Normal.

August 12, Ypsilanti.

I should have known.
I for whom words are my life, reading and writing my passion, I used the wrong word.  The word normal, a simple word, in one sentence, and it conveyed the wrong idea altogether.  Worse, it is a word that represent a concept I distrust and dislike, one of those slippery concepts dear to deconstructionists of all stripes, a word that can mean everything to everybody and still mean very little.
It is also the wrong word for someone who has spent her entire life running away from whatever the norms are.  I was one of those kids that felt different by the fact of just being, punk then New Wave, dieying my hair red, then blue, spending my days walking the streets of Paris with buskers from around the world, outsiders if there ever were, leaving my country at the first opportunity, choosing the path least traveled, challenging myself at every corner to do something that felt the least familiar, the farther away from home, running away with the circus, the essence of not normal for the vast majority of people, people who live in houses that don't move, go to schools that have walls, people that don't walk around in the mud to go to work in leotards.
It is a dumb word, really, or rather a non-word, norm defined by its absence, vanishing as you try to grab it, and I want nothing with it or its shadow.