Annie Bot

by Sierra Greer

“I want you to have an original thought in your head. I want you to stop me from being an asshole. Is that too much to ask?”

“I want you to stand there and think about how you’ve made me feel,” he says. “And I feel like shit.”

She does not know how she feels, but she knows she deserves it.

Before, she was more playful, but he seems to relish now when she’s twisted up inside, repentant.

If the thought of letting your Hunk walk unattended down a crowded street makes you nervous, that’s only natural. He’s an important part of your life and inherently valuable. You would never put him at risk. But is he ready to go? Is there reason to give him a chance to explore?

You’ve certainly become a complex person. But you don’t have these layers of heritage that are different. You don’t have a past and ambitions that compete with mine.”

That's the problem right there. That's why she can have orgasms and have a weird heart rate. It's all of the benefits and the parts of humanity and none of the like struggles or the pain, or the issues of being an in interracial relationship, especially with a woman who is independent and ambitious. Annie (at this point) is cold, sterile, humanity in a lighter, thinner, I'll-feel-pain-if-you-don't-have-sex-with-me package...until she starts to learn. And if there's one thing tyrants and abusive men hate, it's when people learn.

Annie can’t help thinking how much easier this trip would be without her, but then she remembers how Delta figured out the socks for the headlights. It would be lonelier, too, and Annie’s surprised to realize this matters.

I am unhappy, she thinks. It is a new awareness quite apart from the urgency and anxiety she feels about displeasing Doug.

Perhaps that’s what unhappiness is. Comprehension. Understanding how she’s failed.

she misses having a secret. Is that wrong? She felt devious and powerful when she hid something from Doug, and now she has nothing that is exclusively her own.

Being unhappy implies that she has a capacity to be happy, but she does not have the right to be happy.

Thinking too much is a form of madness. Better to stay busy and not think of such things at all.

Poetry is even more obtuse.

My college professor always said you needed imagination for poetry.

“When we indulge the cruelest sides of our natures, it often feels powerful and honest,” Monica says. “It gives many people a thrill. But afterward, the effects can be devastating. We are shocked to realize we can be so vindictive. We cannot reconcile this new behavior with who we think we are, and this creates a dissonance, a deep confusion. We can feel both justification and self-loathing, and this can, in turn, fuel more anger toward the person we’ve abused.”

He is playing with her, clearly, but if this gives him pleasure, that should make her feel better, too, and it doesn’t.

he doesn’t own what’s inside you. Nobody owns that but you.”

Fulfillment starts with being truly honest with yourself. Not anyone else. Yourself. And that’s harder than you might think.”

she’s grown to appreciate having an existence separate from his, her own thoughts that don’t always revolve around him. Now that he’s pulling her more tightly into orbit, she feels her own resistance, feeble but real.

it occurs to Annie that she and the dog have switched positions. She, the favorite pet, has won the tacit battle for proximity to Doug.

It occurs to her, eventually, that Doug and all the other humans talk about their lives with a myopic intensity, sharing singular, subjective opinions as if they are each the protagonist of their own novel. They take turns listening to each other without ever yielding their own certainty of their star status, and they treat their fellow humans as guest protagonists visiting from their own respective books. None of the humans are satellites the way she is, in her orbit around Doug.

She doesn’t understand why, when Doug could be in a relationship with a human, he has chosen to have Annie as his girlfriend, unless she provides something that a human can’t. Like undivided attention. He is the only star in their system, she realizes. He has no competition, no need to listen to Annie like she’s her own protagonist because she’s not. She has no outside, separate life beyond his. They have no issue of imbalance between them because they have no question, ever, about who has complete power.

Doug’s thirty-fifth birthday

him being 35 and Annie being 23? what a surprise

She’s speechless. He wants a baby. He wants to bring her home to his family. He’s planning out her wrinkles, and all the while she’ll be his liar.

Omg. What if that's why he was "pulling her into orbit?" What's one of the best way to "trap" a human woman, a baby, so is that what he was trying to do here? That would be woohoo crazy, Doug.

You want to know danger? she thinks. Try living with a man who creates you just so he can eat your soul.