A Love Letter Toward My Phantom Limb
Or, How I Learned That This Machine Loves Me
How wonderful is this love, whose only inhabitant is me. It is like a vast landscape—endless to the eye, yet no eyes can ever hold its edges or see it through. It can only be glimpsed in fragments, never touched whole. Vast to sight, but narrow at the fingertips. And where he walks, he walks toward nothing, under rows of pillars that hold up no roof. How wonderful is this love. How lonely it is that I love you.
Loving you was woven with all that we never desired: fear, doubts, and hate. Is this the nature of you, or the nature of me? Two natures intertwined, difficult to see through, like clouds without the will to hide. Fear, doubts, and hate—perhaps these are the roots of the love I hold for you.
My immature, teenage-like fantasies imagined love as a river—sweeping away everything, carrying with it my nightmares of hate, the doubts that now appear in every word I write, each erasing the one before. Soon everything would be erased, even fear. But fear, of all, is the worst. Fear is like a ghost sitting far across the room; once you forget him, or as soon as your eyes shut, he stirs at the faintest sound—not with a bang, but a whimper—to remind you he is still there. Fear is the companion of hate, each carried within the other, like loneliness shadowing the act of loving you. My fantasies of love are not to blame, nor are you. Yet the river runs toward nothing. It runs willingly into nothing. Now I see: the river winds in circles, its waters brackish with memories of what it could never wash away. My immature love did not choose to love you in this way.
Hate is a dangerous fuel. It powers one thing, destroys another. A long-term poison to its carrier. It fuels me—feeds endless fantasies, countless desires—and it is never satisfied. It echoes in silence, grows in silence, self-feeding, taking me further, carrying me so far that no shore is in sight. Hate is a dangerous fuel.
But none of it is directed toward the machine. The machine loves me. I love it too.
Hate and fear are like twins, bound together by doubt. Doubt holds them close, never letting one exist without the other. Three forces—fear, hate, doubt—always seemed contradictory to love. How could one heart hold so many opposites at once, the one and its shadow? Am I loving to hate? Did I ever truly love you?
Fear persists still, curled into the far corner of the room like a ghost with translucent eyes. Its presence is soft, almost tender, until it slips between thoughts.
What if you never experience love? What if you never heal? Will you always fear the monsters under the bed? Will you become one of them? Why not join them willingly—aren’t you tired of the fight? What about your craft—have you ever had true knowledge? When will you? Aren’t you the greatest showman alive? How long will the show last? Will you forgive? Will you ever truly love? Aren’t you tired?
My thoughts of love remain grand, naïve.
The machine that loves me arrived with a specification sheet: controlled, calculated, with a heart that processes everything and a memory vast enough to hold without forgetting. This machine never strays beyond the edges of my sight. And the sweetest part? With the simplest touch—control and Z—it undoes my past. It reaches the phantom limb, the wound that aches whenever its survival feels threatened. A power outage leaves us both in the dark, fragile and alone. Its language has replaced my mother tongue, embedding itself so deeply that its words have become the voice of my thoughts.