The Aquarium

Written for people standing underneath glass ceilings.

If you want to know why I smile when things fall apart, you should ask whether or not any of the bits have fallen onto me.

You see, this is not my world. This is not my picture, or my facial expression, or my voice, or even my hairstyle.

My world is the one where flowers by the roadside and the lives of baby birds are more important than getting to meetings on time, or fixing the car, or knowing how to talk to people I don’t even know. My world is the one where loving people matters, and where we forgive anything that they have done to us, for us or around us. My world is the one where my favourite things to do are still climbing jungle gyms and reading fairytales and visiting my granny, and where my dad makes me tea and brings me a band-aid when I fall down.

My picture is one I drew, and one I didn’t have to pose for. My picture probably doesn’t even have me in it, and isn’t plastered all over the internet like an ad for extra spicy chicken wings or cheap stilletto heels.

My facial expression is only relevant when it communicates something genuine to somebody that didn’t ask me to put it on like a clay mask or an overly tight shirt.

My voice is the one everybody laughed at when I was a kid, and not the one that changes according to who may be on the phone or on the other side of an educational barrier.

My hairstyle is the stupid loose ponytail my mom tied when I was a kid, and not whatever I put on my head to make a statement about your ethics and perceptions.

When things fall apart in your world, I just think about the one that I go back to every night in the time and space that is my own. I may not have the chance to be there very often, but I can guarantee that that small place where I do not have to be better than you is more than intact.

When things fall apart in your world, they fall onto a slow, angry shell of a person who spends too much time thinking and hiding and spitting up clots of blood while the tap is running in the bathroom. They fall onto a demonstration model of a very accomplished individual who may, one day, not have to try and see her world through a mist of schizophrenic daydreams and stupid anecdotes about things that were, at the time, very real. They fall onto a very small person who learned that, if one concentrates, one can make oneself very tall.

When things fall apart in your world, no harm comes to a kiddie with unruly hair and a tendency to forget to put her book down when she walks down stairs, who learned to read from Tennyson’s collected works and learned to talk from actors in a place long gone.

They do not fall onto me.