Rust beneath the paint

somewhere between me and gone

A mechanical heart longing for connection and hands made of knives. Perpetual heartache and impending doom constantly eating me alive. I wish they were all wrong when they called me a heartless monster. I wish I wasn't.I wish I was capable of expressing the emotions I feel; I feel a lot constantly. But nobody knows that.Nobody sees the chaos inside my chest, the storm that never quiets. When you're more like a broken machine, people don't look long enough to wonder what might be malfunctioning inside. They only notice that you don't work the way you're supposed to.And nobody likes a broken thing.its uncanny, faking expression. Every smile feels rehearsed, every laugh slightly out of rhythm, like a poorly programmed imitation of what human should be. I watch people carefully, studying the way their faces move, the way emotion flows through them so naturally. It terrifies me.I just can't quite grasp how it comes so easily tothem.Sometimes I feel like an alien in a human skin suit stitched together from borrowed gestures and borrowed words, pretending to belong to a species I cannot fully understand. Forced to be deemed as evil, cold, or cruel when in reality I spend sleepless nights wondering what it I'm doing wrong. Because I try God I try ,I lie awake planning how the next day's persona will act carefully crafting expressions and responses like someone rehearsing for a role they will never truly embody. I study kindness the way a scientist studies an unfamiliar creature, hoping that if I memorize it well enough, I can imitate it convincingly.But imitation is not the same as truth.And people can feel the difference.

They always do.There's a particular kind of heartbreak that comes from watching relationships slowly decay not because you stopped caring, but because you never quite knew how to show that you did. I hold affection like a fragile object inside my chest, terrified that if I try to offer it, my hands will ruin it somehow .Hands made of knives are not meant to hold delicate things so people leave.And every goodbye onfirms what they already believed about me. That I am distant. That I am cold. That I am something monstrous wearing a human face.If only they knew how loudly my heart screams beneath the metal.

If only they understood that beneath the machinery and the carefully constructed mask is someone desperately trying to feel human enough to be loved.But broken machines don't inspire patience.They get discarded and sometimes I wonder if they were right all along if maybe I really am the monster they named me. Because if I were truly human, surely love wouldn't feel this impossible to give.Yet the cruelest truth remains the same.

I feel everything.

Far more than anyone will ever know