Who Is Studying Who?…

Seeing my disorders written on a page,
You study me like a creature in a cage.
You think I’m something foreign, strange, and new,
While all the time I’m working you out too.

I watch the casual way you people move,
Sure and steady in your unaffected groove.
To imagine a life lived in that carefree way,
The difference between us is night and day.

You try out something new, and take delight,
In figuring out if it is wrong or right.
While I arrive with rules already preset,
A rigid blueprint locking down each threat.

You meet a stranger, take the time to grow,
To learn their likes and see their nature show.
I catch their every quirk in half a second flat,
Then mirror back their laughter and copy their chat. 

You make a careless slip and you let it slide,
With room for human error deep down inside.
While I must keep each action precise and exact,
Or pay the cost of a broken contract. 

Your feelings are stable, a natural state,
You barely take notice of love or of hate.
While mine are a tide rushing faster than sound,
Or a silence where nothing can ever be found.

You’ll never know the weight of keeping them fine,
With my family's safety hanging on the line.
I follow compulsions because what if it's true,
What happens to them if I don't carry through?

You'd call it delusion, and logic might say,
That rituals cannot keep disaster away.
But knowing it's senseless is not the same thing,
As risking the ruin your stopping would bring.

You look at my quiet existence and sigh,
Assuming that love is a fire gone by.
But love was a language I wasn’t ever taught,
A concept I've never once wanted or sought.

So I don't feel a hollow, a yearning, a lack,
I’ve never known love, so I don't want it back.
In truth, I pity the attachments you hold dear,
The jealousy and heartbreak I never need fear. 

And while you have a past you can touch and can feel,
My life has nothing that registers as real.
I see what I did, the pictures are there,
But when I try to relive it, it’s empty and bare. 

You carry your years in the palm of your hand,
While mine are like footprints washed out from the sand.
I see my life like a book, sitting on a shelf,
That happened to someone who isn't myself.

So to you I am different, not what you are used to,
But to me you are foreign, the opposite view.
We stand on two sides of an absolute line,
Your ordinary world, and the architecture of mine.