( ) epilogue

“It’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes...”

Souvenirs!

Christmas morning, my parents stuff my stocking with hangover pills and five-dollar bills. Read that like the country song it is. I eye my stack of presents under the tree. One's a book I asked for, I find when I go to unwrap it, Letters to My Weird Sisters, and I read a few bits from the preface before I move on to unwrapping a bottle of Dom Pérignon or something:

It seemed to me that many of the moments when my autism had caused problems, or at least marked me out as different, were those moments when I had come up against some unspoken law about how a girl or a woman should be, and failed to meet it…

What laws have I broken, though? Am I too good a citizen?  She of six-feet-four in heels, lithe in her ludicrous thinness, this not-even-a-twenty-five-year-old with a yet-fully-developed brain, facial attractiveness a fraction that equals a whole number. Can’t I just have my mail-order diplomatic immunity and be done with it all?

Still, the book looks… enlightening, we’ll say. More my speed than Very Important People, maybe. I stack it next to the pills ‘n bills, and save the ribbon. 

Pineapple.