irene ✽ d9 cb fin

My mother prepares dead bodies to be buried.

She swills out their blood and then pumps them full of a chemical that is meant to preserve everything that would decay otherwise, like their skin and nails and hair. That's the point in a conversation where most people decide that I'm too weird to talk to.

I probably shouldn't lead a conversation with that, or mention it at all, but I've never been good at talking to people. I trip over my words like cracks in the pavement and I forget that not everyone wants to hear about the human anatomy, but that's all I know, I can name a hundred different facts about your lungs and I think they're all quite interesting.

I think I've been trying to overcompensate for a childhood I never had, to make up for all the friends on the playground I never made and all the birthday party invitations that never got sent. Mom had always been addicted to her work, even when I was a baby. Grandma practically raised me and she's dead now so I'm raising myself. At least now I have some freedom.

I made dinner for us once, a long time ago, after grandma died. Set the table with the silk cloth we never used and the fancy plates that collected dust on the shelves. I knocked a couple of times on the door to the basement and yelled down, waited a few minutes in case I'd hear the scrape of her stool on the ground, but it never came. I shouldn't be shocked, but it would've been nice to have a normal family dinner for once.

Mom would say that normalcy is overrated, that it's better to be unique and different, but I don't believe that. I've never wanted to be anything but normal.