To be human

There was something so terribly, wonderfully different about them all, and he knew that he was not like them. He knew this in the same sort of way that one knew that the sun would rise the next day or that the worms would pick a skeleton clean, and so he did not question why it was that they were all so very different from him. The answer was perfectly simple after all, he was a monster and they were not. They were not born with the same sort of darkness to them that he was, the same desire to claw and tear and destroy until there was nothing at all left but the beautiful carnage beneath his feet, the viscera that dripped from his jaws and stained the world with its elegant claret.

But it was lonely being a monster. Cursed to live a life where people feared him and other monsters only wanted to use that of which was monstrous within him for their own ends. He didn’t like to think that he was lonely, but there were times, watching the people at play with such ease amongst their friends, that he found the solitudinal nature of his existence was, well, horribly lonely.

So, he watched, he listened, he observed, and he learnt. He learnt what it took to make a patchwork of himself. He learnt what it took to make himself unrecognizable from the monster he really was.

He could see their teeth as they flashed in the sunlight. Blunt, ineffective things that seemed better suited for smiling than they were for biting and tearing. No, they weren’t like his at all. His were too sharp, and there were simply too many of them. If he were to bear them in a smile, it would seem a threat and good people don’t make other people feel threatened like that. But he could fix it. He could make his teeth look just like everyone else’s and nobody would need to know they were made to hurt and not to grin. It would hurt, of course, to grind away his teeth until they’re nice and neat and rendered perfectly useless. But humans did not need to use their teeth to hunt, and so if it must be that he would never again be given the chance to sink his teeth in hard, to taste the thick blood as it bubbled out of the wound, then that was all. A necessary pleasure lost in favour of pretending to be better, more human than he really was.

He could see their eyes. Twinkling, darkening, always flickering with a dance of emotions that seemed to come so naturally to them. No, they were nothing like his own. His were dark and flat and utterly dead. One could gaze into them for an eternity and learn nothing at all, for there was nothing to be learnt from their lifeless surface. He knew, though, that it made people nervous to be caught in his eyes for too long, as if the moment they met his dead-gaze it would steal away whatever life they held. But he could fix it, and it would almost be too easily done. He would simply replace his own eyes with the eyes of another, of a human who, like people did, wore their emotions in their eyes and nobody would be aware that he had borrowed them to hide that he could not wear his own. It would be a little tricky, not the business of popping out his own eyes, no he had always hoped for an excuse for it anyway, but to navigate a stranger’s eyes to the empty sockets and, worse, to see the world through their eyes. But maybe then he could look upon a person without wondering what it might be like to see their entrails spilling onto the ground, but rather to see them as a friend.

He could see how they moved about their day. Each step seemed to flow like a dance, elegant and graceful and as smooth as torn silk. No, they did not even move like he did. His movements were always too much, too angular or pushing just a little too far. He would bend too much and he would see the way those around him would stiffen with alarm, and yet he would not bend enough and would be met with much the same reaction. There was a middle ground somewhere to be found, that much was obvious, but he could never tell where it was. It was a habit that seemed to come naturally to those who were human, and so it was not a habit he found. So, he would bind his joints and deny himself the fluidity of his movements, and he would take to leaning upon a cane to mask his stiffness as something far more familiar, something more human, and he would learn the arbitrary rules for the game he never knew he was playing, and nobody would ever think to question if he was anything other than human.

He could hear the way they talked. There was a musicality to it all, all wavers and tones and songs that came so naturally to them. No, he did not sound like that when he talked at all. He was always too flat or too much, never finding the space in between where he was expected to be. He never gave enough when he spoke, though he had concluded this was more the result of monsters simply wearing and conveying their emotions differently from humans, but if he were to try and portray himself as human, he knew he would have to learn to pretend. To play at parrot, to play at echo, to bounce back whatever emotions were given to him to carry a conversation, to feed into whatever intensity he was given even when he felt it to be absolutely ludicrous. Of all the little things he needed to learn to pass as human, this seemed the least important, but it was necessary all the same. Even the smallest crack to his façade could cause his mask to fall away and reveal to the world that he was nothing more than a monster playing at pretending to be human.

He could see in them all the things that he was lacking. Their hands were gentle and delicate where his were violence and twitching with the energy of all the dark, bad things inside of him. Their conversations flowed so naturally between them all that it seemed to be coming from a single mind where anything he might add would frighten them and push them away again. They were neat and well proportioned where he was too long, too pointy and too angular and just too much and his uncanniness left gazes wandering from him as if he was so wrong that an onlooker could not bear to tolerate him for more than a passing glance. In all the spaces he could see humanity within them, an intrinsic goodness flowing through their veins like blood, all he could see in himself was the monstrous, the wrong and the dead.

So, he resolved to wear a face just like them and maybe, just maybe, he could walk among them and he would not be so very alone.

And it worked, truly it did. It did not matter that he did not recognize himself in the looking glass or the distorted face looking back at him from a wine glass, for why should it matter if he knew himself or not when those around him could do it for him. They liked what they thought they saw of him, those fabricated spaces that he created to hide the truth, and so as long as that was all they saw of him, then they liked him too. The him that they thought was no less human than they were. The him that they did not see practicing and mirroring all that he saw to try and make it seem natural. They did not, after all, see him tightening the stitches each and every night, tugging up a smile or keeping him from falling apart at the seams.

As long as they thought that he was just like them, they would not think to look too hard, to try and see the gaps that exposed his insincerity. They would not see the darkness that lay underneath it all, the truth of the monstrous that he sought to hide by any means he had.

If they never saw who he was, they would like him, and he would never have to be alone again and that was all that really mattered in the end.