I feel more connection with my dead uncle, my mentor and (in my mind) second father than just about anyone living. Maybe it's because I drew the dog-tag reading 'machine' hours before he died, one word out of (at least several) hundred other words that persuades me so. I'm not sure.
I don't think the term 'machine' is accurate anymore; I seem to be an android, less a pure machine...gifted with sentience and introspection, yet cursed to realize that one does not possess it. How lovely.
-M
"There are many things she didn't get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know, and there would always be a distance between us because there were too many shadows everywhere. Had she ever made promises to a faithless reflection in the mirror? Had she ever cried because she hated someone so much? Had she ever craved betrayal to the point she pushed the crudest fantasies into reality, coming up with sequences that only she and nobody else could read, moving the game as you play it? Could she locate the moment she went dead inside? Does she remember the year it took to become that way? The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away — I now want to explain all these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I'm afraid of people."
- Bret Easton Ellis — Imperial Bedrooms
