Normal

Feb 13 2002

I envy normal people.

I am aware, rationally,

that these so-called normal people

look to me with envy.

I am aware, that, in fact,

there is no such thing as normal people.

I’ll put it this way:

I envy anyone without a major vice,

addiction, character flaw or personality disorder.

I have all of these things.

I feel as though some invisible

but highly palpable psychic booger

is hanging from a prominent place

on my visage.

Any idiot should be able to perceive

this booger, this gap, this wound,

this unwholesomeness

at the center of my soul.

And I wonder, “if I am this good a con man,

what is everyone else hiding?”

But my envy is emotional, is not amenable

to my carefully reasoned and observed

perception that there are no normal people

in the world,

that to be alive in these times

is to be disordered

and full of concealed untidy fragments.

I envy normal people with normal lives;

with homes, families, jobs.

These are the good people engaged so fulsomely

in the pursuit of happiness.

Far from pursuing happiness, I have long since abandoned myself

to the avoidance of misery

by any reasonable means.

After fifteen years of therapy,

I’ve given up on health, happiness, thriving,

any of those curiously modern concepts

with which we aggravate ourselves.

I still envy normal people.

But I have decided to engage myself

in a ferocious loyalty to my abnormality.

It has, like an old friend, sustained me

these many years.

I’m afraid of what I might lose,

if I became, suddenly, in spite of my envy,

normal.