They poke and prod at me with their glares and glances, questioning exactly what it is I mean to
say, what it is I mean when I say I can taste the fluorescent kitchen lights flickering over head or
when I say that I can’t eat the spaghetti they made for dinner because I was prohibited from
changing my shirt at 2 p.m. and the stitching kept itching at my neck in a way that made the
sweat drip from my nape down my spine like a spaghetti noodle and I’ve really had too much
sauce on my skin this whole time — it’s not that I don’t want to eat the meal my parents so
lovingly cooked for me, I merely wish they wouldn’t stare at me strangely and hiss at the
vernacular I use to articulate the fact that I don’t want to eat an octopus and that my plate swims
like eels when I squint downward at it; if words could communicate the illness in my mind
without becoming an illness of the tongue then I wouldn’t feel so stuck in this bright orange
rocking chair whose sides squeeze into the gap between my ribs and my hips in such an
uncomfortable manner because there’s nowhere else to sit, and heaven forbid I speak up when it
isn’t my turn, because my sibling is always yelled at for speaking out of turn and when we go
upstairs to scramble into bed I know he’s going to smack me over the ear again — my emotions
are under strict surveillance by the eldest child the way the eldest meerkat daughter watches over
the kits as the tired mother goes on a hunt to sustain herself from the exhaustion of her young;
sometimes I forget I am no longer a kid and that I no longer have to wave a greeting to the dark
bedroom next door so the monsters don’t eat me alive, because as I age I realize that the monster
was buried within my own bones the whole time and the goodbye was never really a goodbye
but rather a goodnight, because as with all ailments of the mind I sure enough would be
welcomed by its sickly smile in the mirror when I rise to brush my teeth, but no matter how
desperately I try to scrub away the plaque of the night I will always feel it build up again —
some days like sunshine baking crust onto the cement — and when I go to the dentist I will cry
as they tell me I have cavities from not slicing string between my teeth, so as I grow I slice
myself into pieces and dissect the infected pieces and toss them away — but I can never get rid
of being autistic.
