Scenic Route to Normal.

He was set up wrong, or maybe not enough. He watches them laugh and hold each other, some of them don’t even need another person to feel it. He’s in the same room and he’s seen what they have seen, and more, but he doesn’t feel the way they do. That part of him is dull and has stopped shining.

Then they tear up at the sight of baby animals, he closes his eyes and let his mind go and he sees all the horror of the creatures life cycle. They smile in coye moments of secret love, he sleeps for days and dreams beautiful dreams knowing that when he wakes even scolding water won't wash away their sickening evaporation, clinging to him like the ghosts of people that never were.

They laugh at simple movies with overly recycled jokes and all he can do is analyze the process undertaken to create the film. The crunching of concepts and numbers until he feels something like a machine must when forced to calculate the same equation repeatedly at ever increasing speed; acceleration without limit or, unfortunately, sense of movement.

The dreams are where he can feel the feelings of normal people, the world alive with full concepts, images, and true emotions; all painted out across the most elaborate backdrop of understanding. Then his eyes open and his clumsy meat body grinds it’s bones against the world just to function. The grind doesn't hurt. It numbs, like an inkless tattoo drilled into his thoughts.

They feel anger. He sees the flaws in their logic but envys either fire. They break down. He see their imminent survival and the transience of their discomfort, but wishs he could let go. They feel helpless as he watches them walk through walls, unaware, while he’s been carved from granite. They succube to self induced limits. he walk until the shoes on his feet have rotten way and he’s etched a rutted ring around the planet, but only look up at the moment he arrives back at the start.

They are weak. He is strong. They are strong. He is weak. Differences, always something different in equal proportions, yet he carries it with awareness.

The feeling of being unique due to logical understanding because of being special in a way the makes one feel like a second hand kind of ordinary. It hurts because it doesn’t.