I'm blinded by your light. I'm cowed by your darkness. I'm impressed by your volume and intimidated by your gaze.
I fit into a crowd. I worry about social situations. I never snigger inappropriately and I always defer to my betters.
I am left breathless by beauty. I am automatically swept away by uniqueness. I can have tremendous faith in people based simply upon who they are, regardless of their actions.
I know my limitations. I respect your boundaries. I know what to expect from people and I'm never disappointed when someone makes the safe, reasonable choice.
I'm kind. I'm patient. I never overreact and I always consider that the viewpoints of others are as valid as my own.
Oh. And everything you just read?
Lies.
There are some people you know -- except you don't know you know them. Or maybe "people" isn't the right word. Regardless, they're there. We're there. Here. We're here because... Well, because we're not allowed to be anywhere else. We look like you and we sound like you, after a fashion, but there the similarities stop. It's a poor disguise, but it doesn't matter. If it looks like an ape and it sounds like an ape, there isn't a member of your species alive who will ever ultimately and rationally accept it to be anything other than an ape.
We look like you and we sound like you, to a certain extent, but it only takes a moment alone with us for the cold wind to blow through your belly. The tiny breath of unrealized awareness that you are lost in a strange place. The knotted anxiety of suspecting that you are in the presence of something -- a lunatic, an excommunicate, a feral tiger -- with which a person is under no circumstances to be left alone.
And the cold wind blows and the walls snap up and some voice that imagines itself to be at the center of your mind's labyrinth says aloud, "It's nothing. Look. This person is reserved and gentle and charming. You're not conspiring with a criminal. You're not breaking a quarantine. You're not sitting across from a cannibal, a Caliban, a calignity, a calamity. Everything is fine. Everything is reasonable. Everything is normal. Everything is always normal."
You believe. You scribble away the moment as an instant of fantasy. They come and they go, all day, every day, every lifetime. You long ago learned to disregard them, to let lay forgotten and unimportant the odd moments, the impossible angles, the baffling glimpses of alien landscapes caught between briefly-stirred curtains, the dreams of faraway places and strange faces which seem more solid and urgent than any place you've been, the brief and terrifying flights of absolute certainty that a door you've opened a thousand times before will this time open into a room you've never seen, the peculiar smell that always seems to remind you of something that hasn't happened yet.
Yeah. You know some of us. One or two. Someone you met years and years ago, who left much more of an impression than was reasonable for the nature and duration of contact. Someone who seemed simultaneously too-solid and not-quite-real. Someone with fire behind the eyes. Someone exiled.
But it's nothing.
Everything is fine.
Everything is reasonable.
Everything is normal.
Everything is always normal.
Right?Per ardua ad orbisque rapinas.
[family motto] I am also:
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Subhuman@Facebook
Radioactive@deviantART
Radioactiveidiot@AIM
CrushThatDwarf@YahooIM
Radioactive@Livejournal