Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who is in love with the voids you do not show them
You smile a lot, love, but in a diffuse way. Like a nightlight, there to passively soothe other people.
You agree with people whenever you can, agreeable; but you stay silent for preference, whenever possible. Better to say nothing and attract no eye than ever be found Wrong; better to nod and mhm and be bound into a thousand regretted obligations than be caught having a mind of your own.
In a world of big personalities, you walk into a room ready to step sideways into the background. Supporting cast, nonspeaking role, out of focus. Not there to be seen. Deliberately bland.
You have composed yourself of censor bars. Opinions: [REDACTED]. Personality: [REDACTED]. Your laugh: [REDACTED]. You are a tensegrity structure built of high-tension anxiety, and everything worth knowing is a lacuna.
You slip, occasionally — god, far too occasionally; it must be hurting you to keep that mask of servile anonymity in place, what must it cost. But I saw you reading, once, waiting to deploy; not aware enough that I was there to be furtive, a genuine smile over the pages. I got enough of a glimpse, from a distance, without tipping you off, to look up the author and all they ever wrote. I ordered everything I could lay hands on, tore through it, weaving elaborate spun-sugar insupportable hypotheses about what you liked and why, bullshit inferences about who it made you, that you liked it.
I've been watching for what feels like forever, now. Carefully, the way people have to watch skittish wildlife: from cover, from distance, from downwind. I have no idea how to approach someone like you, what kind of vanishing act par excellence it might provoke, or failing that, what internal self-loathing self-laceration for not being invisible to me.
I know your favourite authors. I know which of our colleagues you're most afraid of, though I can't always tell why. I know you always have the day's special in the canteen, because that means you don't have to think or express any preference or delay the line even a second for you to consider — and I think you genuinely hate some of the specials, and make yourself eat them anyway, so you can't be seen doing something conspicuous like leaving it or throwing it away. I know being inside a mech lets you be you in a way you don't otherwise allow, mask as lens, bringing you into focus.
I don't know you, really, of course I don't.
But god, love, I am trying to work out how.