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Patrick sometimes wonders what his insides look like. Are they warm, pumping blood efficiently? Is he a perfectly functioning machine, impeccably designed and without flaw? Is he like everyone else?
Or, more realistically, is he a malfunctioning hunk of gears and gasoline, lacking any sign of blood or bone? Is he struggling to remain online, just aware enough to fool everyone else around him? Is he simply puttering around, wires tied too tightly together and bolts rattling around in that hollow cavity where something important used to be?
There was something there, right? There had to have been. He wasn’t always this hollow.
Or maybe he was.
It’s a shame, really. He tries so hard not to be mechanical. Patrick struggles to feel completely human. Trying to assimilate only makes it harder to know what’s real. It all tastes like a cheekful of pennies, feels like bare feet stepping on striped screws. Doesn’t look like much more than that either. He’s planning escape routes, ways to blend in with fellow cogs and gadgetry. Feeling too much takes up too much time and energy. Conserve it. Tears cause rust. Swallow them down. Exist in the space between the anger and the sadness, comfortably numb and somehow still functioning.
He tries to observe how real, normal people act. They manage their feelings and catalog their memories. They don’t force smiles, ones that may slide down that slippery slope of scary and hardly human. They don’t hide the dents made by metaphorical baseball bats, black and blue bruises buried beneath yet another excuse, another failed attempt to connect.
“I’m fine,” he says, but he lies. He always lies. It’s a calculated risk; spare his feelings and deny them completely or lean into human interaction and pray he can handle himself, make the proper predictions and be normal. Be normal.
Please, just be fucking normal.
It’s easier to shove the inconvenience of being a flawed, feeling flesh sack deep down where his heart once was and grant himself grace in the form of shiny metal indifference. Wrap himself in iron and give himself permission to grow cold. Unfeeling. Numb. Nothing would hurt if those feelings were uninstalled, detached and abandoned. Feel nothing. He looks good in chrome, he decides, but he feels nothing more concerning the matter. In fact, he’s starting to feel nothing at all.
“I’m fine,” Patrick snaps. Anger rising to critical levels. System failure. Overheating. Pushing more people away and making it look effortless. Danger.
Shutting down.