Snowflake

by Louise Nealon

Maybe I should try and make friends. I’m nervous that all the good ones will be gone by noon.

‘Dairy farming takes babies away from their mothers,’ he says. I can’t tell if he’s joking or serious. ‘Cows have been modified over centuries for human consumption. They are Frankenstein’s monsters, every single one of them.’ ‘But Frankenstein only had one monster,’ I say. He pauses to think about this for a moment until he comes to a conclusion in his head. ‘Exactly,’ he says, pointing his finger at me as though he has crossed a finishing line and won the conversation.

‘Alice is not herself because she has disappeared,’ Mam explained. ‘When Alice falls down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, she falls out of herself. It happens to us all. When we fall asleep, we fall out of ourselves.’

The bathroom is where I go to recharge, let myself cry and pull myself together just enough to define my edges so I seem solid on the outside.

It’s the boy I never talked to who I miss the most. The fantasy of him stays inside the school walls, decaying like a memory mausoleum.

‘People have such a narrow view of what they consider to be reality. We only ever catch a glimpse of our shared imagination in art or music.’

‘Well, people are afraid to be ignorant,’ Mam says. ‘And they are uncomfortable with the thought that when we enter the deepest levels of a dream, we break free of ourselves. Our society is so fettered to the idea of the individual. Real inspiration comes from outside of ourselves, the communal, that which we don’t know, that which can exist only in dreams.

It sounds like I’m lying. I don’t expect anyone to believe me. I suspect that in a few years, I won’t believe myself. Telling a story – even if it’s just talking about my life – requires some kind of hindsight. I’m eighteen. I don’t have a whole lot of hindsight. And I can’t really say, once upon a time, this happened to me, because it’s still happening.’