The Guidelines for being Normal
- Lydia McNeill
- May 14, 2015
- 2 min read
Updated: Jan 23, 2021
His face will fall; weary, disorganised as he leans in a bored way against the table. His face is unshaven and his fingernails dirty and I am judging him. I’ll sit judging him in the large gaps through his sentences. Each word will have an unmistakable gap until the next, like the gap between an unsatisfied couple each end of the dining table. I’ll be wondering why he talks so slow. It’s as though a singular cog is spinning around, jutting out information lazily like a teasing poltergeist.
I’m always sure that he doesn’t mean to be so slow-when-he-talks… but I’m impatient, so very impatient. All of what he says makes perfect sense to me already, I get it, I understand. Move on please Sir. My right palm is open floating half way above the table, cupping the air as if to absorb more information. If only! If only my palm could silently wave him on to the next point, like how I brush the pages through a book. I silently wish my hand will have some telepathic effect in order to read his lazy mind; pushing at that one, unwilling cog.
I’ll construct a thousand more cogs for you so you can think faster. I’ll put a thousand bees inside your brain so that it will buzz into action when I press this button. Be more exact with your words. Be more precise. I wonder about him with my narrow, judging mind. How can you be this unimpressed with yourself? Is this what I have to look forward to?
He won’t have killed the room yet. Expressions of students dance across tips and tops of tables, their bodies swaying and bopping with the world. They always seem to walk into a room like this, still dancing, smiling and red nosed from the chilly air; noises too loud, opinions too cocksure. As the lessons begin they start to wilt from the sound of the teacher. I start to construe my own made brand of bland looking down at my torn Asda bag. I am wishing and I am hoping that someone will speak to me and see the things I used to see in me.
“Am I unique?”
But if everyone is unique, then surely nobody is.
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