Strawberry laces
I am not a psychopath. I do not have a disorder. They have tried to pin me
down in words and categories since they brought me here, but their categories
are wrong.
Of the world’s population, I am part of the 4.5% of people “affected”. They
make it sound like it’s a disease. But what I have is not a disease: it is control.
You can’t control your emotions. You think you can, but you can’t. You define
yourself based on what you think is real, moulding yourself to rules and ideas
that you didn’t make up. The reality is, you are played by emotions like a
predictable video game, always with small variations that weren’t seen before,
but inevitably programmed to end the same way. That’s all humans are.
Robots. Scientifically coded to quiver with hairs stood on end, or cry, or bare
teeth into a smile. You want to feel pleasure because your body has been
trained to believe that is what you want, but more than that, you have been
trained to “want” in the first place. Desire is constructed. When I am Numb I do
not want, and at this moment, like most moments, I am Numb. I decide to be
Numb, to live outside of the rules of emotion, but as far as I remember, I have
always been Numb, transparent, colourless. I suppose I will always be Numb
until I learn how to live otherwise. Numb is a good word for the space I exist in.
1
Numb (verb) deprive of feeling, to cause a sensation to be felt less intensely.
Although my body is only sensationless when I choose not to feel. Being Numb
simply means transcending the code of feeling.
Numb (adjective) Unable to think, feel or respond normally. I suppose that is
true. I’m certainly not normal, or not on their terms. But what is “normal”?
Normal is not normal, nor should it be.
Numb (adjective) deprived of the power of physical sensation. “Deprived of the
power”? “Deprived” seems a common theme. I am not deprived. I am free.
Where you are governed by your emotions, I am Numb and neutral and
uncompromised. Numb to the idea that you or anyone or anything can
stimulate emotion in me. Even that. I’m doing it again. “In me”. Using their
concepts, your concepts, to describe this. But it’s not “in me”, or ‘in you’ for that
matter. It’s nowhere, and everywhere, and in the space between everything.
Emotions are not as you know them. They are not feelings. Feelings are just
bodily formations, sensations. Emotion? Emotion is energy. Powerful energy,
colourful energy flowing around people, around objects: a reflection and a
response to movement. For me, this coloured energy is matter that I can hold,
manipulate, contain. It is electricity surging between matter and my power is
that I can see it, isolate it and choose not to engage with it. I choose not to plug
myself in to the universe. This is my talent, but they are afraid of me. They do
not understand. So they lock me up.
2
I try to explain that I am just interested in the energy of emotion: how people
use it, and studying it in its purest form. I’ve found that emotion is at its purest
when the person exists within its energy whilst not being trapped inside its
bubble: living as part of its fluidity. The only people, or beings, or living things,
I have seen do this are children. Children. They are my fascination.
They say that this is not a satisfying excuse, even though I did nothing wrong.
I explain that children are both inside and outside of emotion at all times:
swimming in a sea of colour that they both engage with and produce.
Meanwhile I can only ever be outside of emotion - or, if I so choose, inside it existing in binaries. For most adults, inside emotion is all you know. But the
children in the streets, in the park, running, playing, holding hands, they live in
a liminality I cannot understand. But I want to understand. Wanted to
understand. No. Still want to understand. I will get out of here.
In here there are no children. I can see that the purple eyes through the
windows fear me, but I do not understand why. I have done nothing wrong.
The first time they took me, it was from the park where I was observing my
usual specimens, Julia, Ben and Nadir, amongst others. They were playing a
game they called ‘Tag’ and
“Nadir, you’re it!”
Ben and Julia were running frantically, laughing, screaming, energy resonating
between them. It was like watching music being composed, the creation of
3
energy from within energy; an array of beautiful colours bouncing from one
child to the next. Watching this process is where I find purpose. There is
nothing else like it in the world. I remember seeing Julia’s fingers tighten
around the metal pole of the climbing frame as she hauled herself up, out of
Nadir’s reach. Hands touching, feet pushing, aware of her laughter, aware of
her movements, of the incentive and the purpose, yet undeniably unaware of
herself: at once inside and outside emotion. It is a pure version of emotion that
I cannot grasp even on the very rare occasion when I decide to feel, to not be
Numb: when I allow the drip-drip of serotonin and dopamine from my
hypothalamus; when I tell my gut to contract; when I allow the energy to
penetrate my space. It is never the same. Once I am engaged, the energy flows
all around me in a bubble of reds and greens and blues and I am inside of it
until I decide to turn it off. There is no halfway measure. And being inside
emotion is useless. It clouds and confuses and cuts off the world. Being Numb is
better.
Nadir’s fingertips just caught Ben’s shoulder as he tried to twist away and duck
under the slide, when a man stepped in front of me, holding up a badge. He said
something but I wasn’t listening as I leaned round to try and regain sight of the
children. Nadir’s face was bright with pure pleasure, when the man blocked my
view once more with a red, blotchy complexion.
“Did you hear me?” He was in a cold bubble of gritted teeth.
“No. I wasn’t listening.”
He spoke through thin lips as I peered around the other side of his wide form.
“…you won’t come… peacefully, sir… required… by force.”
4
“Do you mind?” I ushered him out of the way. The next thing I knew, my face
was pressed to the bench as he pulled my arms behind my back with a force.
“…it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something
you later rely on in court…”
I tried to get one last look but all I could see were mothers in bubbles of
swirling black energy. They took me to the station and said that a restraining
order had been filed, and that I was not to return to the park as it was within
the one-mile radius of Julia’s house. I was told that if Julia’s mother intended to
extend the restraining order for a longer duration, an attorney or myself would
be allowed to speak on my defense in court. When they let me leave, I went
home and mapped out the rest of the parks and schools in the town outside of
the radius and decided to visit each systematically on different days, before
and after work, to avoid further interruptions.
It was months before I was noticed again. It was one of the children this time.
Sally was attentive and observant and clearly intelligent; she gave power to
productive energy. I could tell she recognized me but she didn’t engage with
purple fear. It was like she understood why I was there. One day afterschool
she walked over to the place by the fence where I was stood, her on the inside
of the metal bars and me on the outside; presumably she was too young to
leave the premises alone. The move took me aback, and I stepped away unsure
if someone might see us, but in the flurry of home-time no one looked across.
I’d never been so close to a child before. I’d always observed from a distance, as
was proper, or so I had thought, that is until my previous arrest. I guess I must
5
have thought I had nothing to lose. So I just looked at her, taking it all in, and
she just looked at me through the gaps with pink curiosity.
“Whose parent are you?”
I told her that I wasn’t anybody’s parent. She picked the peeling green paint
from the pole in-between us, without breaking the gaze she had on me.
“What’s your name?”
I told her it was a secret.
“I’m good at keeping secrets.”
I smiled. I said I’d tell her next week.
Next week I didn’t tell her, but I brought her some strawberry laces. She tied
them and twisted them and created shapes and games with strung-out sugar.
She was a wife with a ring on her finger. She had long red hair. She wore an
elegant bracelet with intricate patterned plaits in the design. Energy danced
and twirled like leaves in a breeze but I didn’t let myself feel with her. Feeling
is dangerous. Instead I just observed, and, as always, left before her mother
arrived.
Nobody noticed our interactions at first, mainly because of their briefness, but
also because of her ability to slip away so discretely. So I began to visit her
school more often than the others, whilst trying to be careful of being caught. I
knew from last time that whatever rules they had made up meant that
observing children was for some reason off limits, even at a distance, and I was
6
now most certainly not keeping my distance. Somehow I never had to ask her
not to tell the other children or the adults. I think she just knew.
I continued bringing other sweets that she could be creative with, passing them
through the bars: animal shaped gummies and gingerbread men. She liked the
faces on the Magic Stars. Everything was a game and I was her afterschool
playmate, exchanging electricity, and encircled by the waves of energy she
created around our bodies. I told her about the colours that she allowed to float
around her: the pinks, the purples, the gold and grass greens. She called them
her butterflies. They call it synesthesia.
I could tell that she liked me. The movement between us was favourable: a
delicate orange and unquestionably warm. Once I asked her why she first came
over to me. She paused before answering.
“You looked… lonely.”
Something in the way she said it made me melt into a soft yellow. It was then
that her energy first penetrated my own space. That had never happened
before. Looking back, perhaps she was trying to show me or teach me pure
energy. Or perhaps in that moment I experienced the first emotion that I had
not created for myself. From then, I decided that I needed to see her for more
than just these little visits.
The next time, as I waited in our usual spot, I planned to ask her if she would
like to have lunch with me through the fence. But that day, they came again.
This time it was a number of officers, emerging from a hot, red haze of
7
pointing-fingers and crossed-arm teachers. Furrow-browed mothers herded
children to their respective cars in clouds of purple. I saw Sally protest as her
mum dragged her away, and her eyes mourned after me, followed by waves of
blue.
Once at the station, I told them I hadn’t done anything wrong.
“My actions weren’t wrong, you just say that they were.”
They said that this time there was no restraining order. Apparently they had
been watching me for a while. This time, they told me that I was unwell and
that the doctor would help make me better again. They told me I was sick. That
I had a personality disorder. That I was a danger to society and that until I
responded to treatment they had a legal right to keep me here,
“Indefinitely.”
Today, like every day now, I am trapped in a grey bubble of psychiatrist’s
couches, hospital beds, and these bare white walls.
“Why were you watching the children?”
“How do they make you feel?”
“What do you mean, you don’t feel?”
“It’s an illness.”
“It’s a condition.”
“It’s-”
8
“No.
I am not a psychopath. I do not have a disorder. Your categories are wrong.”
I’m never getting out of here.
9