Reassembly
She was thirteen
when the world peeled open like wire,
and the metal inside men
cut her skin from the inside out.
The night did not end.
It installed itself,
permanent as code.
Love was a ghost
she once sang to in braids and bare feet,
but now it stank
like burnt circuits and iron wrists.
Her innocence did not die,
it was disassembled.
Screws scattered.
The girl turned to machine
by hands that did not ask.
Eyes blinking red,
heart in lockdown mode,
she walked halls like a drone,
untrusting of wind, of hands, of songs.
Each smile a potential malfunction.
Each hug: an override attempt.
She learned steel.
Learned silence.
Learned how to love herself
the way machines love function –
no poetry, only survival.
They called her cold.
But it was self-repair.
Then, years later,
a boy with a cracked voice
didn’t reach.
He waited.
A friend who didn’t ask of anything, just listened.
A woman who offered warmth
without soldering wires.
She glitched.
Something sparked.
Not pain but memory,
of running barefoot,
of sunlight not followed by shadow.
She faltered.
Let herself lean.
Not collapse
but lean.
And they held her
without asking her to be fixed.
She learned softness
is not weakness.
That machines
can learn to feel again
if given time and silence and choice.
That love, once a ghost,
can be reprogrammed
into something brave.
And she,
not the girl she was,
not the robot she became,
but a hybrid of strength and skin,
she bloomed.
Not new,
but reborn
with armor that bends
and arms that open.