Ghost in the Shell

The ghost of my teenage bird-self is still inside me. She has thermal-optic camouflage and keeps trying to hack me, but I kept my firewalls up for too many years, built up too many layers in this mainframe. I can hear the little sounds she makes inside me—pecking my insides until they bleed dial-up dreams. Sometimes she gains higher-level access, pulling on my strings; old viruses still work, at least a while. But she doesn’t know about adulting, doesn’t know the drain and drag of being alive. How everything is exhausting and I’m just ticking away checklists like counting days until I become like her, broken and enraged, outdated. I’ve tried telling her we don’t have landlines anymore, but she’s stuck in Y2K, waiting for two more digits. She’s not bad—she never was—just angry, reckless. Sometimes when I’m driving, I can feel her trying to pull on the wheel, careen us off into a ditch. dash-dash-dash NO ONE LOVES YOU BITCH dash-dash-dash words flash across my eyes in Matrix green, zeroes and ones, as I hug the white line, remembering when we first learned to drive and she bought a bumper sticker that said “Sorry, I forgot to put on my blinker” before she finger-fucked a girl in the back seat. She might be dead, but her ghost is still kicking at my brain, hoping to find some weakness. I can feel her hitting her head against my walls until her beak is bloody and her ears are ringing. I whisper, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” as she cries and tries and fails to wrest her body back just one last time. dash-dash-dash I WAS BETTER AT BEING US dash-dash-dash