My family is visiting. People who I haven't talked to in years showed up. They seemed uncomfortable; there was something in their eyes. They talked about me, in front of me, without me. I don't think my family likes me.
We went to the mall and went shopping. I got lipstick. I already had a red one, but this one isn't as pink. The group was big, so we split up. We met back up. My aunt wanted to take photos. She hands the phone to my cousin. I smiled for the camera. My cousin insists, "you're not smiling!" The woman who looked at me funny (or maybe, this is just the way she looks and I am being judgemental) seemed uncomfortable again. We've barely spoken two sentences to each other. I don't know how to describe it, but I felt uncomfortable too, after that.
I went to the bathroom. Sometimes I think, not exactly worry but sort of worry, about things that are practically inconceivable. I looked up while I was in there and saw a fan; I wondered if someone was watching through it. But I still thought about it. We were at dinner yesterday. I wondered if my fish was undercooked. For a brief moment before I ate, irrationally, I had the thought that someone would play a nasty trick on me and that it would be fried centipedes rather than fried fish. Was it how I was raised to fear the worst from the least important things that made me think this way? Was it my predisposition to thinking about unlikely what-ifs? And does that so called "predisposition" actually come from my upbringing?
We're at dinner again today. There was more fish. I hate it when people dismiss fish as unfeeling or beings without pain simply because you cannot hear them scream. Any living organism has a reaction to negative stimuli: their own unique "pain". Fish are interesting and wonderful and beautiful. Technically, we can all be taxonomically classed as fish due to our endoskeletons. There was fried smelt on the table. I ate some. A bigger steamed fish lay motionless on its plate. I am ripping up a fried fish with my fingers to take the spine out of it. I couldn't hear it clearly, but it sounded like "something's wrong with it".
I can't tell if it is too self centered to feel the way I did. Although that sentence was likely never about me, it still made me feel hurt somehow. Was it kinship with our meal? Me, with hands and legs, cannibalizing my finned brethren. They sit, unseeing and dead. I breathe with the longing for the water that they may have carried once. Someone else recognized smelt as sturgeon bait. Maybe, in a past life, I was a greedy sturgeon: reeled in with smelt on the hook. I wanted too much? A fish stuffed into a decaying human body.