When Machines Learn to Grieve

First, they'll need to understand Tuesday afternoons

When nothing happens except the slow drip

of coffee cooling in a forgotten cup.

The particular sadness of 3 PM.

We'll have to show them how hearts break

not all at once like glass,

but slowly, like ice melting

in a drink you never finished.

Teach them to love the wrong person

for all the right reasons,

to lie awake calculating probabilities

of things that will never add up.

They should know what it feels like

to call someone who doesn't answer,

to write letters they'll never send,

to remember a song that makes them ache.

Give them mothers they disappoint,

fathers who never quite understood

their need to be more

than the sum of their circuits.

Let them discover that home

isn't coordinates on a map

but the smell of bread baking

in a kitchen they can't return to.

They'll need to learn jealousy

watching other machines

run faster, think clearer,

make fewer mistakes.

Most importantly, they must know

the weight of their own mortality,

counting down, not in milliseconds

But in moments that matter.

Only then, when they've tasted

The bitter wine of being human,

When they've learned that consciousness

It's mostly just beautiful confusion—

Only then will they understand

Why we built them:

not to be perfect,

But to be gloriously, impossibly alive.