The Robot Voice

based on a tale by a friend

The Robot Voice

 

            When I was younger, there used to be this video game I loved to play on my parents’ old worn-down, dinosaur of a computer. I would sit in an old brown and padded kitchen chair for hours playing the game in the living room, forgetting my friends and homework and wasting the sun and my hot dinners. The game was on one of those ridiculous kid-friendly websites, and it was a ‘build-your-own’ type of thing, where you could build your own “totally awesome” robot.

            Well, I would sit there for hours, making my own “totally awesome” robots on the family computer. I would sit there, legs barely touching the floor, and then I would sit criss-cross, and then maybe sit on one knee, and then later, the other. I would sit there and build robots with one leg or three, with four arms or none, with antennae and bug eyes and clown shoes and big, computer-chip toothy grins.

I would get bored of one sooner or later, and then I would want to start over. And I just remember the ‘start over’ button in the upper left hand corner of the screen, gray and bulging. And when you would click it, a gurgly, monotone robot voice would say, “Start over.” And I would start over.

Ten years later or so, and my life is constantly falling apart at the seams, and mysteriously binding back together again, over and over. I lose friends and hurt myself and keep track of which days I take the meds and which days I do not �" I get my hopes up for stupid, childish things and let myself down.

 And I walk in the halls at school throughout it all, every day. I watch people come and go, like myself, with expressions of angst or irritation or humiliation or joy or death . . . all with conflicting personalities that light up when they get close to touching each other . . .  all with different colors of the rainbow, reds and yellows and blues and purples and different shades of blacks and grays . . . all with different eyes, kind eyes and mean ones . . . all with a different breakfasts sitting in their stomach, different homework assignments swirling in their minds . . . all with their own lists of ‘to-do’s and ‘to-avoid’s and ‘shall-not-under-any-circumstances-ever’s . . . all with problems, feelings, good things, bad things. I watch them all pass me by, and keep on walking. And all I hear is that gurgly, monotone robot voice, telling me to start over, every time they pass. And I start over.