All those silences are lost to me, you are lost to me. Everything in my brain twists and turns, and as you can see, there’s no more room for me. And when there’s no more room for me, I’ll have to forget you.
Every day passes just the same. Robert is trying to forget how life feels, and he’s trying to become better at forgetting. It feels hard to him, and you can bet it truly is hard, but his concern is not the hardness of life, rather the moments when his life seems easier.
Towers and tall buildings accompany his walks every morning. Silences and whispers accompany his sleep every night. Above all, everything is dim and damp and scary, and what’s not to be scared about? Only everything.
His words are meaningless and awesomely cruel, without a hint of passion or peace. His words just are. He cannot seem to find comfort in the warmth of other people, nor pleasure in music, as most of us do.
His only pleasure seems to draw its power from the stupid gathering of useless information. In his small circle of friends, Robert is the ever knowing fact hoarder, acquiring stupidly dates of birth, mileages of highways, chemical formulae and lines from every movie known to man.
But as Robert tries harder every day to forget the things he does not need to know, he just becomes better at remembering. He remembers smells from the first sunset he ever lived through. He remembers the first time he touched a human being. He remembers how his first anti-flu pills tasted like and he remembers acutely how he felt when his mom embarrassed him in front of the class in second grade.
Robert is good at remembering feelings, sensations, emotions, particular things and incredibly weird things to know about other people.
Stuff like Lana’s bra size. Or when she has her period. Or exactly what kind of chocolate she loves. Or exactly how many hairs she has on her left hand (he counted those by himself, thrice, just to make sure).
Lana is amazing, unlike Robert. She has deep green eyes and a cheesy smile, all the while hair is so dark, she couldn’t be a natural brunette. But she is – Robert knows she is. And he also knows she likes to call him Rob. Short for Robert, of course.
She is witty and smart and always funny, but it seems that her charms have this power only on Robert. Nobody else seems to enjoy her jokes as much as he does, but he’s ok with this. It only means he’ll have her only for himself, and that’s a good thing, right?!
Lana is also a woman of very little talents. She doesn’t sing that wonderful, and her drawings are ironic at best. But she is smart and she is witty, as Rob already noticed, and in this day and age this seems good enough.
Also, she is a bad cook. Or, if she cooks at all, Lana didn’t seem fit for it to show to Robert, and so, he deduced that she’s a bad cook.
And although she doesn’t seem to eat much, Lana is very fit and healthy, keeping a close relationship with coffee and salad.
However, Rob doesn’t seem to remember the first time he met Lana.
He only remembers bits and pieces, flowings of hair and whiffs of perfume here and there. He does, awkwardly, remember Lana’s voice, and her steady hand with a screwdriver, but he can’t really pinpoint the exact destination, location or origin of this memory. So he considers it a manufactured memory and that’s it.
Robert also doesn’t eat ice cream. He doesn’t breathe. He needs permanent charging. He’s Rob, the Robot. And Lana isn’t quite finished with him.
