Edison in Love

Thomas Edison loved a doll with a tiny phonograph inside because he made her speak. Is there any other reason to love a woman? Did she say the ghost of my conception or something equally demure? It’s hard to be sure how he feels when he holds me, I fall apart. I’m projecting here. He didn’t feel her first transgression was in having no expression. René Descartes, too, traveled alone with a doll-in-a-box he called his daughter.Francine, Francine... is it better to be silent and wait for everything we were promised? Or should we love them back, the way a train loves its destination, as if we have the machinery necessary for it?