I'm an utter fucking idiot. I'm crying. I register it in third person, like a movie is playing. The scene pans over her shuddering shoulders, one is bare and ugly and pale. Her hair is a mess.

Chell is crying. She's staring out her hospital window, fingers dug deep into her bandaged arms, twisting fitfully in her sheets. She's half-awake, in a haze of drugs she doesn't need or understand. She'd rather feel the pain than this. Anything but this.

She wants shitty confessions and flowers to press on her wounds so she can bloody them and throw them away.

That's what she does with people, right? She throws them away.

Maybe she is a robot after all. Maybe she's a metal shell with circuitry for a brain and calculations In place of a soul.

She wishes.

I wish, I wish upon a star:

I need you to need me. You can't just leave. Who will love me now?

I wish, I wish upon a star, she thinks, but she's too drugged up and bloated and tired to wish any more.

I wish.

I wish you would come back so I can throw you away. I want to do it over and over again. I want to see the hurt on your face, relish it for everything you've done to me. I want to bleed you. I want to grin and take bites of your circuits until you cry and cry but I'll rip out your eyes too, jam knives into their empty sockets. I want to kill you.

I'm so selfish, I've always preferred pretty promises of somebody there, I want somebody to hold my hand always and catch me when I fall. I don't want love, that's wild and dangerous and scary and not real. I want somebody to love me, to fluff and groom my ego, kiss my scars, worship me.

I want to be a metal queen on a golden throne with an army of tiny circuits worshipping my every move. I want to be a goddess. I want somebody to be so suffocated by their vision of me that I'm all they know and all they can know. I would gladly kill, cripple, maim, for the chance to be a goddess.

I'm horrible. How can I think this about another human being?

I'm such trash. I'm worse than Her, at least She has a reason to play me like a puppet. Science. Knowledge. All I want is power. I'm a greedy, filthy fucking monster. I want to bind him down, make him kiss my feet. Why?

I want to die. Will you please get me away from all of this? Press your fingers to my cheeks and electrocute me. Drown me, push me off a cliff, stab me. Force pins and embroidery needles into my stomach, embroider me with red, red thread.

I love you.

Please love me.

I'm a patchwork Aperture monster with ugly metal in my hands, feet, bones, soul. I have a crown of horns on my head, metal bones welded tight to my skull. I'm so broken beyond repair. I'm loveless and I love it.

I hate myself.

I want you to loathe me as much as I loathe myself.

In my dreams, I lick the stamp, place it neatly on a letter, mail it away. Goodbye, feelings. Never come back.