Modification

I really often wish that I could just be a normal girl, who walks around the city smelling like lotion and cosmetic products. I assume this means that what goes on in her mind, the mind of the normal girl, is just that: What lotion should I buy? What eyeshadow should I wear?

When I was four, I was riding a plastic purple elephant with yellow wheels on the driveway. The driveway was separated from the neighbor's driveway with railroad ties, and our driveway was about four feet above theirs. I guess I lost control, and my purple elephant went hurdling over the railroad ties. I landed head first on the paved surface. There was a rock right where the center of my forehead impacted.

I remember crying, and I remember getting stitches at the hospital. I remember getting home from the hospital and having a weird hat on that was meant to keep me from scratching the stitches. What I don't remember is that the doctors told my parents that there was no way to be sure that I wouldn't have brain damage. My parents thought, for several years, that I would be retarded. They were told that my skull was "dented."

I imagine sometimes that my radical ways of thinking are a direct result of my dented brain. I look in the mirror sometimes and I notice that my right pupil is dilated twice as much as my left one. I think the dent is pressing on my optical nerve. When I contemplate this, I, without research, determine that if it ever bothers me enough, I'll just get surgery on my skull, like, if you can get a dent out of a car, you can get a dent out of a skull. It's not like they'd be doing anything to my actual brain, they'd just be giving it more room. And maybe the reason I think the way I think isn't because my brain doesn't have enough room. My sister and I think alike; very alike. She's just as tormented as I am and she never had any dents in her skull. Teachers did think she was developmentally disabled once, because she insisted upon eating earthworms and other things she found crawling in the soil. But now she's an excellent chef of snails, among other dangerous things, and she's proved her childhood intention, 22 years later. We both have given serious thought to trepanning ourselves.

Psychoplasty aside (yes, I just invented that term), there should be something I can do to smell less like a freethinker. I think shopping'll help, but I theorize it instead of enjoying it. I flirt with the idea of falling into wholly bland and uninteresting circles of friends who talk mainly about TV shows, and not the good TV shows. I hope to think about the TV shows and the lotions advertised in between the TV shows, although, those lotions really don't smell good and I can totally tell when some normal girl is wearing gross non-designer lotion from the drugstore.

The theme is modification. Throughout our lives we're modified through a series of accidental circumstances, then we modify ourselves to adapt. I wish I could take lotion and makeup and fix the shit in my skull that makes my eyes fucked up. I wish I could take lotion and makeup and subdue my philosophical consciousness. I wonder if that's what all these normal girls are doing. Is it? I'll never know, I guess.