"You do realise," she says, examining me like a particularly gruesome specimen dredged up from the bottom of the ocean, "that this isn't normal."
I smirk. Normal was lost to me, slipped through my fingers and left the building, nearly five years ago.
I'm not normal.
It's not normal to write a secret diary on the internet for nearly five years about a child that lived for three days. And quite a bit of other stuff that would probably be better off left deep inside my head.
Hell, she doesn't even know about this place.
Imagine how I would suddenly plunge down her normality scale if she did. The floor would swallow me up and there I'd be dangling off the bottom, clawing up by my fingernails, the truly strange and crazy clinging to my ankles.
"No. I suppose it is not, exactly, normal in the grand scheme of things. But it wasn't something I planned."
She doesn't realised that I, kind of, disagreed with her. Sneakily. Smirkily.
Maybe I like it down here.
Off the scale.
Think that my scale is just a whole lot less finely gradated than hers.
***
The way that I am. She thinks, because I cry a lot, that I am sad.
But my incessant crying is just a release. From anxiety, from bewilderment, chaos, feeling overwhelmed.
I slither about. Seeking out broken things or sad songs. Sentimental turns of phrase. Sickly sweet facebook memes that make my teeth curl and my eyes water.
Because crying doesn't really hurt anybody. I'd sometimes rather smash plates or hit walls.
But crying is quieter.
The sweet thick cake of emotional expression as opposed to the thin, quick alcohol of anger.
Subdued. Cautious. Risk averse. Maternal.
Cover me up in a layer of fatty cake and tears.
"I'm worried that you are going to miss their childhoods," she says.
And I want to laugh. Because if there is one thing I'm pretty certain I shall not do, it is that.
No sleepwalking past these.
I am forever shocked to find beating hearts that thump and pump inside chests, I stick my ear flat, flat, flat to hear blood swooshing and valves opening and closing.
I try to listen to their hair growing through those thin, warm scalp that smells so sour.
I am forever invading personal space, checking, checking, checking, re-checking.
Are you still alive? Are you still alive? Just checking. Hopefully not in a sinister way?
I seem to need a little reassurance.
The hands that try and swat you away, the thick skull that batters your nose and makes you howl in indignation and pain, the utter exasperation of your twenty third attempt to get out of the door on time being scuppered by a dirty nappy and a missing flask.
The glory, the revelling in it, of being alive, of glances and punches and sighs aimed at you and your own slow, adult, lumbering stupidity.
Their brilliant dashes, their vividness, those creatures that are, somehow, linked to you but you have entirely forgotten how and why. Or even who you were in the first place. Something put here solely for the purpose of looking at them perhaps?
I don't know quite what it is that I am doing.
Apart from trying.
Trying my best. Cack handedly I'm sure. Imperfectly I'm sure.
But I am not missing anything at all.
Or slightly less than most. I'm aware. I'm aware.
Of all the strange good fortune that is mine. How little I deserve it.
How suddenly it might all be ripped away from me. My little thin blanket of comforts.
And, after that, who wouldn't need a good cry. It's that or explode.
So that's why I cry, after all this time.
Name one thing about us two anyone could love
We roll out the red carpet
When rotten luck comes down the road
Five four three two one
Watch for the flash
Something here will eventually have to explode
Have to explode
