shymai

I don't have spiderhands today. Today I'm just happy that I've allowed myself a whole weekend without going to work. It's like a treat for taking care of my interests, which doesn't usually happen. I know I don't take care of myself as well as I should. I'm too lazy to overwork as much as I do. . .

With the air conditioning broken and half a dozen people crammed into what is essentially a metal box with a tar roof, work itself was an event. Add to that a generous supply of summer, maybe just a dusting of stressful phone calls, and a computer system with the reliability of a pissed hooligan, and you have yourself an office anti-party, complete with crying, desk chewing, sunburn and milk on the turn. Even the fax machine broke under the pressure.

Imprisoned in out custom designed metal cooking box, I sat quietly like a melting toffee and watched the commotion unfold around me, wondering how anyone could find the energy in this heat to flail around in frustration quite as fatastically as my boss did, and wishing someone would peel me off my chair and put me on a distant window sill to cool.

It'll be over 30 degrees this weekend. . .

No, definately not going. . .

Sometimes I wake up and it is the type of odd, and hazy day that makes my fingers want to dance across my computer keyboard and create something profound and clever, so I get ready to write. I have a beautiful suede notebook which I take everywhere, but my spidery writing is just that, like my fingers are just eight long thin black strands that are unable to hold a pencil easily, like I should have eight eyes to decipher my scrawl.

Sometimes I have so many ideas in my head I'm sure that I could write for hours. but when I reach in with my spiderhands I find that my ideas are just fragments, and if I pull enough of them out I don't know if they will make a whole thing that I may have knocked over and broken with my freakish fingers, or if they were only shards to begin with.

And then sometimes I think my ideas are more like little trees. If I clumsily pulled the leaves off, maybe I could leave them out and let them grow back into plants, then I could weave them together into something amazing.



Then maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have spiderhands after all.

Hope is a battery word. It keeps you going when there is nothing else. this is because it has a positive and a negative side. It promises nothing, yet denies nothing, and because hope has no conclusion, it lingers. It's also a sticky thing. When what it clings to ceases to be, it simply appears attached to something else. Hope is a word of perfect balance and endurance, a chemical trigger in the mind designed by human nature to keep us ticking.

There used to be times when I felt like a forgotten toy. My back housed a compartment for my batteries. The weight of them inside held me upright, my plastic body doing the things it was designed to do, my plastic head empty, my plastic eyes peeling away. I couldn't remember a time when I felt like a real person. I always felt like a crude copy of one.

All the time I felt like this I knew that something would have to change. People don't run on batteries, even though the world sometimes makes them feel like they do. I was tired of looking for lighter things to replace my batteries with. I was tired of wondering what would happen to me if one day
I
just
stopped

working. . .



In my ongoing quest for something that would make me feel real, I discovered a beautiful girl who melted away my plasic casing untill I could move and think like a living creature again. The batteries inside my back began to burn as my connection to them erroded. Unable to stand it any longer, I got on a plane to find her. She was everything I had hoped for. When I came home again something was different. She had installed a key into the back of my neck when I was asleep and taken out the batteries.


She followed me home soon after.


She winds the key every time I see her..


And when she isn't here I reach back and wind it myself.


I don't need the batteries any more.