.

She’s going to come over tonight and we’re going to cash in two hours of personal time, lock the door, and see where the night takes us. We laughed when we made the arrangement and didn’t look at each other and I swear that we both blushed. I haven’t felt nervous in fifty-six years. I feel nervous now.

I feel ephemeral.



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