Sui Generis

Imagine yourself at a library. You’re walking past the many shelves of books and come to the section of your favourite genre. Your eyes scan the many titles of a various thickness and size, written by thousands of authors. Your index finger brush against the spines of books that sit neatly arranged in rows for its next reader to take home. You pick the first book out —intrigued by its title— open its cover, flip a few pages, and return it to its place. It wasn't a book you wanted to invest your time in. You move on to the next one that catches your fancy. This one has pages slightly weathered, its cover dented in a couple of pages and some stains that could possibly be coffee. Or brown paint. The bright colour of the cover had taken your attention. You do the same: take it off the shelf, give it a quick glance over, then shaking your head you put it back. This continues on for the next several books. After what seems like a long time, you’re worn out, feeling hopeless that yo...

‘Mama, my feet are cold.’ ‘Come warm your little toes by the fire, darling.’ I’ve always had cold feet. Colder than anyone else’s. Though not corpse-cold, but enough to have to keep wearing thrice the layers of socks as  anyone else during winter, and occasionally during the warmer months. When I became a teenager, my cold feet syndrome  kept me from joining the others in the pool, fearing I would catch a case of frostbite. Or rather, just about anything that required removing my shoes, basically. ‘Why are her toes purple?’ ‘They look like they’re about to fall off.’ ‘Maybe she’s a zombie.’ Or rather, I was just afraid. Of everyone else. It wasn’t as though I had no friends. I made plenty. There was a girl, Marie. She was just as different as I was. She had cold hands, like dead fish. And another, whose name was Lydia, had a complexion so pale, she could’ve very well been a vampire. Together, we set our own rules and ab...