She is not of this world.
She should be. She was born through basic biological functions of the human body, her organs perform the same operations, her senses input information for processing and reaction. But she is, inexplicably, an outsider.
She wanted to belong, because she knew she was supposed to want to. She just didn't. But she played the role they assigned her well and got by. She started to think that’s there all there was to any of it- getting by.
When the attacks started and the world cowered and panicked, she just watched in curiosity. She felt nothing, she never had. But there was a spark of the potential to feel something. To know something. To understand something, maybe something she’d always understood underneath all the lines she had to recite.
The news reports screamed of Armageddon. The religious zealots committed mass suicide in preparation for deliverance. The rest of humanity scurried around like insects, hurriedly picking up anything they could carry. She just watched and waited.
When they finally arrived, to capture her along with the rest, she knew. What she’d wondered in a way that logical thought couldn’t describe, what she’d hoped for in a way that humans don’t hope, what she’d been sensing underneath everything her whole existence.
She wasn’t an outsider. She was just waiting for her family to come home.
It's like the ugly duckling, if all the swans were dicks and killed off all the other birds on the planet.
ReplyDelete