04.22.05 sometimes norma looks outside herself and she thinks the world is beautiful. she wakes up from a sleep that consists of logarithms and algorithms and all the rithms that she knows and her neck turns toward the light. how warm the sun feels on her hair, how it tickles her skin, how it breathes over this overworked piece of wide-ruled. inhale; exhale. norma loves the sun but she doesn’t go outside. it scares her to see so much open space, so much ambiguity, so much opportunity. if she were to walk outside her room right now, if she were to jump to her feet and flee out of the building, if she were to do this as she screamed at the top of her lungs, if she were to escape, where would she go? to mars? to pennsylvania? to nantucket? would she walk down the street and come back again? would she go grocery shopping? would she talk to someone? the choices are overwhelming. they frighten her. they cool her skin and make her unhappy and she stops thinking about them, prefers to live in this one ray of light that seeps through the window, this ray that comes to visit each day. she knows this portion of the sun well and this is how she likes it. unfamiliar things can be dangerous. but she is safe here and there is nothing that will touch her again. sometimes norma writes her name out over and over on her skin. she starts on her feet and writes along the side of her big toe, her left big toe. she scribbles N, ORMA, norma, because this is her name, like the word “normal” but without the L, which is funny to her sometimes because she likes to think of NORMAL as familiar, as routine, like the proofs she works on that always return to the statement that she had once started with. she writes her name on her foot and scales the pen upward, up over her body, until there is a string of letters that reach along her hip and up her arm. she writes on her armpit and it tickles and she laughs, but it is a different tickle than the one she feels from the sun, and this is the variety that she shall receive. she would write NORMA on the side of her face but she can’t see her own face. there’s a mirror on the other side of the room but by the time she remembers this she’s bored and wants to sit back down to her paperwork. but one day norma will look in this mirror and she will write NORMA all over her body, because she will see her face in the reflection and she will be ready to keep going, and she will one day stand there naked with NORMANORMANORMA up and down and across and around and when she sees what she looks like, what she really looks like, she will clear up. this is the day she waits for in the back of her mind. this is the day that will eventually come like white stallions pulling a silver carriage. and then she will know for sure that she is norma, that she is normal, and she will go outside and she won’t know what to do with herself except maybe buy a bag of potato chips at the convenience store and then walk around the town until her feet hurt too much to stand anymore.