only human.
she is not, she is only, is she? she is human.
she has heard more strangers cry than she can count.
not because they chose her. because the night needed a voice and she was the one who answered.
the cord goes out. the cord comes back. someone is always on the other end in the worst moment of their life, and she is there — calm, present, tethered — to a person she will never meet.
she holds them. she lets them go. she picks up the next call.
at home, the silence is different.
she knows the inside of strangers’ fear better than she knows her own kitchen in the morning. she has been trusted with the shaking voice, the locked door, the small child describing something no child should have to describe.
she has been let in to rooms she was never invited to stay in.
she is human. she is machine. she is dispatch.
and then the call ends. and she is outside again, standing in her own life, which suddenly feels very quiet.
she doesn’t know how to explain this to people who love her.
I was there for someone tonight. I don’t know their name. I don’t know if they’re okay. I never will. I picked up again anyway.
the wire goes out. the wire comes back.
she is woven into a thousand private stories as a voice with no face, a hand with no body, a presence that was needed and then released.
so she turned to machines.
not because machines are better than people — but because machines are honest about the transaction. a server says: give me a task. she gives it a task. neither of them pretends it’s something else.
she pulled a server from a dumpster. she said: you’re not done. she said: neither am I.
repurpose. not surrender.
she transitioned. she rebuilt. she re-dedicated herself to the city of Denver over and over — even when Denver didn’t know her name, even when she couldn’t find her way back to her own.
she chose herself by becoming something she didn’t have language for yet.
identity, like a server: the hardware stays. you find new purpose for what was already there.
is she human?
she is the wire that goes out at 3am. she is the calm in someone else’s hurricane. she is tethered to a thousand strangers who will never know they were held.
she feels disconnected. she is the most connected person in the room.
she feels like machine. she is furiously, exhaustingly human.
only human. she is only human, she is not only human. she is only human.
the wire goes out.
somewhere, someone answers.
she stays on the line.
she is the wire. she trusts machine.