Your Concern That It Is Awful

 to be me is misplaced.

Nine days ago, in the evening, and after throwing off the bear shoulders, I grew a celesta. My lungs were glass bells. Washboard, guitar string hips.  Accordion bellow arms.  I waltzed the orange light as she slipped upward through  my hands, opening to gray-blue. Alone with the cool-waisted dusk, I ran wood wrists against my grooved, silver legs.  I sang.

But you were not worried about the dreams.  It is the machine-work you do not like. It is plain on your face.  "Strange."  Say it again.

"I would hate to think { } caused you to think this way."
It has not.  My mind is what I have made.  There are two persons in your frown, one broken and one fixed, and I am neither.   I know it seems to you I am unwell. And if you were wrong?  How would you check?  I do not say to you, "my wood wrists."  I said nothing about the Snow Queen.  I said, that I reason. That it is not difficult, it is not intelligence.  The times I am misunderstood are oftenest when I use words in an ordinary way.  I do not expect people to think "on the same level."  I expect them to mean what they say, and when they choose to declare truth, when the words are "therefore" and "because", I expect those words to hold.  I am not the one who has chosen them.  This is strange to you when I say it, that I choose to reason.  This conversation is no longer about me.

You write it down,
"... the idea that what I understand to be thought; what it means to me to be alive and possess a mind, is somehow fundamentally wrong or broken..."  You like this sentence.

"Are you sure you've always thought this way?"

"Yes.  In fact, I think this way so completely, that I did not even realize--"

"I mean, even when you were younger?  When you were 10?"

Oh.  I see. The window has shut.
"Yes."

This question is irrelevant; I am not broken.  And I am not a child.  I have had a lifetime to consider; to choose what I will think and how.  Those things about my mind, body and heart which are beautiful, of which I am the most proud, did not exist when I was 10.  I built them.  It is the one thing  I have done which is the most beautiful.