I'm Just Like You

By Peter Bowden

He told her over coffee, under the flicker of a fluorescent bulb and the buzz of a tired ceiling fan, “I’m a cyborg.” She didn’t flinch. Maybe it was the way he said it—like someone confessing they couldn’t stand jazz or preferred cloudy days. His left eye twitched faintly, a shimmer of circuitry beneath freckled skin. “They replaced the parts that failed,” he added, shrugging, “and a few that hadn’t yet.” It wasn’t shame. Just fact. Outside, rain hit the window in soft metallic rhythms, like fingers drumming on steel.

She looked at him, quiet for a beat, then said, “That’s why you don’t sleep.” He blinked. Once. Twice. “That’s part of it.” And then she laughed, not unkindly, more like a sound that said she’d already known, in some unspoken corner of her. She reached across the table, her hand warm over the artificial ridge of his wrist. “Well, I’m an insomniac,” she said. “Maybe we’re just built different the same way.”

They sat in silence after that, the kind that doesn’t ask for anything, not even words. The coffee cooled. The storm passed. And in that quiet hour before morning, in the hum of old machines and newer hearts, the world didn’t need fixing. Not yet. Not tonight.

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