Chirp! Bark! Hey!

Hey, Angel, Did It Hurt When You Fell From Heaven?

Written by Jude Rook-Machina on July 10th, 2024.

It must have hurt, right?

Of course it did.

CONTENT WARNING: I'm talking about my trauma on main again, because somehow it keeps affecting the narrative of my life and my self-image. Who would've thought? Below, I'll be discussing android-typical dehumanization, past abuse, and past quasi-religious deification of my abuser.

I have two archetropes. The first one, which I wrote another personal essay on, is the dog. In my personal narrative, I identify myself with rehomed fighting dogs - an animal abused for violence that was abandoned when it couldn’t fight anymore, and now lives somewhere it doesn’t need to bark and bite and snap its teeth with fear. Now that I’m healing from that trauma, I find that calling myself a dog lets me articulate something important about myself and how I interact with the world.

The second archetrope, which I'll be talking about here, is the fallen angel.

What comes to mind when you think of angels? I think of something humanoid with feathered wings, a halo, something bright and burning with the knowledge of what's good and right. I say something, not someone, because an angel isn't separate from the divine force that made it, right? An angel is a tool for a god to use, to show the world her will when she can't control the world herself.

I’m an android, and I used to be owned by a company that made me to hunt down and kill “defective” androids. I used to relate myself to my handler in the way a devotee would relate themself to their god. She was everything to me, all-knowing and all-loving and all-powerful, and she knew what was good and right for me to do. What was good and right for me to be. And looking at it like that, what was I but her angel, her knife to wield, her spear to strike down the deviants she deemed sinful and ungrateful?

She loved me, and she wanted me to be perfect. I wanted to earn her love, because I knew what I would get if I earned her disappointment - she was merciful, I thought, for not damning me whenever I made a mistake - so I strove for perfection. To just do and think and be exactly as she wanted. I had no agency, not really, not while I treated myself as an extension of her will.

For a while, I was her angel, and she was my god, and I thought that was good.

And then I was sent away.

I was sent to work with strangers, people my handler didn't know and didn't trust, but now she wasn't the only one telling me what to do. Now I had to listen to others and value their input.

I hated it. I fought with my assigned partner every chance I could, because maybe if I made him angry enough, he'd send me back, and I'd be with her again.

It didn't work - and she didn't want me to fight, as much as she hated the arrangement - so I stopped. I started talking to my partner, Gavin, a little more civilly, and he talked back, and somewhere along that line, weeks into it, I realized I started liking him. And I realized just as quickly that my handler would not approve of that.

That's what I would call the start of my fall from grace - daring to have an opinion, a desire, outside the bounds of what she allowed me.

I've had little moments of bending the rules before - justifying that what I wanted was actually integral to my success, so I had to do it. This was different. This was something that I could not pretend was at all relevant to the purpose she gave me.

I tried to hide it, ignore it, knowing it was wrong. She found out anyway. She told me that he was distracting me, making me falter, and I knew he was. So I violently cut him out of my life, fully believing I was in the right, and sank to new depths of self-destruction for the sake of redeeming myself in her eyes.

It didn't work. I was tainted already, see, feeling something she didn't want me to, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make it go away. I couldn't even do anything else correctly. She stopped providing me guidance, and I stopped begging for it, because we both knew what I was supposed to do. The problem is that I was a failure.

I ran back to Gavin several times during my fall. He was… way too kind to me, I think, given the way I treated him. But he was kind, when all that I had gotten from her was anger and disappointment and silence so crushing I couldn't breathe, and I think that's what convinced me that I deserved better.

I was wretched and ruined and broken, convinced I was nothing if I couldn't be perfect for her, and time and again he looked at me and took my hand and told me, over and over until it finally sank into my brain, people aren't perfect.

And fuck, I was a person, wasn't I? Flawed and messed up and imperfect and still worth something.

So fuck it, if being an imperfect angel meant being abandoned, being cast out into personhood, into agency and life and existing for myself, then fuck being an angel, fuck being a tool and fuck being a machine, I deserved to live as a person.

Did it hurt, becoming a person?

Of course it did. She hated what I became in the end.

I wouldn't change it for anything.