butterfly effect

This vortex, this peculiar gravitational pull— it’s not a tornado, nothing so dramatic. It’s more… a butterfly effect. You know the one: a tiny, insignificant flap of a wing in Brazil and suddenly my entire atmospheric system is a Category Five mess. They said pay attention. I said to what? The constant hum of the fluorescent lights? The seven thousand threads of a single thought unspooling all at once? My mind is a flipped-through Rolodex, a browser with forty-seven tabs open and one of them is playing music from a game I quit in 2007. “Pay attention,” they said. I never could. Then you arrive, all earnest eyes and clipboard questions. You ask me about my GOALS. And I… (bitter laugh) I said I want to be normal. Yeah. Normal. That mythical country I can’t seem to get a visa for. I want to be social. I want to do the thing where people laugh and the laugh isn’t a weapon or a test. I want to stand in a room and feel the noise without feeling my skin try to crawl off my skeleton and become a quieter, calmer skin somewhere else. But. And it’s a big but. A boundary-shaped but. I need a fence. A moat. A drawbridge with a very suspicious guard. I need a thirty-page terms and conditions document that you have to initial at the bottom of every paragraph. Because I can’t trust. After all. After all the love that felt like landmines. After all the apologies that were just pauses between rounds. After all the times the weather in my own head changed because of a Brazilian butterfly I never even saw. So my goal is a contradiction wrapped in a paradox: Let me in. But stay out. Talk to me. But don’t look at me. Understand that I am a storm and a drought and I am begging for a map while I’m building another wall. It pulls me in, this strange situation, you see. The butterfly’s fault, probably. Not the whirlwind it became. Not the wreckage. Just a tiny, delicate, insignificant flap. And me.