I'll BE BACK

The problem with being the machine is everyone keeps giving you more to carry

Surely we all wanted to be Arnie when we were growing up.

Not the political Arnie. Not the cigar and climate conference Arnie. I mean proper Arnie.

Leather jacket. Shotgun. Motorbike. Skin that looked like it had been basted in olive oil and confidence since birth.

The man looked like God had built him in a gym and then sent him to Earth to make the rest of us feel like we’d been assembled in a hurry.

And if we were lads of a certain age, we didn’t watch Terminator 2 and think, “I’d like to develop a healthy emotional framework.”

We thought, aye, I’ll have some of that.

The size. The calm. The certainty. The way he walked into chaos like chaos had better start explaining itself.

We all had our little time in the sun with that.

Maybe not full Arnie, obviously. Let’s not get silly. But enough.

Enough shape. Enough confidence. Enough swagger. Enough sense that the body did roughly what it was told and the world still had a bit of give in it.

Then life, being the sneaky little bastard it is, started sending Sarah and John Connor into the picture.

A woman to love.

Kids to keep alive.

A house that somehow needs money thrown at it every time you blink.

A job that does not care whether your nervous system has had enough.

And the machine in us thinks, fine, we can handle that.

We take the hits, keep moving, we put ourselves between the people we love and whatever is trying to get through the door that week.

Bills, arguments., deadlines, school runs, crap sleep, stress at work, family pressure. The broken boiler or the surprise car payment...

Bit by bit, the human covering starts showing the signs.

Just a few scratches at first, then the cuts get deeper.

Then one day we catch ourselves in the mirror and there’s a flash of, fucking hell, when did I start looking like the deleted scenes?

Meanwhile the newer T-1000 models are everywhere.

Fresh skin. Fresh hairline. Fresh testosterone. Fresh little gym bag and plenty of spare time to meal prep chicken into perfectly miserable cubes.

They seem to glide through life looking upgraded.

We’re behind them at the traffic lights with emergency power flashing on the dashboard, one eye twitching, trying to remember whether we replied to the message, booked the thing, paid the other thing, trained this week, slept properly, or just ate the last four chicken nuggets the kids left because apparently that now counts as a private act of rebellion.

And still, we move.

Of course we do.

That’s the job.

Sarah still needs us.

John still needs us.

The mission is still live.

But when our basic programming starts to fail, when we can see that the people around us have less faith in us than they used to, and worse than that, when we no longer fully believe what we say either, that’s when the music starts to play and the molten steel ending begins for men.

Nothing left to give but a fake thumbs up to signal everything is ok while we keep slipping into lesser versions of ourselves.

No structure.
No control.
No self trust.

Confidence in the bin.

At some point, the thing doing all the protecting has to be protected too.

We keep telling ourselves, “I’ll be back.”

At some point.

But when?

This is where we begin.